Television has become more like a newspaper than the radio it was designed to emulate. Contrary to the varied programming on a few major stations in its early years, television now contains many cable stations which focus on individual areas of interest. From broad topics such as religion to more specific interests like golf, television is providing its viewers with stations to suit their interests. Paradoxically, this form of programming specialization is one of the many factors that makes the television a generalizing medium.

The five-hundred channel television will add more to the viewing experience than just more content. The organization of these specialty channels will change the way that we watch television. Blocks of new channels are added onto the existing spectrum of stations with no regard for maintaining any sort of logical order. The result is home repair on channel 86, fishing on channel 87, horror movies on channel 88, and cooking on channel 89. A viewer that craves a fish dinner after watching channel 87 will soon lose her appetite when she heads up to channel 89 and sees a mutilated corpse along the way. As specialty channels increase, channel surfing becomes an adventure into the unknown as viewers can only remember what’s on channel 118 by visiting it.

Also of significance to the cable explosion is its effect on an entirely different medium: TV Guide. TV Guide, and its numerous substitutes, is an attempt to categorize television. It is the medium of print trying to assign its rules onto a medium that follows completely different ones. When only a few channels exist, it can do just that; the TV guide breaks television into a set of easy to understand programs at fixed time intervals. However, with hundreds of channels, the TV guide becomes obsolete. Finding out what’s on at 7 o'clock will take until 7:30, and keeping track of your favourite shows becomes a game of word search. Television will be best navigated with a remote control and a knowledge of what your favourite stations are.