I always wanted to believe that it's just me becoming a dinosaur, much like I used to have to listen to old people tell me how great things used to be back in the day. I long ago anticipated that as part of life, it's just that it's turning out much differently than I expected.
An example, watching the ongoing decline of quality of minds in software engineering. It's not that there aren't some smart young people entering the field, it's just that tragically they were never given the chance to develop their brains in the way that developers did 30 years ago. These days, all it takes is a Google search to look up "how do I do this, how do I do that", or they watch a 10 min video on how to accomplish the task ahead of them. In the early days of software development, the programming tools were primitive and horrible and every single time you ran into a challenge you had to stretch your mind to figure it all out yourself, there was no such thing as Googling for the answer and there were not 10 min videos. Sometimes you needed to read 1000+ pages of dense, intensely technical material in a period of a few days to a week before you had enough information to begin to overcome the problem and derive a proper solution.
That's all gone. The newbies don't have a reason or rationale to even begin to learn how to train their brains to think at that level. It's sad really. Most of them have only basic reading skills, enough to pick up the latest Internet meme and feel clever about using it. They don't have the attention span to even survive through 1000+ of dense technical material without having an ADD spaz attack and getting diverted onto something unrelated.
With regard to music, however, I think the issue is similar in the sense that technology changed the landscape (cataclysmically actually) but the reasons and effect are somewhat different.
I never really connected MTV's decline to whatever it is today (wouldn't know, haven't seen it in years, its not even in my list of watched channels) to the same things that closed retail music stores like Internet music sharing, I guess because the changes seemed to happen only after a couple of years after they first came on the air. First it was music videos, then it was inordinately long music videos involving acting and story lines, then by the time the early 90s rolled around they were doing reality shows that had absolutely nothing to do with music, yet the rest of the music industry was still there even if MTV lost their way.
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