My grandfather said that his family got a T.V. when he was thirteen years old; they were one of the first people in his neighborhood to get one. He said that his family listened to radio together every night after dinner to shows such as "Mickey and Molly." They often listened to records together when his father built a record player into the wall of their house. In my mother's family, they got most of their news through T.V. She said that they had two, one that the children could watch and one for the parents. They also listened to radio together as well as reading books and magazines to each other. Both my grandfather and my mother said that there were no real limits on their T.V. watching except that they couldn't watch it during homework time. They said that the reasons for not having limits on what to watch was because there were no violent or profane shows on back then. So we can see from this information that it hasn't been till my generation that we have started to put violence and profane material into the media. My grand father said that he received the news about JFK's assassination from his next door neighbor when they arrived home, then they turned on the T.V. to catch the rest of the story. My mother received information of the assassination on T.V.
The way in which I received information on 9-11 was through T.V. I was in school when it happened and we were told by a teacher to turn on our television sets to see the event because it was horrible, but it was history in the making. I remember watching the towers being crashed into, watching them just disappear and seeing how much damage and destruction was done. I didn't realize at the time how many lives were lost and how devastating the event would really be. In my generation, we watch T.V. just like the other two generations, we still have radio and newspaper, but the major difference is the internet. We use the computer everyday to do many tasks and get most of our news here.
