The 1950s would be remembered as a decade of conformity, and while the reasons may be many and complex, one cannot exclude the most salient: the historically anomalous scale of attention capture effected by television, together with the homogeneity of the stuff created to do the capturing. This was, of course, not enforced viewing; there were, as mentioned, three channels, and no facist “Television Guard”—though given the primacy of the ratings champions, most Americans were indeed watching the same shows and the same advertisements most of the time.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 457