Television Goes on the Offensive

Many people know of Anna's plan to phase television out of her life. Thanks to a traitor in her midst (me) that plan isn't going well. Now there's this. Yesterday afternoon, we noticed that there was a new choice on our digital cable menu. So we checked it and learned that we now have On Demand cable, which means that we can watch anything we want whenever we want, to a limited to degree. As HBO subscribers we now get a whole library of that network's original shows. There are extended highlights of NBA games. It's really pretty intense.

Or as Anna put it: "I'm never going to get anything done ever again."

I suppose the next question is, if you're controlling when you watch something and picking it out like you're at a video store, is it still television? Or maybe you have so altered the fundamental nature of the traditional transaction that we're edging our way into something else. I'll leave that for the philosophers.