How did we behave before TV and cinema arrived?

I came across this article while reading Monocle magazine. It is by a guy called Robert Bound.

"Robert Bound has been culture editor of Monocle since launch reporting on art biennales in Sharjah and Venice, army TV from the Pentagon and rock festivals and space missions in Japanese ski resorts and surf islands respectively. 15.06.07"

I wanted to write about how this article made me feel and what i liked about it but i can't be bothered, so here it is.

"Fiction on screen has taught us everything, from how to love to how to fight. Now there's now way of turning, so just try to remember your lines."

Good manners, bad manners, fights, gangsterism, arguments, the delivery of good news, the delivery of bad news, a doctors bedside manner, hooliganism, flirtation, argument, drinking, smoking, cooking, fucking. How would you know how to do these things without being shown how to by the TV, or a century of films? All right, so most of the above are fairly natural, normal things that most people will enact at some point in there lives (most: i only learned hooliganism and gangsterism after becoming Monocle's culture editor -  a doctor's bedside manner is, literally, an occupational hazard), but how much has our delivery changed, our portrayal moulded by the fictionalisation of these behaviours on screen?
    We know how the other half live, love and collide from watching Gosford Park and lapping up Lady Chatterley's Lover. They teach us the appropriate, fecund gruffness and just the right amount of shackled reticence with which to speak one of the dialects of the language of love. Next time we get it on, in the walled garden of a country pile or not, we will adjust our lust accordingly.
    How many fights have you been in? How many have you ever seen? In the world of westerns, it only takes a cowboy from outta town to spit on someone else's patch to kick off a bar brawl: fists pumelling, arms windmilling, elbows cracking jawbone. This is our understanding of fighting - the amusing, violent, fiction of crafty gunslingers and burly ranch-handlers beating seven shades of shit out of each other while a tack piano jangles away in the corner.
    When things are depicted as they used to be in real life, we find them quaint, funny and fictional. The fight scene between Hugh Grant's Daniel Cleaver and Colin Firth's Mark Darcy is the redeeming feature of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Two middle-aged, middle-classed men in suits overwhelmed by lustful anger and passionate fury, unable to translate it into harm unto the other. It's what fighting was like before Dirty Harry, Tyler Durden, Barry Lyndon.
    As acting has become more naturalistic, more stanislavski, our real-life behaviour has become more stylised, more kabuki. We know that romance is best conducted in the style of Rhett Butler, that Gordon Gekko invented brokers' gittish behaviour, and all around us we hear a generation of 20-year-olds employing up-speak aped from Australian soaps and The OC. We're forever playing Hamlet: taking on the role as our own but unable to resist referencing or copying centuries of actors who played the Dane.
    We have been painting with perspective since the 15th century, and can't go back to Bayeux without changing the tapestry. Of course, some of us haven't been paying attention, acting like we're in the prelapsarian Eden - fighting clumsily, smoking with insouciance, kissing like camels. Sorry. Sometimes we even write like cavemen.