TV.

I think everyone kind of gets sucked into the same things.  It is weird to think about how far technology has come-- my parents were so reluctant to get a DVD player at first, and cable, and now that I have it, it is so hard to get away from.  They were right to shelter me a bit from those things and DVD collecting because now it is all so worthless, both financially and mentally.  I liked Angie's comment about reality TV being like crack-- it is so ridiculously addicting, but then after the show is done I could care less about where that person is or what they are doing.  In the back of my mind I realize how scripted and monitored the show is,  yet I still watch it and sympathize with the characters, similar to how people do with regular characters on drama shows.
I really want to get into the whole netflix thing, but I am not sure that I could get my parents to pay for it since I already have cable in the dorms, and they want me to focus on my grades. I think TV is something that I will have to cut out of my life when I graduate, at least when I am starting out. It seems like such a small thing, and something that every one of us has grown up with, but it really is a time-consumer and useless mostly.
Another interesting point is how everyone talked about the two most popular shows at the time being really affected by the writer's strike.  You had the two powerhouses-- Lost and Heroes, and they were generating huge amounts of weekly viewers, but then without the good script behind them, people were just completely tuned off.  Lost was able to regenerate and complete the season, but as far as I know, Heroes is still going on, and has yet to truly go anywhere.  They really lost their audience with all of the twists and turns in every episode; it became too confusing and dumb.