My grandmother had one rule at her dinner table: no elbows, no politics, and absolutely no television. Today, her great-grandchildren eat with one hand and scroll with the other, and nobody at the table finds this strange. I want to talk about how we got here, because the road runs straight through abc.com and everything it represents.
I remember when abc.com was simply where you went if you missed an episode. You watched the show, you caught up, you moved on with your evening. That was the deal. Television was a thing you did, not a thing that did you. Then the walls came down. The streaming wars turned every network into a bottomless well, and suddenly the distinction between "watching a show" and "living inside a feed" vanished. Log onto abc.com today and you don't just get your program. You get clips, recaps, autoplay suggestions, and a quiet machine that studies exactly how long you'll stay before you leave.
Here's what unsettles me. We used to have rituals around entertainment. Families gathered at eight o'clock. Neighbors talked about last night's episode the next morning at work, at church, at the school pickup line. That shared clock synchronized us. It gave us something to say to each other. Now every household watches a different algorithm's version of the world, at a different hour, on a different screen, often alone. We didn't just lose appointment television. We lost appointment conversation.
And the cost shows up everywhere. Ask a teacher how many students can sit through a forty-minute lesson without reaching for a phone. Ask a pastor how many pews empty out because Sunday morning competes with a screen that never sleeps. Ask a marriage counselor how often the phrase "he's always on his phone" comes up. This isn't about one website. abc.com is simply the polite face of an entire economy built on harvesting attention and selling it back to us in fragments.
The deeper problem is what we traded away. Boredom, for one thing. Daydreaming. The long, unproductive hours that used to turn children into people with inner lives. We handed those hours over gladly, because the alternative felt like discomfort. But discomfort is where character gets made. A society that cannot tolerate a quiet room is a society that cannot tolerate itself.
I'm not calling for a ban. I'm calling for honesty. Every time you open that tab, you're making a choice about who you're becoming and who you're ignoring. The screen doesn't care. It will take whatever you give, and it will ask for more tomorrow.
So here's my modest proposal: bring back the dinner table rule. One hour, no screens, real faces. It won't fix everything, but it's a start. Because the collapse of a society doesn't announce itself with sirens. It creeps in quietly, one autoplay at a time, while we're all too busy watching to notice.