In the classic television show The Waltons (which you can binge-watch on Amazon Prime if you’d like), the Walton family is often seen sitting around their radio, listening to news or to one of the Presidents fireside chats. Ever since the invention of broadcast communication using electromagnetic radiation, some form of this ritual has been a hallmark of modern life.

When I was young, we sat around the television, which picked up a signal that was broadcast over the air. It was a huge deal when sometime in the 1980s we upgraded to receiving our signal over a wire. Even back then we had many electronic devices in the house, in contrast to the Waltons, who only had their beloved radio.

Fast forward to my early adulthood and you might have found my friends and I enacting the ritual around a computer screen, playing a strategy game. We would all have insisted on playing competitively against one another, but today’s young generation can be seen gathered around a game where one person is playing and the rest spectating. Either way the social bonding around the screen remains a constant.

Now that I am in mid-life and enfolded again into a multi-generational family, we repeat the ritual gathered around the Internet. For that is what our big screen is connected to now, the old commercial channel format replaced by streaming on demand. We sometimes sit and watch short videos on YouTube, discussing them in heated arguments, or showing our favorite new finds to one another. For whatever faults the Internet may have, it has become a place of gathering, of sharing and interacting.

I’ll leave off with a video from a YouTube channel we enjoy, since we are all film fans. The channel is a very erudite set of video essays on film technique. Here we learn why Edgar Wright movies are so good (and this was made before Baby Driver).