I'm currently reading Don Delillo's White Noise, first published in 1985, and although I'm not even a third of the way through the book, I'm absolutely fascinated by how the characters, in 1985, talk about cable television. This scene of the protagonist and his family sitting around watching TV encapsulates the sentiment well:
That night, a Friday, we gathered in front of the set, as was the custom and the rule, with take-out Chinese. There were floods, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes. We'd never before been so attentive to our duty, our Friday assembly. Heinrich was not sullen, I was not bored. Steffie, brought close to tears by a sitcom husband arguing with his wife, appeared totally absorbed in these documentary clips of calamity and death. Babette tried to switch to a comedy series about a group of racially mixed kids who build their own communications satellite. She was startled by the force of our objection. We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.
The TV as a site of cultural conflict comes up more than once in the parts of the book I've read so far, earlier on a college professor laments that his students view TV as "Worse than junk mail. Television is the death throes of human consciousness, according to them."
This unlocked a seemingly forgotten series of memories back from my youth, from a time before recommendation algorithms and infinite-scroll social media UIs became the current object of social anxiety. Instead it was cable television. I remember it most clearly from music; Red Hot Chili Peppers had Throw Away Your Television, Tool had Vicarious, and Depeche Mode sang Let me hear you make decisions without your television. There were anti-TV organizations and everything. I was only a child back then, but I still remember the persistent worry that TV an encroaching threat, not a mere cultural backdrop.
It's tempting to draw parallels between how we looked at TVs in the 80s and 90s, and how we look at recommendation algorithms now, and conclude that it was nothing more than techno-skeptical paranoia, because no one really talks about the dangers of cable TV anymore. This, however, is almost certainly the wrong conclusion. Fox News Derangement is practically a well-accepted phenomenon among the children of gen-x and boomer parents, the generational equivalent of forum-dwelling 20-something alt-right twitter trolls.
I suspect that the banal and grim truth is that history always rhymes; cable TV and modern day social media are more alike than they are different---techno-ecosystems that evolved under the corrosive glare of advertising dollars and viewership, primed to be sold to whoever demands that attention the most.
I haven't heard any cool anti-social-media rock songs, though. Throw Away Your Television might be a bit preachy, but it's a total banger.
