2. People did say that about TV and TV maybe had the potential to be like this. However, TV failed in many ways to be a hyper addictive device. Some of the many reasons: i. Just less content. There wasn’t that much TV content at all. YT probably adds more content in an hour than all the TV content ever created.
ii. You couldn’t choose what you wanted to watch beyond a few dozen channels at best. So you always had opportunities where you were forced to do something different at many times.
iii. The TV wasn’t available to you at all times. You had to go to the den to watch it and you couldn’t take it to school with you.
iv. TV couldn’t specifically target you individually with content to keep you watching. The most amount of targeting TV could do was at maybe a county level.
v. You couldn’t be part of the TV. Social media and phones today make you an integral part of the “show” where a kid can end up having a video of them popping their pants on a playground shown to millions of people. Even in a more ordinary sense, a kid commenting on a video or sending a message to a friend makes them part of the device in a way TV never could outside of extraordinary situations.
The shows had target markets often driven by the need to reach certain demographics, though actual viewer demographics sometimes were surprisingly way off the mark.
Or they weren't and addiction wasn't the crux of their position; and I say that as someone who loves a lot of rock derivatives.
The influence pop icons with broken lives had on teen generations was horribly deleterious (and I'm not even talking about hippies), mainly because malleable and unproperly taught minds rarely see that an artist's respectability is completely separate from his output.
The ancients had the concept of muses for a reason.