Granted, although I might maintain today's material is more interesting, or stimulating if you prefer, to them if only because how many tweeners want to watch old stuff except as a curiosity. It can be fun to hunt down references that derived from Three's Company or Bewitched but there's a world of other stuff to see online right at their finger tips.
No, they can find far more stuff far more easily than I ever could as a teen.
You're still missing my point. Yes, you can find anything
if you already want to look for it. But if you have no pre-existing desire to look, you won't try to find it, and so you'll have no idea it exists. What I'm saying is that when you and I were kids, we were constantly exposed to old stuff on TV
whether we wanted to be or not, because it was just there already, without requiring any effort or will on our parts to seek it out. So we just osmosed knowledge of its existence. But in a media environment where you don't see anything
unless you actively seek it out, then you can remain completely oblivious to the existence of entire genres, because it never occurred to you to look.
This is not a conversation about liking or interest in older stuff, it's a conversation about
knowledge of its existence, e.g. whether someone could sincerely be unaware that Tim Burton made Batman movies. What I'm saying is that it's easier today to be ignorant of the existence of older fiction, because there are fewer mechanisms for being
passively exposed to it, for just stumbling across it without trying or having it around in the background of your life. You only see what you know is there to seek out.
It's analogous to how fragmented people's political knowledge and opinions have become. Because everything is narrowcasted to the groups already receptive to it, people only hear the news and opinions they're predisposed to hear, rather than getting exposed to a diversity of viewpoints, and it makes people more ignorant and more limited to their echo chambers.
Teens can see any number of reruns and do in countless ways beyond what I ever had available. I've had plenty of young tweeners in my classes in Seoul who knew more TV shows from the 80s than I recalled and I lived through that decade.
And I'm not denying that people like that exist. Of course they do. I'm just saying I understand why it's possible for
other young people to be completely unaware of those older things. People's knowledge and interests have gotten more fragmented as media have become more narrowcasted.
Write classic TV or 50s tv or old comedies, or similar phrases into the search field.
Oh, I was hoping there was some more organized, less haphazard option. Like some systematic, categorized index of what was available as full series, rather than having to sift through a bunch of clips and music videos and reviews and whatnot.
When Nick at Night stopped showing the old classics we lost the avenue for exposure. Now even if they are available for streaming, there's no reason for a kid to check them out without someone specifically suggesting it. And since it's no longer "the only thing good on right now" its harder to get enough momentum to make a fan.
Yes, that's exactly what I mean.
