How has your television watching changed over your lifetime?

It used to be we could only watch when the show was on. Then we could tape things and playback later. Then there were DVRs. Now there’s Hulu and Netflix and OnDemand, and you can get movies and TV shows any time you want.

Used to be that I watched sports alone and some TV shows alone because no one else in my family watched TV. Now my kids do pretty much the same thing. They do all their TV watching on their computers. Sometimes, on weekends, they’ll watch together in the morning. Sometimes we’ll get together on a Saturday night to watch a movie together, just so we can be together (and not have to go out for a movie).

The other big change for me is that I used to watch a lot of TV, but since I’ve found Q&A, I’ve stopped watching TV and I’ve stopped reading a lot of magazines. I’ve gone from six weekly or monthly magazines to one weekly. I’ve gone from several nights of TV to none. I’m on the computer all the time now.

Complicating this is that I’ve gotten bipolar disorder. Did Q&A bring on bipolar? Or did bipolar make me find Q&A as a kind of self-medication? All I know is I got manic and started Q&A at the same time as I stopped watching TV, stopped reading magazines, and stopped reading novels.