Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life

THERE is a queasy sensation, like the aftereffects of a heavily sweetened milkshake, that comes with reading about certain technological innovations. One of the newest is the fiber-optic cable, an invention that will transform television and is--if you were to touch, taste, or smell it--clean, antiseptic, and altogether non-sickening. But listen to what's being said.

The Wall Street Journal recently speculated on some of the channels that may, as a result of fiber-optic technology, be added to the relatively few broadcast and cable channels we already have. One of them, "the Armani Network," would allow viewers to see animated models of themselves walking around on a stage, wearing "the latest suits." This service "would know [the customers] size and could make him a custom suit out of the material he chooses, then send it to him and bill his credit card." Another channel would present interactive soap operas, allowing the viewer to ask for background information about the characters, such as: "This is Bob, he showed up on the show yesterday, and he's having an affair with Rebecca."

Are you feeling ill yet?

Others predict a more exalted future for fiber optics--notably NR contributor George Gilder, in a slim, provocative new book called Life after Television. The object of Gilder's affection consists of a hair-thin strand of highly compressed sand, along which bits of information travel as digitalized light pulses, at a speed of something like 62,500 pages per second. An amazing thing about the fiber-optic cable is that it allows transmission in two directions. "Intelligence," Gilder writes, could thus "move from the broadcast station into inexpensive home-based personal computers [PCs]. The PC would eventually be able to manipulate video signals at the user's will, zooming in and out, performing replays, storing and even editing pictures." Gilder tells us watching TV will in this way turn from a passive activity into an active one.

That in turn will stimulate creativity, as channels are created to cater to every interest, passion, and, one assumes, perversion. Meanwhile, the enormousness of the new TV-channel marketplace (an experimental system already running in Queens, New York, has five hundred channels) will ensure the kind of competition that will produce excellence in programming of a degree we've never seen. This will lead to a revolution that will "enhance individualism," "strengthen capitalism and democracy around the world," and "renew our entire culture." Or so says George Gilder.

Now when it comes to the business of technology, Gilder is manifestly a genuine prophet. He sees trends and money-making opportunities others don't, and can express them with a clarity and enthusiasm that are hard to resist.

Here is the bad news, as he compellingly tells it: While American consumers drooled over the promise of high-definition television, an unremarkable technology by comparison, the Japanese have been working away in quiet on their own fiber-optics system. The question is, will we wire America fiber-optically, or will the Japanese do it for us? The "key to U.S. competitiveness," Gilder argues, is a national "broadband integrated service digital network (ISDN) reaching into every home." Despite the efforts of forward-thinking executives at the phone companies, progress toward our own ISDN is made extremely difficult by regulations that, among other strictures, require the Baby Bells to collaborate on communication technology with foreign companies instead of AT&T. "We need a new prison protest movement: Free the Bell Seven," Gilder writes.

Which is to say, whether it means profit for U.S. business or not, fiberoptic telecomputing will come. This is a fact; but are we obliged to welcome it?

If Gilder believes that, in culture, more is better, he should consider what has happened to magazine publishing in the last forty years. In 1950, readers could choose from many fewer publications than we can today; but they could easily lay hands on such excellent magazines as the Saturday Evening Post and the old New Yorker. Today we have 24,000 to choose from, most of them minutely specialized, but hardly a single literary or generalinterest magazine worth its inflated cover price.

lf Gilder expects that life after TV, with its multitude of channels, will include such as the Armani Network and interactive soap operas, he doesn't mention them. He's not trying to hide anything from us, though. These would merely be pointless consumer diversions, fancier than but no different in spirit from cable's Home Shopping Network or MTV. The future Gilder does describe is, in some ways, even more depressing.

There is no more appalling image in this book than one on page 41. Using your two-way television, you could, Gilder says, "give a birthday party for Grandma at her nursing home in Florida, bringing her descendants from all over the country to the foot of her bed in vivid living color." The pathos of this scene, instantly arresting to this reader, somehow didn't strike George Gilder.