CHANNEL SURFING

If there's one reason the World Wide Web hasn't exploded as fast as industry insiders once predicted, it's that many ordinary folks are intimidated by the high-tech, user-unfriendly PCs that have heretofore been necessary to jack into cyberspace. That could change, though, with the introduction of the much-lauded (by consumer electronics companies) and much-derided (by traditional PC powerhouses) ''Internet set-top box,'' a cheap, compact piece of hardware that enables the average technophobe to access the Web via his or her TV set. To see about this technology for myself, I spent some time using one doohickey, Philips Magnavox's WEBTV ($329); Sony has a similar model out for $330. A day-by-day account:

-- Thursday morning. My WebTV arrives. Smaller and sleeker than a VCR, it comes with a funky remote control and a wireless keyboard (an optional, but indispensable, accessory that costs an additional $69). Installation is a cinch: I plug the box's audio and video cables into my TV and attach a phone line to the back of the unit. As soon as I switch it on, the box dials up the WebTV home page, which unfolds with glorious crispness on my 27-inch TV. Then it's simply a matter of registering with the WebTV Network, which costs $20 per month and entitles me to five separate E-mail accounts.

-- Thursday afternoon. The WebTV browser, I quickly learn, is based on a different principle than that of, say, Netscape. To navigate, I press arrow buttons on the remote or on the wireless keyboard, a labor-intensive experience that's considerably clunkier than using a mouse. I notice, also, that the WebTV home page, though comprehensive (including links to hundreds of entertainment-related sites), may be a bit limiting to those unaware of the enormous breadth of the Internet. Newbies might linger there for weeks before realizing that by pressing the appropriate keyboard buttons, they can bypass the page entirely and jump into untrammeled cyberspace. Oh, yeah -- since for now the Internet is essentially a silent medium, WebTV tries to liven things up by broadcasting a steady stream of elevator music. I turn it off in about seven minutes.

-- Friday evening. To prepare for tonight's broadcast of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, I fire up WebTV and visit some fan pages devoted to star Melissa Joan Hart. I'm impressed by how clearly and quickly the images of Hart scroll onto my TV screen; then it occurs to me that because WebTV doesn't include a hard drive, I can't save any of them (though sites can be bookmarked). Another bad sign: When I attempt to download a video clip of the show from the official ABC site, a routine enough transaction on the PC, a message informs me that ''the item chosen contains a kind of information that WebTV can't use.'' The silence is becoming deafening; it seems unnatural to be using my TV without any auditory content. I reactivate the elevator music. Three minutes later, I turn it off again.

-- Saturday morning. I'm in the mood to go out and see a flick, so I browse through the movie links on the WebTV home page to see what's out there. Big problem: Not only am I unable to download any video clips from these studio-sponsored sites, but there's no way to access Shockwave, which adds much-needed interactive tomfoolery -- like the hostage-negotiation game on the Metro website -- to the silent inertia of the Web. (A WebTV spokesman says the unit's limited memory can't handle such megabyte-intensive applications.) Scream's site doesn't, and The People vs. Larry Flynt is completely impenetrable -- the site is designed to be navigated with a mouse. I'm reminded of what a fellow critic once wrote about Philips' CD-i game player: Using it was like flipping through an encyclopedia whose pages were all stuck together.

-- Sunday afternoon. Utilizing the picture-in-picture feature of my TV set, I watch the first quarter of the Panthers-Packers play-off game and at the same time access the Fox Sports website. This is, I think, WebTV's most promising application, but the demand simply doesn't exist yet for Fox to provide real-time ancillary content on the Internet; I learn just as much by watching the pre-game show, listening to John Madden's fevered commentary, and studying the stats that routinely pop up, all on the live broadcast.

-- Monday morning. I pack up the WebTV and ship it back whence it came. If you've never owned a computer, and you're looking for a cheap way to get onto the Net, I grade it as a solid B. But in its current form, for anyone who's ever spent a lost weekend staring into a PC screen, it's a C-.