I was enjoying the evening by walking my dog and listening to the Nerdist podcast featuring Ken Marino, formerly of The State.
They were riffing on how much the media landscape has changed since the early/mid-90s when The State was on and Chris Hardwick was at TV. This hit home particularly because, for whatever reason, I’d been noodling around last night reading the Gilligan’s Island entry on Wikipedia and had earlier had a conversation about how I wasn’t too worried about my kids’ screen time in light of the fact that I had spent so much of my childhood watching dreck like Gilligan’s Island, Three’s Company, and whatever awfulness the three networks saw fit to cough up.
I don’t have a lot to offer besides “gee whiz,” but Gee Whiz! I’m sure media fracturing has caused all kinds of hardship and folks long for the good old days; but Lowest Common Denominator programming is no longer the beginning and end of media offerings.
My childhood was filled with the few syndication offerings from the big networks. Some of the basic cable offerings were emerging through my teen years. Cable really seemed to start exploding around my college years. Toward the end of law school was when the Internet was becoming a thing — my future wife and I bonded over a mutual love of the Internet. We would sometimes go to the computer lab and surf the web together. (What a date!) I remember being floored by Real Audio coming out during my first few years of work. Seems like I’ve been Christmas shopping over the Internet since probably 1998. And since then, there has been a deluge – Youtube, Pandora, Netflix, smartphones, Facebook, Twitter, etc. And I’m certainly behind the curve if you compare me to kids with a lot more free time.
Is it a good thing? Bad thing? I’m sure there is good and bad with the media explosion. But, at this point, it hardly matters – it’s just something that has to be dealt with. Ride the wave and hope it doesn’t crash on you, I guess.
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