[I posted this as a comment on a post by Nishant Shah, seemed worth saying it more widely.] I stopped watching TV ca. 1981 — no special reasons, I just didn’t have one, then after that didn’t get one, didn’t have room, didn’t have money, etc. For a dozen+ years saying so often met with serious and explicit anger (elitist! snob!), and a few times I ended up with one, but only briefly. This all had an immense impact on every aspect of my life: on friendships (the cult of the Simpsons took a toll, believe it or not), on how my living spaces were arranged (especially when TVs were fat), on my ability to socialize (gaping holes in the world of chitchat and little tolerance for half-distracted socializing), on the rhythm of my day, on how much I read and how I got my news, on when and how I got into the net and the friendships that enabled. Most of all it gave me a very sharp awareness of, and alienation from, the depth and extent to which TV organized and synchronized American culture. It left me with a very clear sense that unless you step outside of a dominant social system for a sustained period, deliberately or not, it’s almost impossible to understand how subtle and pervasive domination can be. The net has changed a lot of that, of course, but most of the babble about “filter bubbles” is nostalgic nonsense. Yes, they have negative effects (e.g., various kinds of truthers), but they also have very positive effects — like the mainstreaming of various flavors of alienation that enable formerly minoritarian critiques (e.g., strong feminist critiques of everyday life) to become conventional wisdom.