By the time the transistor (which does essentially what vacuum tubes do but in less space at lower cost) found commercial applications, the top-down TV system was already entrenched and petrified, dooming viewers to docile reception of programs they were dependent on a very few networks to provide, and creating a “psychology of the masses” in which a trio of programming alternatives aimed to appeal to millions and millions of Joe B.’s. The TV signals are analog waves. Analogs are the required medium, since “With little storage or processing available at the set, the signals… would have to be directly displayable waves,” and “analog waves directly simulate sound, brightness, and color.” But analog waves can’t be saved or edited by their recipient. They’re too much like life: there in gorgeous toto one instant and then gone. What the poor TV viewer gets is only what he sees. This state of affairs has cultural consequences Gilder describes in apocalyptic detail. Even “High Definition Television” (HDTV), touted by the industry as the next big advance in entertainment, will, according to Gilder, be just the same vacuous emperor in a snazzier suit.
But for Gilder, TV, still clinging to the crowd-binding and hierarchical technologies of yesterdecade, is now doomed by the advances in microchip and fiber-optic technology of the last few years. The user-friendly microchip, which consolidates the activities of millions of transistors on one 49¢ wafer, and whose capacities will get even more attractive as controlled electron-conduction approaches the geodesic paradigm of efficiency, will allow receivers — TV sets — to do much of the image-processing that has hitherto been done “for” the viewer by the broadcaster. In another happy development, transporting images through glass fibers rather than via the EM spectrum will allow people’s TV sets to be hooked up with each other in a kind of interactive net instead of all feeding passively at the transmitting teat of a single broadcaster. And fiber-optic transmissions have the further advantage that they conduct characters of information digitally. Since, as Gilder explains, “digital signals have an advantage over analog signals in that they can be stored and manipulated without deterioration” as well as being crisp and interferenceless as quality CDs, they’ll allow the microchipped television receiver (and thus the viewer) to enjoy much of the discretion over selection, manipulation, and recombination of video images that is today restricted to the director’s booth.
For Gilder, the new piece of furniture that will free Joe Briefcase from passive dependence on his furniture will be “the telecomputer, a personal computer adapted for video processing and connected by fiber-optic threads to other telecomputers around the world.” The fibrous TC “will forever break the broadcast bottleneck” of television’s One Over Many structure of image-dissemination. Now everybody’ll get to be his own harried guy with earphones and clipboard. In the new millennium, U.S. television will finally become ideally, GOPishly democratic: egalitarian, interactive, and “profitable” without being “exploitative.”
Boy does Gilder know his “Larger Agenda” audience. You can just see saliva overflowing lower lips in boardrooms as Gilder forecasts that the consumer’s whole complicated fuzzy inconveniently transient world will become storable, manipulable, broadcastable, and viewable in the comfort of his own condo. “With artful programming of telecomputers, you could spend a day interacting on the screen with Henry Kissinger, Kim Basinger, or Billy Graham.” Rather ghastly interactions to contemplate, perhaps, but then in Gilderland each to his own:
Celebrities could produce and sell their own software. You could view the Super Bowl from any point in the stadium you choose, or soar above the basket with Michael Jordan. Visit your family on the other side of the world with moving pictures hardly distinguishable from real-life images. Give a birthday party for Grandma in her nursing home in Florida, bringing her descendents from all over the country to the foot of her bed in living color.
And not just warm 2-D images of family: any experience will be transferrable to image and marketable, manipulable, consumable. People will be able to
go comfortably sight-seeing from their living room through high-resolution screens, visiting Third-World countries without having to worry about air fares or exchange rates…, you could fly an airplane over the Alps or climb Mount Everest — all on a powerful high-resolution display.
We will, in short, be able to engineer our own dreams.
So, in sum, a conservative tech writer offers a really attractive way of looking at viewer passivity, at TV’s institutionalization of irony, narcissism, nihilism, stasis, loneliness. It’s not our fault! It’s outmoded technology’s fault! If TV-dissemination were up to date, it would be impossible for it to “institutionalize” anything through its demonic “mass-psychology.” Let’s let Joe B., the little lonely average guy, be his own manipulator of video-bits. Once all experience is finally reduced to marketable image, once the receiving user of user-friendly receivers can break from the coffle and choose freely, Americanly, from an Americanly infinite variety of moving images hardly distinguishable from real-life images, and can then choose further just how he wishes to store, enhance, edit, recombine, and present those images to himself in the privacy of his very own home and skull, then TV’s ironic, totalitarian grip on the American psychic cojones will be broken.!!!
Note that Gilder’s semiconducted vision of a free, orderly video future is way more upbeat than postmodernism’s old view of image and data. The novels of Pynchon and DeLillo revolve metaphorically off the concept of interference: the more connections, the more chaos, and the harder it is to cull any meaning from the seas of signal. Gilder would call their gloom outmoded, their metaphor infected with the deficiencies of the transistor:
In all networks of wires and switches, except for those on the microchip, complexity tends to grow exponentially as the number of interconnections rises, [but] in the silicon maze of microchip technology… efficiency, not complexity, grows as the square of the number of inter- connections to be organized.
Rather than a vacuous TV-culture drowning in cruddy images, Gilder foresees a TC-culture redeemed by a whole lot more to choose from and a whole lot more control over what you choose to… umm… see? pseudo-experience? dream?
It’s wildly unrealistic to think that expanded choices alone will resolve our televisual bind. The advent of cable upped choices from 4 or 5 to 40+ synchronie alternatives, with little apparent loosening of television’s grip on mass attitudes. It seems, rather, that Gilder sees the ’90s’ impending breakthrough as U.S. viewers’ graduation from passive reception of facsimiles of experience to active manipulation of facsimiles of experience. It’s worth questioning Gilder’s definition of televisual “passivity.” His new tech would indeed end “the passivity of mere reception.” But the passivity of Audience, the acquiescence inherent in a whole culture of and about watching, looks unaffected by TCs.
The appeal of watching television has always involved fantasy. And contemporary TV has gotten vastly better at enabling the viewer’s fantasy that he can transcend the limitations of individual human experience, that he can be inside the set, imago’d, “anyone, anywhere.” 34 Since the limitations of being one human being involve certain restrictions on the number of different experiences possible to us in a given period of time, it’s arguable that the biggest TV-tech “advances” of recent years have done little but abet this fantasy of escape from the defining limits of being human. Cable expanded our choices of evening realities; handheld gizmos let us leap instantly from one reality to another; VCRs let us commit experiences to an eidetic memory that permits re-experience at any time without loss or alteration. These advances sold briskly and upped average viewing-doses, but they sure haven’t made U.S. televisual culture any less passive or cynical.