So what were we watching in 2008? The multiplication of television continues at speed. If you have cable TV you might have, say, 80 channels to choose from, most of them having nothing to offer you whatsoever. Some have almost no viewers. You could afford to advertise a missing cat on some of them, except that nobody who might have seen your cat is watching. Richard and Judy have been demoted from terrestrial TV to a hopelessly obscure channel — ratings at one point dropped to 21,000 — yet their book club continues a sort of phantom existence, selling huge quantities of paperbacks even though almost no one sees R&J plugging them.
Supporters of the new dispensation claim that this is an ideal situation; nobody would go to a supermarket that offered only five different foods. Yet there are drawbacks to all this choice.
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