In the past, I've harbored plenty of resentment towards television, but I have trouble doing this now. If you look at the trends, there was clearly an explosion in television-watching around the same time that TV sets became widely available. This looks bad; it makes it seem that TV consumption supplanted a lot of other more important and intellectual pursuits. Perhaps it left us worse off.

But the rise in television watching coincides, I believe, with the rise in disposable time. The technology of the 20th century, that brought with it the television set, brought several other pieces of technology as well. Washers and dryers are one example. Doing the laundry for a household each week used to take hours, and it used to be very labor intensive, with washboards and clotheslines.

I think that housewives across the country, having to spend less time on the laundry, and with no other model to follow, decided to spend some time watching television. It's what I do at the laundromat when I've forgotten to bring a book or I'm too tired to read: I watch the television.

I think it's difficult to say for sure just how many intellectual pursuits were truly lost to television when it first arrived. If you're going to make that argument, I think you'd have to go back to the proliferation of the radio. Didn't people used to consume that for hours on end before TV showed up?