DE-MASSIFYINQ THE MEDIA
In Columbus, Ohio, a week earlier, I had visited Warner Cable Corporation’s Qube system. Qube provides the subscriber with thirty TV channels (as against four regular broadcast stations) and presents specialized shows for everyone from preschoolers to doctors, lawyers, or the “adults only” audience. Qube is the most well-developed, commercially effective two-way cable system in the world. Providing each subscriber with what looks like a hand-held calculator, it permits him or her to communicate with the station by push button. A viewer using the so-called “hot buttons” can communicate with the Qube studio and its computer. Time, in describing the system, waxes positively rhapsodic, noting that the subscriber can “voice his opinions in local political debates, conduct garage sales and bid for objets d’art in a charity auction… By pressing a button, Joe or Jane Columbuscan quiz a politician, or turn electronic thumbs down or up on a local amateur talent program.” Consumers can “comparison-shop the local supermarkets” or book a table at an Oriental restaurant.
Cable, however. is not the only worry facing the networks, Video games, have become a “hot item” in the stores. Millions of Americans have discovered a passion for gadgets that convert a TV screen into a Ping-Pong table, hockey rink, or tennis court. This development may seem trivial or irrelevant to orthodox political or social analysts. Yet it represents a wave of social learning, a premonitory training, as it were, for life in the electronic environment of tomorrow. Not only do video games further de-massify the audience and cut into the numbers who are watching the programs broadcast at any given moment, but through such seemingly innocent devices millions of people are learning to play with the television set, to talk back to it, and to interact with it. In the process they are changing from passive receivers to message senders as well. They are manipulating the set rather than merely letting the set manipulate them.
Information services, fed through the TV screen, are now already available in Britain where a viewer with an adapter unit can push a button and select which of a dozen or so different data services he or she wants—news, weather, financial, sports, and so forth. This data then moves across the TV screen as though on ticker tape. Before long users will no doubt be able to plug a hard-copier into the TV to capture on paper any images they wish to retain. Once again there is wide choice where little existed before.
Video cassette players and recorders are spreading rapidly as well. Marketers expect to see a million units in use in the United States by 1981. These not only allow viewers to tape Monday’s football match for replay on, say, Saturday (thus demolishing the synchronization of imagery that the networks promote), but lay the basis for the sale of films and sports events on tape. (The Arabs are not asleep at the proverbial switch: the movie The Messenger, about the life of Muhammad, is available in boxed cassettes with gilt Arabic lettering on the outside.) Video recorders and players also make possible the sale of highly specialized cartridges containing, for example, medical instructional material for hospital staff, or tapes that show consumers how to assemble knockdown furniture or rewire a toaster. More fundamentally, video record-ers make it possible for anv consumer to become, in addition, a producer of his or her, own imagery. Once again the audience is de-massified.
Domestic satellites, finally, make it possible for individual television stations to form temporary mini-networks for specialized programming by bouncing signals from anywhere to anywhere else at minimal cost, thus end-running the existing networks. By the end of 1980 cable-TV operators will have one thousand earth stations in place to pick up satellite signals. “At that point,” says Television/Radio Age, “a program distributor need only buy time on a satellite, presto, he has a nationwide cable TV network … he can selectively feed any group of systems he chooses.” The satellite, declares William J. Donnelly, vice- president for electronic media at the giant Young & Rubicam advertising agency, “means smaller audiences and a greater multiplicity of nationally distributed programs.”
All these different developments have one thing in com-mon; theyslice the mass tfelevision public into segments, and each slice not only increases, our cultural diversity. it cuts deeply into the power of the networks that have until now so-completely dominated our imagery.John O’Connor, the perceptive critic of The New York Times, sums it up simply. “One thing is certain,” he writes. “Commercial television will no longer be able to dictate either what is watched or when it is watched.”
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