How television liberated me?

I know every academic may go on about how bad television is for you but for me I felt that it freed me and helped show me a different world out there! Something I don't think books ever could. I can remember when MTV 2 would show videos by groups like Sonic Youth and Violent Fems and Chemical Brothers and culture going on in cool places like New York and London and Tokyo and LA and Austin and Paris and San Francisco and Chicago... exc exc . (In my small rural michigan town everyone listened to Country and Ted Nugent! "Barf!!") I also was able to watch shows like "Queer as Folk" and the "Tales Of The City" mini series, and many other gay themed movies on cable that helped me as a gay youth growing up in a small Republican, ultra religious hick-town where gay people were viewed as vampires. Also I highly doubt I would have been able to obtain a copy of a EM Forester book at the local library.