Cable, however, is not the only worry facing the networks.
Video games have become a "hot item" in the stores. Milions of Americans have discovered a passion for gadgets that convert a TV screen into a Ping-Pong table, hockey ring or tennis court.
This development may seem trivial or irrelevant to orthodox political or social analysts. Yet it represents a wave of social learning, a premonitory training as it were, for life in the electronic environment of tomorrow.
Not only do video games further de-massify the audience and cut into the numbers who are watching the programs broadcast at any given moment, but through such seemingly innocent devices milions of people are learning to play with the television set, to talk back to it and to interract with it.
In the process they are changing from passive receivers to message senders as well. They are manipulating the set rather than merely letting the set manipulate them.
Alvin Toffler - The Third Wave