"Meaningless and endless" would be how I would've described cable TV ~20 years ago, ~10 years ago, ~5 years ago, and today. Go back further than that and it's just, "meaningless" because it wasn't as "endless" back then.
Youtube at least has some interesting/useful content and lets the creator and the viewer engage each other in various ways.
When I was 10 I watched hours upon hours of television and played NES games until I ran out of content. Now my 10 year old son gets about 2-4 hours of personal screen time each day (depending on the day) and in that time he plays loads of games, watches loads of game-specific videos, and a fair share of pointless videos (e.g. "top ten ugliest dogs", "most satisfying video", etc). Contrast, "top ten ugliest dogs" with say, 1990s Transformers cartoons and you'll probably come back realizing the the ugliest dog video is both more interesting and entertaining.
> 1990s Transformers cartoons and you'll probably come back realizing the the ugliest dog video is both more interesting and entertaining
I don't know about that. At least a bad cartoon is an original creative work. So many YouTube videos are just recycled low-effort garbage. Not that there isn't great content on YouTube, it just seems like their algorithm promotes some pretty bad stuff. If you visit it in an incognito window it looks like the front of a tabloid.
Youtube at least has some interesting/useful content and lets the creator and the viewer engage each other in various ways.
When I was 10 I watched hours upon hours of television and played NES games until I ran out of content. Now my 10 year old son gets about 2-4 hours of personal screen time each day (depending on the day) and in that time he plays loads of games, watches loads of game-specific videos, and a fair share of pointless videos (e.g. "top ten ugliest dogs", "most satisfying video", etc). Contrast, "top ten ugliest dogs" with say, 1990s Transformers cartoons and you'll probably come back realizing the the ugliest dog video is both more interesting and entertaining.