I would think your parents thought about television more than refrigerators. That's one technology that really set the world on a new trajectory. Imagine if Nixon won the presidency in 1960, if we didn't have real-time video of the Apollo landings, or if America stayed in Vietnam for another ten years.

Television and radio set the parameters for the "single-stream culture" that emerged in the 20th century. Mostly a result of the limited bandwidth of early broadcast technology, so everyone had to watch the same few channels.

Web 2.0 broke this into millions of creators. Generative AI produces everything on-demand, but again there is a small number of (polymorphic) models producing the content.