Cuz it's what's literally being made for them. Let's say I'm a Gen-Z teenager. I get home from school and go to Netflix. The very first thing I see is not "His Girl Friday", that's buried under menu after menu, I have to look for it specifically. But there's the new Netflix show, right there, click, already watching, I get all the allusions, the cultural touchstones, cuz it's made for me.
We're mainly talking about adults here, though. People who have grown up and gone to college. I already carved out an exception upthread for kids... because although they're definitely in the "everything is new to me" category, their tastes are also liable to be more influenced by current trends, peer pressure, and/or advertising.
(Although why anybody would "spend hours watching kids my age talk about video games on YouTube" I cannot fathom. I know people who
develop video games for a living, and they don't like talking about them that much, much less watching other people do so.)
And if it just plain "wasn't available" then how did you watch it? You had an interest and went out of your way to find it. You probably made friends with people who share your interests, that's usually the friends we make.
I'm about the same age as Mojochi, judging by his post a few spaces upthread. My family didn't have cable, and we didn't go to a lot of movies. So when it comes to older TV, a lot of it I
didn't watch, because indeed it wasn't available. (I did see a fair amount of stuff older than I was, including
Star Trek — mostly in the after-school syndication time slots — but just a small sample of what existed in the grand scheme of things.) But that doesn't mean I didn't
know about it. Even as a kid, I haunted my school library and my local public library, and I read books and magazine articles about things. I've never seen Jack Benny or Milton Berle or
The Honeymooners or the original
Lost in Space, but I know they
existed. If someone made a reference to "Rochester" or "to the moon, Alice," I knew what it meant. I've never watched an Abbot and Costello movie, but I know the "Who's On First" routine and actually performed it once in a summer camp talent show.
And when I got to college, I did a lot of catching up. I stopped watching most current TV, as did most of my classmates (because it's college! ... although we made an exception for TNG), but I was a regular at both of the on-campus film societies, seeing all kinds of awesome movies old and new. My friends and I also traded our music collections with reckless abandon (and our favorite music was certainly
not the new stuff). And just in general, I absorbed what there was to learn from a diverse social circle with diverse backgrounds and interests.
Again, I think a lot of it comes down to intellectual curiosity. I've always wanted to understand how the culture around me came to be, and to sample a wide range of it... not just to accept the status quo as a given, and be a passive receptacle for whatever is marketed in my direction. It's basic cultural literacy. (Just the same as I want to be informed about other aspects of the world I live in... from food to politics to science to what-have-you.)
Hell, even a lot of the
new stuff can't be appreciated without awareness of what came before, of what shoulders it's standing on. It's got to be hard to enjoy the movie
The Artist if you're unaware of the silent film era, for instance. And hard to enjoy something like
Voyager if you're unaware of the larger universe of Star Trek.
But we can't just go through the world being incredulous when other people spend their time differently than we do.
Well, no, of course not. As I've said, I find differences an opportunity to indulge my curiosity and broaden my horizons.
But the OP was expressing incredulity at a
specific kind of difference, and I think it was warranted. The difference we're talking about here is that of people who are
incurious, who are apparently content to experience only a tiny subset of the cultural experiences available to them, and to remain ignorant of the rest. Yes, people like that exist... but I maintain that they're outliers, and it's perfectly reasonable to be surprised by them.