Estranged by Movies

The comment about movies in this Guardian article could apply to a lot of other things

Movies have been more like a secret vice, the first and most invasive of the technologies that have progressively estranged us from one another. 

I grew up in small-town India in pre-internet times and my escape of choice was reading. I was completely indiscriminate and would read just about anything. Read first and judge later (if at all). It was just great to have an escape into the world of an unfamiliar cast of characters that came along with a book. There were plenty of other kids like me - sometimes we shared the love of the same book and talked about it. As we grew older, our tastes started to diverge, for some of us the love of reading became a relic of childhood. By our twenties, what we read often "estranged us from one another" instead of creating moments of intense bonding as it once did.

I knew of a lot of avid readers in college who were fundamentally lonely people. They had a mental space that they could not successfully share with others and not for the lack of trying. We exchanged books with each other as a way to connect - occasionally there was perfect resonance. Music can similarly bring people together or cause them to diverge - intergenerationally it is seems harder to find things in common. As we get older, we perhaps get less able to accept and like the types of music we are unfamiliar with or did not love in our own youth. 

Singling out movies for this indictment seems wrong.