Yesterday’s news cycle gave me a chance to tease out an idea that’s been in my head for quite a while. The news in question was the revelation that

Young people now watch almost seven times less broadcast television than people aged over 65, according to a report from regulator Ofcom. It said 16 to 24-year-olds spend just 53 minutes watching TV each day, a two-thirds decrease in the past 10 years. Meanwhile, those aged 65 and over spend just under six hours on average watching TV daily.
-Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62506041

I teased out that thought in a thread, which follows below. But first:

I’ve long been troubled by the hypocrisy of the UK’s obsession – moral panic, really – about young people, screen time on mobiles and devices, and the content they consume there; a hypocrisy born of the fact that as anyone knows, that statistic showing six hours of average TV viewing by the older generations is a generous underestimate, and one which does not even address the content they are taking in.

I’ve never understood the sanctimony about the need to “protect” young people from excessive screen time, when almost literal all-day TV viewing isn’t just central to older people’s daily lives: it’s a subsidised benefit, via free TV licenses, which is held to be something of a sacrament. This country wants them to live that way. And twelve years of Tory austerity cuts mean there’s very little else for them to do, and not much they can afford to.

And yet. It’s always about young people and mobiles; that other cohort remains sainted and untouchable.

They shouldn’t be.

This is, in fact, something I feel very strongly about, personally. I’ll tell you why; scroll down to the line if you just want to get to the policy thought experiment.

I watch very little TV. In fact, there are weeks when I might turn it on once or twice to watch live news. That’s partially because TV is just not my thing; it’s partially because I have tons of other ways I’d rather spend my time; and it’s partially what I’ve come to call my postmarital therapy, and the taking back control of my own life.

I wasted what should have been the best years of my life being a part of a family whose life, like so many British families, revolved around the television. The goddamn thing had to be on every waking minute, no exceptions, tuned into the most banal programming possible. This was not a family that got deep into box sets which pushed the boundaries of the craft of film and television. This was a family that stared at 40’s derring-do war films, 50s melodramas, 60s nostalgia, 70s cop shows, 80s murder mysteries, 90s game shows, and 00’s property and antiques porn – so much fucking property and antiques porn – plus a topsoil layer of nonstop WWII documentaries.

All day. All week. All month. All year. All the time. All there was.

And all devoured with the rapturous attention of religious penitents. Anything that interrupted that rapture, such as my rude attempts at conversation, or the suggestion of hobbies which did not involve the TV, were regarded as if I’d just slapped them in the face.

Let me tell you how deep the TV obsession ran in that family: we did not eat family meals around a table. We did not have a table. That family had never owned a table. There was no table. The