The edition I got of George Gilder’s Life After Television was the first; printed in 1990, nearly two decades ago. As you can imagine, a lot has changed since then. But for me that was the best part of reading the book (even though I would have liked to read the extra chapter, prologue and afterword to see what he had to say more recently) because it is interesting to see where he makes accurate predictions and at the same time not so much, but to all the while wonder if some of those other predictions may still come true. In this response I will examine his predictions and thesis, evaluate how they are true today, and asking about what we can expect in the future.
The basic premise of Life After Television is that the age of television, the mode of the master-slave, top-down model of creating and disseminating media that appeals to the lowest common denominator is dying and being replaced by a system that fosters creativity and involvement in democracy by creating a level playing field for everyone. I think that we can see in the past twenty years that this prediction has definitely come true, but it hasn’t really gone the way he thought it would or should.
In the introduction, he insists that “New governmental policies are imperative. The U.S. will have to adopt a genuinely new strategy in the technology race, moving entirely beyond television into a realm of new technology.” My only problem with this is that on the previous page he says that the government is in a “passionate siege of self-abuse,” with experts advocating new government bureaucracies and business consortia. I simply fail to understand how he thinks new policies and initiatives be put into place that won’t simply conform to maintaining the status-quo and become puppets of the lobbyists of the current telecommunications industry. They want television to remain very much at the forefront of broadcasting information and entertainment and will do anything to keep it so.
One of my biggest problems with the cable TV industry is that I can hop onto my computer, download the first season of Mad Men and watch them all straight through with the use of torrents or save them to my hard drive and watch them whenever I want with no commercial interruption. Considering that there has been so much controversy over the legality of such downloads, take for example Hulu.com, where users watch streaming television with minimal interrupted ads. In contrast, when I want to watch cable, I have a DVR to record the shows when I can’t sit in front of the television but am otherwise restrained to watching shows to whenever the television company decides I should. All on top of this, the remote control and the interface used to navigate through the cable box are prehistoric when compared to some of the browsers and capabilities a user has with a keyboard and mouse. To think that we used to laugh at pc-tv and internet TV. Now, this option is quite desirable!
The point here is that Gilder is absolutely right that telecomputers will fundamentally alter the consumption and production of media. Websites such as YouTube lets users upload videos they’ve created to share with whatever audience they want, with some creators raking in advertising revenue. Similarly, MySpace and iTunes let musicians upload their music directly to the site and as the many distinctly different audiences consume their media, they receive advertising returns. This is the type of individualism that has come that Gilder describes at the end of the second chapter, where he says “it will bring an eruption of culture unprecedented in human history.” But as he goes on to make the case that movies will only cost a quarter now, he completely failed to predict theYouTube phenomenon and the impact it would have.
But like I argued earlier, the problem is that government, under the pressure of media organizations like Time Warner and Verizon, seeks to very much control our telecommunications habits (whether it’s charging extra for more bandwidth or regulating the type and size of packets sent across ‘their’ cables), which is why the television industry is so behind technologically compared to the internet even though the latter’s promises are much greater. The good part is that we’re making inroads when it comes to issues like net neutrality (although disappointingly Obama supported the recent FISA legislation) and copyright licenses when it comes to creativity on the web through Creative Commons licensing. But YouTube and MySpace Music can’t save our entire culture and restimulate our capitalist competitiveness and put us on the forefront of the technology race like Gilder wants to argue. I agree with him when he says at the end of chapter 5 (the end of my book) that “a campaign to promote fiber optics would be simple and practical. It would be a sure winner. [It] could revitalize the American information economy and regain their central role in telecommunications.” The only problem is that nearly 20 years later nobody in the federal government seems to know squat about fiber optics. Instead it took a Google to assume the lead in laying the groundwork of a national fiber optic network.
A few quick more points to make before I call this response quits: Gilder’s predictions—and how they have come true—are very much the solution to the all-powerful, conglomerated type of media that Walter Benjamin tried to warn us about. And as this affects The Culture Industry, the individualism encouraged by the proliferation of culture Gilder predicted will likely enhance the prevalence of the Culture Industry, although it won’t be controlled by a monopolized few but instead many cultural icons competing for consumers (a good thing for the economy). And finally, during Gilder’s description of the creation of the microchip at the beginning of chapter two, I was very much reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s quote saying that “electronic circuitry is the extension of the central nervous system.” The question here is whether in a world so connected by the internet does that circuitry remain an extension of us or are we becoming an extension of it?
