Playing an instrument or being able to sing half-decently used to be a lot more common, because it was more valuable, and in any group of people you could depend on all of them knowing at least a few of the same songs from a set of traditional and more recent pop tunes.
For all the benefits of recorded music and film and such, it's all but killed small-scale culture. Being a 3rd-rate pianist, for instance, has gone from "fairly valuable" (not monetarily, but in a social-capital sense) to "no value at all". It's a topic Vonnegut treated a few times in his novels, notably in Bluebeard where he just digresses at the beginning of a chapter to give us his views on it more-or-less directly, through his author stand-in character (the central protagonist, in fact—that book's a kind of whirlwind tour of all Vonnegut's major topics and themes). I'd say it's akin to alienation in the Marxian sense. Probably some communication theorists have covered the territory well, but that whole field's writing's so damned (and deliberately) impenetrable that I can't say for sure.
Card and parlor games, lawn games, reading aloud from books on long winter evenings, sing-alongs around the piano, all used to be way more common than they are now. Imagine, no TV, radio's just getting started, the only films are silent and you have to go somewhere to see them, and you've got five wax cylinder recordings and can maybe borrow a few more from friends. What are you gonna do for leisure?
For all the benefits of recorded music and film and such, it's all but killed small-scale culture. Being a 3rd-rate pianist, for instance, has gone from "fairly valuable" (not monetarily, but in a social-capital sense) to "no value at all". It's a topic Vonnegut treated a few times in his novels, notably in Bluebeard where he just digresses at the beginning of a chapter to give us his views on it more-or-less directly, through his author stand-in character (the central protagonist, in fact—that book's a kind of whirlwind tour of all Vonnegut's major topics and themes). I'd say it's akin to alienation in the Marxian sense. Probably some communication theorists have covered the territory well, but that whole field's writing's so damned (and deliberately) impenetrable that I can't say for sure.
Card and parlor games, lawn games, reading aloud from books on long winter evenings, sing-alongs around the piano, all used to be way more common than they are now. Imagine, no TV, radio's just getting started, the only films are silent and you have to go somewhere to see them, and you've got five wax cylinder recordings and can maybe borrow a few more from friends. What are you gonna do for leisure?