Television: buffet or a la carte?

Over at World Wide Webers, Karl looks at this pick your cable channel package idea and finds it bad, for a number of reasons - including that it will end up costing viewers a lot. But there's a philosophical note to his dislike, too. I like this:

Channel surfing is my 50-ish equivalent of the library browsing I used to do when I was a kid. Many of the most interesting books I ever read were books I discovered by chance (to this day I resent libraries with closed stacks). It's about letting yourself be exposed to the wealth of human experience in all its weird, unpredictable, tawdry, magnificent variety. I think this is why God made the universe--because He likes a world that is crazy, colorful, and almost-but-not-quite chaotic. And if God likes it that way, who am I to argue?

To me there is something fascistic about the idea that we are supposed to know in advance everything we want to experience--and that we should deliberately wall ourselves off from everything else, lest we ever (horrors!) discover something unexpected or new. It's not surprising that Christian fundamentalists are behind this a la carte idea.