I don’t know, I have a feeling that television by itself was very damaging to society and Fahrenheit 451 was basically right.
Cable and movie rentals was probably the optimal amount of digital media for a functional society. Get rid of commercials and that was probably peak.
Submitted 5 hours ago by Daft_ish@lemmy.dbzer0.com to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Comments
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 hours ago
dan69@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Hot Take: Bring back Family Video (midwests version go BlockBuster) and I have Xbox and dvd player.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
My pre-internet days:
-Dialing random numbers that I think had some weird mini-games or something… on the landline that cost money
-downloading games on my dad’s motorola feature cell phone that gets charged to the phone bill
(my older brother dared me to do it so he got most of the blame for it xD)
-accidentally triggered the SIM PIN Lockout and my dad had to go to the phone store to get a new sim
-Also my older brother pouring a whole ass bottle of white-out and igniting it on fire… WHILE WE ARE LOCKED INSIDE THE APARTMENT WITH NO ADULTS HOME (luckily the fire just fizzled out after the fuel (the white-out) burned out)
Okay, but there are also normal stuff like:
-Board games? Most kids in China of my generation didn’t have siblings so I guess some would call that “lucky” to have a playmate (but he was also abusive to me 😕)
-Bootleg Video Games on a CD/DVD disc inserted into a portable DVD player (sometimes hooked up to the tv) and you plug in controllers and you can play games on it… you can plug in two controllers and play 2player games… I think I played that with my older brother sometimes… he always made me 2nd player with the controller that had the mushy buttons 😕 (it’s what I get for being the 2nd born i guess)
-A windows computer with a bunch of music files but zero internet…
-I remember Yu-Gi-Oh Cards…
-Rubic’s cube I think? But there was no internet to look up how to solve it so it’s never solved (until way later into my teens when I got internet) so I just took it apart and reassemble it…
-Cartoon stuff… that I never really paid attention to probably because it’s boring af so I don’t have much memories of it except like a few faint images that I’m not sure of.
-Mostly just locked in the apartment when parent’s aren’t available
Feel free to ask questions… I wanna see if I can jog some memories…
whaleross@lemmy.world 45 minutes ago
Games on a DVD player?
MnemonicBump@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours ago
You pretty much just described my typical lower class American upbringing in the early 90s. Except the Rubik’s cube thing. Internet or not, somebody knew how to solve that thing. If you got bored enough, you played with it until it made sense
ugandan_airways@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
Just like learning guitar without lessons. Eventually it just clicked
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
somebody knew how to solve that thing
I didn’t get to meet many people because my parents think the there are kidnappers everywhere so I just got stuck at home beside school time…
I think during breaks, they sometimes take us back to one of the parent’s village, and there I remember we were allowed to run around since I assume everyone in the village knew each other and I remember hopping on to other people’s roofs with my older brother… I took a peek down the sky-window thing and saw spiderwebs in one of the houses… could be abandoned… idk…
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Is having one or two people telling you what to think better than having most of the world telling you what to think?
morto@piefed.social 5 hours ago
Deep down, it’s still just a few
Daft_ish@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours ago
I dont believe that was the state of things.
homes@piefed.world 1 hour ago
You see ads? Lol.
Daft_ish@lemmy.dbzer0.com 39 minutes ago
Hmm. Talking about when cable was a thing.
homes@piefed.world 37 minutes ago
Oh, in that case, I disagree with the premise of your argument.