No other medium so affected the prevailing mass media as television. "Directly and immediately, leisure time use was affected, as television grabbed huge gobs of time away from radio-listening, reading, and other activities. Movie attendance went into a tailspin, the radio was pushed from the center stage of home entertainment to become just a medium for providing background music, and the authority and credibility of newspapers began to fade" (Rogers 1986, 83). A 1955 study by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare reported how U.S. homes were affected by the purchase of a television set: magazine use declined 41 percent; newspaper use declined 18 percent; radio use declined 57 percent; television use increased 1,441 percent (Brody 1990, 269). Other research showed where the time spent watching TV came from: 13 minutes of sleeping; 12 minutes of social time away from home; 8 minutes of radio time; 6 minutes of reading; 7 minutes of housework; 5 minutes of travel; 5 minutes of conversation (Brody 1990, 270). Clearly, television's affect on American culture was enormous.
With such a revolutionary new mass medium, it is hard to understand how the others survived But they did. Radio was severely affected. Listening time bottomed out in the mid-sixties but then started to climb (De Sola Pool 1984, 81). The technology survived by re-inventing its purpose. What started out as the nation's primary entertainment medium became one to be used when television could not: while people were driving, working, studying and the like (Rogers 1986, 192).
The film industry, on the other hand, took a dive and is still diving, though not for lack of trying. When television came along and box office receipts fell, the industry tried gimmicks such as wider screens, 3-D, and special sound effects, but none of them worked (Rogers 1986, 190). The film industry then dropped its moral standards and began using sex to entice audiences, but attendance still fell. (Rogers 1986, 190). Though it is still a viable medium today, movie theater attendance continues to decline on a per capita basis (Rogers 1986, 190).
There may be lessons here for newspapers. There has been a recent trend in newspaper design, lead by USA Today, to print shorter stories along with news briefs and plenty of colorful graphics, in an attempt to capture the decreasing American attention span. This could be seen as an effort by newspapers to become something they are not: a television or computer screen. In the same way that radio moved to the spaces where television couldn't go, printed newspapers might find a place where computers aren't appropriate. Since print is the preferred medium for long textual documents, perhaps newspapers should take this cue and try to supply longer material not well-suited to the CRT screen. In this way the newspaper industry, like radio, might re-invent itself and settle into a new niche for the next 100 years.
Like newspapers, the future of television is up for grabs. Network television, after a decline probably due to competition from cable, has enjoyed a recent resurgence. Fragmentation is apparent in newspapers, niche magazines, hundreds of cable channels targeted at very specific groups and tastes, and in on-line services with discussion groups on every conceivable topic. But network television has made a comeback, possibly because "the communal experience it offers has become an essential component of our personal lives and the body politic" (Rezendes 1994, 73).
One vision of the Information Superhighway has us all using interactive televisions the way we might use a networked computer. Andrew Grove of Intel pointed out in 1994 that there were close to eight million interactive computers linked to on-line services in American homes and not one interactive TV (Kehoe 1994, 9). The Macmillan Publishing survey found that the average computer owner spends more time using it than watching TV (Schwabach 1995, G1).