( CNN ) -- In a country as splintered as the United States has become , can there be any such thing as a national pastime ? The phrase has been associated with the game of baseball since late in the 19th century , when sportswriters began dropping it into their stories . It was a great promotional slogan for the sport ; whether it ever was literally true is open to question . But it would be just about impossible to make the case that baseball is the national pastime today ; in a country of 314 million people , this year 's World Series drew , on average , a television audience of only 12.7 million viewers per game ( football 's Super Bowl this year attracted an audience of more than 111 million ) . Yet the question is not which sport has become the national pastime , but whether any single activity of any kind qualifies for that title . Cohesion is not exactly the dominating quality of 21st-century life ; we are endlessly being reminded of all the choices we have about how to spend our time , and the concept of the entire country gravitating toward one leisure-time activity sounds beyond archaic . If baseball ever was , at least symbolically , the national pastime , it was supplanted in the early 1950s by the rapid growth in the number of television sets in American homes . Suddenly something was happening that had never before occurred : People all over the country were looking at the same thing at the same time . Most mornings , the main topic of conversation in offices , factories and schools across the continent was something that had been on all those television screens the night before . There were only three channels to watch in most cities , and perhaps an additional `` educational '' channel , the forerunner to PBS . The nation had a new pastime , and it took place indoors . The great majority of Americans who are alive today have no memory at all of a world before television . The median age in the United States hovers right around 37 years old ; this means that half of all Americans were born in 1975 or later . The presence of television , to them , is as unremarkable as the sight of the sun in the summer sky . And a newer pastime , as we all know , has emerged , on screens of a different sort . To take note of how free time ( whatever that has come to mean ) is now being spent , all you have to do is walk down any street in any city or small town , and observe your fellow pedestrians checking the screens they grasp in their palms . But the hegemony of early television , with those three channels , is a distant memory . No one can take the public 's attention for granted today ; first the advent of cable television fragmented viewing patterns , and then came the boundless Internet , followed by the creative forces that provide the content for all those little personal screens . Apple offers around 700,000 separate applications , as does Google . A lot of ways to pass the time , in a nation with a twitching concentration span . And there is always something around the next corner . The same way there are fewer and fewer Americans who can describe to you what the country was like before television , soon enough there will be few Americans who will be able to recall a world before the Internet . It is hard to conceive , but social history tells us that the seemingly limitless array of ways to spend time today will before long seem constricted and small . There is a famous and provocative phrase , translated from the writings of Karl Marx , that has been used in various contexts over the years : `` the opiate of the masses . '' The concept of people being susceptible to a symbolic opiate of any kind remains controversial and current . Do today 's Americans simply enjoy the screens they carry with them , or are they psychologically addicted to them -- is it a pleasurable pastime , or are they hooked ? It 's not an unfair question . ( And as far as opiates go -- pharmacological and figurative -- the Wall Street Journal recently reported on an intriguing development at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta , as explained by Rhonda Scott , Grady 's chief nursing officer : `` Grady agreed to double the number of TV channels in rooms and add ESPN because 'the requests for pain medication go down during the afternoon football games , ' Dr. Scott said . '' ) Our pastimes are many , and the very idea of a national pastime goes against the contemporary aversion to doing only one thing at a time . Although the very real possibility exists that , seemingly contradictorily , we have indeed settled on a new kind of national pastime : . Multitasking . Baseball 's starting to sound better and better . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Bob Greene .
Bob Greene says it 's been awhile since baseball has been the U.S. national pastime . He says life fragmented today ; few things unite people as a shared whole . Baseball once did . He says Internet has further splintered interests ; is computer screen new language of masses ? Greene : New national language may just be born . Makes you wish for baseball .