It was a late, Thursday night, my friends and I were hanging out in our dorm room talking and going through Twitter on our phones. One of us stumbled upon a short clip from "Rolie Polie Olie" that had been cleverly dubbed to some rap song and we all laughed. The discovery made us look up the show’s actual theme song, which we quickly found on YouTube, and we even surprised ourselves by somehow remembering all the words. We started laughing and trying to remember other shows from our childhood – seeing if we could remember their theme songs, trying to recall character names, talking about how weird certain aspects of the shows were, and comparing what our parents wouldn’t let us watch.

This continued for a few hours, which was filled with a lot of laughs and happy memories. It was pointless, and in no way a productive use of our time, but this topic of childhood shows allowed four friends, from different parts of the country, who grew up in very different homes, to bond and laugh together. When you think about that, something that has the ability to do that is pretty powerful. There aren’t too many things in the world that a person from one background can experience almost exactly the same as another person from a different background. Television is one of those things.

Growing up in the early 2000s, my generation was one of the last to grow up without access to programs like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, or whatever other streaming-program can be accessed today. As a matter of fact, these things didn’t even exist. If you wanted to watch a show without having that channel on, you had two options: convince your parents to let you use a tape to record it on your VHS, or wait a day and ask your friends at lunch what happened. But this has all changed. Kids have millions of shows at the tip of their fingers practically anytime they’re accessing technology. They can watch anything they want. No longer are kids limited to Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and ABC Family. Every kid watches his or her own thing.

On one hand, that’s great. Kids can develop an interest in a genre, they can follow story lines better, and they have options. But, are they being deprived of a classic, generation-uniter? When they’re in college, bored with their friends, one of them will say “do you guys remember that show with the dog?” and it will all depend on whether or not that person’s friend's five-year-old self selected that on Netflix one day. By no means am I saying that this is the world’s biggest issue or anything – believe me, there are still plenty of other ways to entertain yourself on a late Thursday night in college, but nonetheless having generational commonalities is a huge part of social interaction and a basis of so many small, “connecting” moments between people of the same age.

Costumes, songs, toys, trends – all of those things in the world of children revolve around TV shows. I mean even things as classic and innocent as elementary school talent shows show hints of the popular shows. (You can't tell me you didn't sit through at least one American Idol Re-Enactment in your day.) These shows become ingrained in kids’ every day lives and even more so in their memories, and whether or not that’s beneficial, it definitely leads to a lot of laughs and funny memories down the road. However, if kids now are watching different things, from all different places, are they going to be deprived of this common bond later?

Don’t get me wrong, I am as a big a fan of Netflix as any 18 year old is, but is it breaking down a staple of generational culture? I think so. Is this going to deteriorate kids’ future quality of life? Probably not, but it definitely will take something away from them that generations for so many years have been able to share. Maybe there is an age that TV Show-Streaming programs should be introduced so that each generation can grow up, in some sense, together.

But, no matter what, I will forever be grateful that I will always be around people who will know what to say after hearing “That’s So Raven…”