I grew up in a house where we weren't allowed to watch much tv. We had a black and white set when most households had graduated to color. There were also only 3 channels that came in clearly (if you adjusted the antenna and the horizontal and vertical controls.) Before television, people listened to radio, and before radio, families gathered in parlors and read to one another or played music and sang. When I studied sociology, we studied about how television had altered the family. People once faced one another and interacted and communicated. With television, familes face the television and are usually quite.