To play devil’s advocate; being on your phone is an isolating activity, while watching the TV is generally more communal, and was especially so in the era in which Boomers have spent most of their life.
Millenials and most Gen Z have shows that everyone watched growing up, but that’s going away increasingly, with on-demand streaming and customized feeds replacing the latter. I think it’s a very obvious culprit of why young people today struggle to talk to one another.
I am Gen Z.
This. For better or worse people would gather to watch a show at a particular time and day. It often turned into much more of a social event than a let’s watch this show event. A thirty minute show was a several hour gathering of people. Laughing, eating, having a good time.
You cannot replicate that using a phone.
And you could talk about it the next day with your friends in school.
A lot less choice and everyone watched the same things.
The experience can only be compared to a football final these days.
Millennial here, I got (and sometimes still get) my fair-share of bashing for spending way too much time on the computer. Some were concerned that I will be unable to talk with other people about the series currently running on the TV (!), although early on they mourned the “football star” I was supposed to become, with my late stepmother not really giving up on that until she thought instead I could be the next Zuckerberg (TL;DR: she originally hated computers because they crashed and she also read an article on the Columbine shooting once, but changed her mind once Facebook came out).
