It might help to consider TV as the Internet before the real Internet made its way into people's homes. You got a newspaper once a day, but cable TV news was up

It might help to consider TV as the Internet before the real Internet made its way into people's homes. You got a newspaper once a day, but cable TV news was up-to-the-minute, and local TV news filled you in on local events from the day. You couldn't forward cute cat videos to your co-workers with one click, so you'd bond at the coffee machine every morning talking about last night's basketball game, or who shot JR, or that clumsy guy that fell off the roof on America's Funniest Home Videos. In 1970, 1% of the U.S. population (20 million citizens) was illiterate. Do you know 100 people; friends, family, neighbors? One of them might not have been able to read. As an audio-visual medium, TV is an equalizer. America loves to think of itself as a classless society. With apologies to Andy Warhol: "You can be watching TV and see Alf, and you know that the President watches Alf, Liz Taylor watches Alf, and just think, you can watch Alf, too." So much of cable TV's influence reflected its ability to educate, inform, AND entertain. Communities were given public access studios without the need for powerful, expensive transmitters. They could have a whole channel with computer-generated text over soothing elevator music showing the latest happenings at the public library. CSPAN put the legislative process in your living room. TLC was originally The Learning Channel and it had actual educational shows, but so did all the local community colleges on their own low-budget cable stations. On the morning of the Challenger disaster, I watched the shuttle crew drive to the launch pad on NASATV while I ate breakfast. Is this what everybody watched, all the time? No. But when it came time to vote on "Community Antenna TV" and eventually cable, this is what was trotted out and you can't deny the power of bringing that into people's homes. TV was a huge deal until we replaced it with the Internet, and in many ways we're using it in the same ways. It's shared culture. It's audio-visual entertainment. It's news & information.