As Friends of the Blog have probably surmised, I am not an early adapter (though it's on my bucket list).  And it's not just with technology, it's with culture.  I don't rush out and buy bestsellers, and I generally don't feel any urgent need to run to the movies to catch the latest blockbuster. 

I don't even have a TV. There may have been a time when that was a boast, but lately it's becoming an embarrassment.  Luddism just doesn't fly anymore.  Nowadays when people say "simplification" they're talking about an elegant interface, or more and better apps.  No one in their right mind would suggest you throw away your smart phone — that would only complicate your life.

And I love the internet.  So to be all anti-television, especially when TV and the internet are becoming increasingly indistinguishable, would be disingenuous.  I like TV, but on my own terms.  I mean, what could be better than watching The Human Centipede on a Saturday night with your best cuddlebuddy?  The problem is: nowadays it seems like you have to be a real rocket scientist to set one up.

This is when a husband comes in handy, girls.

Remember back in the day?  You could literally come home with a TV, plug it in, and go.  It was hardly worth it.  You couldn't go far.  But there it was.  The magic of television!  Not anymore.  You bring one of these babies home today, and all you've got is a headache. 

It actually starts before you get home from Best Buy.  What were the choices before?  Black and white or color?  Thirteen or twenty inch?  Laminated woodgrain case?  Obviously.  Now it's plasma, DLP, CRT or LCD?  Progressive scan or interlace? Wall-mount or console?  And you have to think of things like burn-in and glare. 

No sooner do you get it home than you have to pick a cable package.  Then you've got to call the cable guy, set up an appointment, and wait around for him to come, which is guaranteed to be an ordeal in itself.  And then it's onto more headaches.  I mean, 500 channels, none of them porn?  Why spend your nights channel surfing when there's tumblr?  I mean, the internet has porn.  Why do we even need TV anymore?

Yeah, I know.  Sports.  We need TV for sports.  But I'm not interested in watching men grabbing each other's balls — not those kinds of balls anyway.  The thing about sports is that they take up so much of your time.  You can't fast-forward through them to the good stuff, or to the end to see who wins — you're supposed to be there in the moment, caught up in the game — the suspense is supposed to be real — in the here and now (and later they'll pick and choose the moments of glory for you).

Yeah, you could Tivo it, or whatever people do nowadays, but that's like watching The Sixth Sense when you already know the end.  Why would you? 

Which is why porn is better.  No commercials (not a small thing), no play-by-play commentary (except by the players themselves sometimes — and you can always mute that), you don't have to watch it live, you can fast forward to your favorite parts, and you know how it ends.  Which means, five minutes and you're on with your life.  Porn is, in fact, the perfect entertainment for the age in which we live.

Tellingly, sports (and to a lesser extent traditional network news) represents what TV does best.  Porn is the internet.  Even down to the screen size — Sports works best on a ginormous screen — a sports event is by its nature a shared experience.  Porn, by contrast, works on any size screen and is probably best experienced on the subway. 

But in this age of synergy, porn, news and sports are not in the least mutually exclusive — in fact, the lines between them are increasingly blurred. Spectator sex is a sport, news is porn, and so on. 

But I digress.  My point is:  getting your cable hooked up, as much of an ordeal as it can be, is just the beginning.  You should probably have a gaming system.  They're not just for gaming anymore.  If you want Netflix — which for years has been my only contact with the outside world — on the big screen, there's Wii. 

Soon, you'll have to have Apple or Google TV.  This next step requires a leap. We've grown accustomed to letting TV onto our laptops, but what are the implications of letting your internet onto your TV?  This could get confusing.  And that's the thing.  We are living through a hellish version of Herbert Spencer's observation about evolution as greater and greater integration coupled with greater and greater differentiation. 

I'll say it again, girls: this is where a husband comes in handy.

Like I said, I'm not an early adapter.  I don't mind waiting a year for a season of Dexter to hit my Netflix queue.  I don't have a Dexter support group I have to check in with after the first broadcast, or a water cooler klatch at work I have to crunch for.  What Dexter and I have is between Dexter and me. 

So, yeah, I take TV at my own pace partly because I don't really have anyone I talk about TV with.  So when I watch something it's like when I read a good book — it's "our thing", me and the book.  It's the same with art and movies and TV.  I spent most of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in bed with the flu this year, but I had 4 Seasons of 30 Rock to keep me company.  

I don't see the way TV works as something it's lacking.  It is what it is.  And it has always been a solitary sport.  When we watch it together it gives us an illusion of togetherness, true, but just as we're born alone and die alone, we all surf alone.  No one wants to share the clicker. 

I'm always surprised when I read in the advice columns that couples still share a computer.  If it's the cost, it's one thing, I guess. But where TVs started as a shared experience (albeit of isolation), the PC is called a "personal computer" for a reason.  It's a personal Pandora's box.  There's no pretext anymore of sharing.  

The internet has its own veil over alienation — social networking — but it really just amplifies the real, inescapable isolation of our existence.  In a good way, though.

I'm not knocking it, people.  I think there is something extraordinary in the degree to which we can become utterly absorbed in the spectacle.  And what TV and movies do at their best is what all creative types aspire to do with what they create — draw our attention to them so completely we forget everything and everyone else.  The best art not only calls our attention from (which is mere distraction) but draws our attention to.

And thus, creative types are always egoists, and their works seek nothing less than our complete submission.  It starts as the cloying art-school demand to be affirmed, to have the execution of one's vision be given the grade of "you are right."  But lines don't lie.  Competence inspires no one.  And competent art when given a showing convinces us of nothing but the artist's need for affirmation. 

Great art is the product of an expansive, benificent egoism — in inviting complete submission, in dominating the viewer completely, it allows us to experience the Other, albeit a stylized and simulated other.  Turns out it takes alienation, isolation and ego to momentarily obliterate alienation, isolation and ego. 

So much of our culture is media, and media is all about seeing the world through the Other's eyes. There are dangers here, of course — we do need strong and healthy egos to function in the world — but the instructive, some would say moral elements of art are found here, too.  Art itself implies the Other — and there is no art without the Other. 

But it requires that we submit to the Other in order to see the world as the Other sees it.  The degree to which we judge a work superior lies not in its realism — its reflection of what we see in the world — but in how completely it transports us into the world it sees. 

It's not always so serious, of course.  In fact, one of the great achievements of modernity is how we have been able to reduce this experience to 30-second spots.  And luckily comedy serves the purpose just as well as tragedy.  It works as well with Magritte as Michelangelo.  What people who are unfamiliar or afraid of art often don't get — along with art snobs, ironically enough — is that it is more earthy than ethereal.  It reflects the breadth of human experience.  Chaucer would love Jersey Shore. 

So what does any of this have to do with television?  What has approximately forty hours of 30 Rock over three days taught me?  That I need something other than a freakin laptop to watch television on.

And that this is where a husband comes in handy.