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You know what I think is missing more? Complete lack of context.
Digital cable that had the menu of what was playing was a novelty even in the 2000s so television used to be "you turned it on and what was playing was playing." You'd catch a movie halfway in and not know what the hell it is and that was all you could learn. Even if you had an internet connection you wouldn't think to use it to look up what this movie was, and if you did, IMDB and such didn't exist yet. Maybe Yahoo! would turn something up, probably not.
Then the file sharing days were wild. There are people convinced to this day that System of a Down did a song about The Legend of Zelda.
System of a Down did the Zelda song, Arrogant Worms did The War of 1812, Weird Al did everything else.
Eh, the printed TV guide was a thing, and around here just about every newspaper had daily and/or weekly listings of what was on the different channels. Most cable subscriptions came with their own monthly TV guide as well.
Fond memories of going through the TV listings with family, circling the things each one wanted to see on the single TV in the house 🙂
Similar thing applies to music. There are still web radio stations and web broadcasts of good FM stations out there, and what a relief it is to fall back on these, especially i f you're getting playlist burnout. There's something to be said for a queue of music that some person has just slapped together for the day that fits whatever the overall feeling of a station is. The original algorithms before the final algorithms took over, I suppose.