There were more real world options. Roller skating rinks, malls (a sign of the online world to come but still real world), water skiing. Also, there was real content in a lot of the older media (Scientific American,Popular Mechanics pre 90s for example) even television news showed some actual news. It just all went from some actual content, expensive, fraught with difficulties to get right (what is truth anyway), to empty calories, cheap, easy to produce, and just more profitable.