Add to the Waring Blender the following observations from George Gilder, who is of course biased.Life After Television
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"From the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington to a conference of NewsCorp on Heyman Island in Australia, they laughed when I waved my arms and recited the theme of a chapter of my 1989 book Microcosm, predicting "The Death of Television." They yawned when I parlayed it into a book the next year called Life After Television. Those were the days when the broadcasters ruled the air and imagined that the fumes of their programming and advertising smelled like roses along the road to the future rather than the fragrant residue of horses and buggies.
"Television, so I said, was a top-down, lowest-common-denominator broadcast system attempting to extend a paradigm of dumb-terminals or boob tubes into a world of ever-smarter computers. It would die. They took me aside and confided in a whisper that "of course it was a boob tube-because the people are boobs." The broadcast execs knew it-"from market surveys."
"I continued year after year to make my case. Advances in digital processing power-the already familiar Moore's law-would converge with a newer, less heralded, but even more heroic expansion of fiber optic networks to yield a "worldwide web of glass and light" with smart terminals at the edge. With vast gains in the viewer's control over both timing and content, the longstanding top-down, master-slave, couch-potato culture would give way to a world of pullulating variety, choice, and intelligent interactivity.
"As I have been saying for more than a decade, this vision is coming true, "any day now." In 2002, at last, you can watch it unfold. Driven by chips and optics, the Internet has already displaced television as our chief information medium. Now yet another technology-one that I utterly failed to foresee in the 1980s-is spurring the disruption of television as an entertainment medium. With the slower-than-expected roll-out of last-mile broadband connections, hard-disk data is emerging as the real TV killer. With the cost per megabyte of storage dropping a thousandfold since the mid-1990s-from a dollar a megabyte to a dollar a gigabyte-low-cost hard- drives now enable consumer-class devices that can store, shift, and de- louse weeks-worth of video.
"The huge bandwidth advantages of cable and satellite have been slowly transforming broadcast television for three decades. But while they greatly expanded choices, they did not address even more important issues: flexibility and time. "
It would be a fine thing indeed to see technology bring Jeffersonian visions closer to fruition. I am not holding my breath (having learned it is counterproductive) but it is a good vision, I'd say, and a reasonable hope. And the Jeffersonian vision of an informed populace driving more rational policy is the only path away from anarchy that I can see working longterm.A