fascination with television and its attendant technologies is by no means a
uniquely American phenomenon. At least 90 percent of families in Venezuela have
access to television, and by nine o’clock in the evening, 71 percent of those sets are
switched on. Worldwide, more than one hundred million households own videocassette
recorders, and several countries surpass the U.S. in the proportion of the population that
owns or rents VCRs—Japan, Great Britain, Saudi Arabia, and Norway among them. On
the streets of Taipei, you can buy a videotape of the previous night’s output of Japanese
television, recorded off the air in Tokyo and delivered to Taiwan by early morning flight.
In India there are 12,000 licensed long-distance “video buses.” The introduction of
television to the largest cities of the People’s Republic of China in the early 1980s has
been called the most important cultural event since the Cultural Revolution; nearly every urban Chinese family now has access to television.