Certainly it comes as news to no one that television has been a mainstay of modern home life since its arrival in the living rooms of American families in the 1950s. The media theorist Lynn Spigel, one of the foremost authori-ties on mass culture at midcentury, points out that while only 9 percent of American homes had a television set in 1950, postwar consumers purchased the new technology at such record rates that by the end of the decade the number of households with at least one receiver had risen tenfold to nearly 90 percent.1 Writing with considerable prescience about the new medium in 1956, the sociologist and cultural critic Leo Bogart predicted not only that every household was destined to have a tv but also that as the technology improved and the sets themselves became lighter and less cumbersome, tele-visions would be spread out through individual homes, with a set installed in nearly every room.2Like most Americans of the baby boom generation, I had lived comfort-ably with the technological marvel of television ever in the background of my everyday life.