When we got this assignment, I was intent on watching Desperate Housewives. I immediately went to the ABC website, which welcomed me (slash scared me) with this man's voice that preempted his appearance and occurred before the web page even loaded. The voice belonged to some car advertisement that took up the main section of the opening webpage, a distracting motion that added to the overwhelming clutter of the page and redirected my attention from the internet to this TV-like advertisement. The ad provided a live link between the television and the internet, reminding me of my reason to use the internet as a gateway to past television - a means in which I could almost relive the past. This webpage was going to give me the opportunity to experience Desperate Housewives in its state of "liveness" that I missed that previous Sunday night. In a sense, the internet was providing me the comfort and reassurance that technology would compensate for the relentless continuum of time. This notion parallels Doane's idea of television's attempt to make a chaotic world more orderly - Internet basically acts as television's back up by "render[ing] 'natural' the logic and rhythm of the social order" (233) when television fails to do so.

Once I finally got to actually watching the show (after several minutes of necessary online test-taking...i.e."Which Desperate Housewife Are You?"), I was interrupted again by another advertisement. This time, the pop-up screen forced me to watch the advertisement, which consisted of Christina Aguilera's new music video/Target commercial. The advertisement was a continuous stream throughout the entire episode, occurring every 20 minutes or so and picking up where it left off, like some alternate sort of story line occurring simultaneously with the Desperate Housewives story line.

Diverging from the screening, I'd like to note some intriguing aspects of Caldwell's article and question his notion of "utopia." Caldwell associates utopia was a "gloss of endless diveresity promised in the new age of cable" (44), indicating the link between utopia and chaos. This relation contradicts the classic interpretation of utopia as "perfect" and "orderly." Perhaps Caldwell is implying his belief in a utopia as some sort of confined chaos - a perfect society that contains a necessary diversity in a controlled atmosphere that simultaneously propagates the spread of collective knowledge and (in terms of capitalism) produces a profit from doing so.