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This is interesting but incorrect if the thesis is that suddenly people spent a lot of time from the '50s on watching television (or the sitcom). Before TV peo

This is interesting but incorrect if the thesis is that suddenly people spent a lot of time from the '50s on watching television (or the sitcom). Before TV people spent a ton of time watching movies. The 1940s was the peak years of movie watching in the US. When you went to a movie in those days you saw two and the numbers that Americans watched was much, much higher than today (or the late 50's), particularly per capita. Then also before the rise of television there was enormously popular radio dramas that probably took up about the same amount of the average American's time as TV in the 30's and the 40's. So if this all represents an explosion of social surplus, I would argue that surplus existed in the US way before TV.

rcoveson 3y ago
In terms of hours invested, I don't think going to the movies ever got close to the 50's rate of television consumption. I can find stats as high as 90 million tickets/week, which (if we assume 100% double features) may have been as much as 400 million hours per week. With a US population of 130 million, that's roughly three hours per week per capita. Compare that to television in the 1950s, which nearly reached 5 hours per capita per day. That's over 10x the time investment. Radio, on the other hand, seems like it may have done similar numbers to those of TV. But I'd be interested how different those modes of consumption were in practice. Certainly some people watch TV in the background, and some people listen to the radio while doing nothing else, but I would bet the rate of watching TV while doing nothing else was far higher than that of radio.