Along with having to actually get up from your seat, or bed, and turn the channels and/or adjust the volume how many remember the only three channels that were available, sometime possibly 4 if you had a UHF tuner. If the President was to speak then all three stations, ABC, NBC, and CBS were tied up. Today with numerous channels to chose from the main three have lost a great share of their viewers. As for me, other than the National News, I hardly ever turn my television to ABC, NBC or CBS. For news I either tune to FOX, CNN, or MSNBC and other that that it's information type channels that I tend to favor such as Discovery, Science, NatGeo, History, and Military channels.
So much has changed over the years and makes you wonder just what the future will hold. Will future generations experience exponential growth and changes, as ours have or has the exponential changes already happened and only incremental improvements be experienced?
Another thing to ponder is just how much has changed from 1955 on and how much things changed from years before. I can't imagine what it was like before Television and the 3 channels were supreme and high tech for their times. I can even remember going from Black & White to Color Televisions. Sometimes I take opportunity to listen to old broadcast from Radio shows from the 1940's and 1950's such as Fibber McGee and Molly and the Great Gildersleeve or Jack Benny. So many changes due to technology. Consider that at one time Print media was supreme and high tech where events like the Civil War, World War I was covered in print and people got their only news by word of mouth or print. After Radio was discovered and became a regular then information was faster but still there was a lag time and the full effect of stories wasn't realized until Television could bring in actual pictures.
Today it's almost certain that almost any and every event will have some video or photo coverage thanks to the proliferation of smart phones and with the internet we have a period where news lag is the shortest it's ever been. We've gone from the Civil War days and before where battle results weren't known for days if not weeks or months by the majority of people to Operation Dessert Storm and the Iraq War where journalist were imbedded in the very battles themselves as they occurred. So much has changed!