It would, however, be unfair to claim in a broad sense that the commercial attention industries “won” the 1960s from their noncommercial antagonists, whether public broadcasters, spiritual seekers, those espousing liberation à la Marcuse, or merely those yearning for a simpler life. For clearly those ideas would leave their lasting mark. Individualism became the dominant American ethos, even of capitalism itself. But in a narrower sense, commerce did win: the counterculture’s call for the revitalization of spirituality and social consciousness inspired very few to make a permanent break even from television, the great portal to all that was wrong with society. To the contrary, by the early 1970s, television viewing had increased to an average of six hours per day per household.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 594