In the old days before the Internet, there was a sort of tyranny of mainstream entertainment which users today haven't yet experienced. Water cooler conversations would be limited to Seinfeld, which was a really good show, however, there were much worse ones such as Friends, and my point is, there just wasn't the option to go into depth on some other random form of entertainment which you had stumbled across since the 'other guy' would not have heard of it and would just walk away instead. That lead to a sort of lame public commons of media consumption, in which many people watched shows that they found mediocre, simply so that they could be prepared for such water cooler conversations, media references, and just generally being 'in the know'. There were, of course, always those folks who eschewed such pedestrian content and instead retreated into their 'deep tracks', consuming their own favorite media forms. They were the hipsters before the hipsters, also known as nerds, geeks, etc. Now there isn't any need because... there's a proverbial subreddit for that. How long will this 'golden age of television' last? With media companies getting bigger, have our butts been glued back into our couches once again? Are the laugh tracks coming back? Will deep tracks go back to being the domain of the esoteric once again?
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