Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/101592/10159924.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 6KB | 119 lines

                                                                                SPECIAL ISSUE: MILLENNIUM -- BEYOND THE YEAR 2000 

THE CENTURY AHEAD, Page 70

Beyond Your Wildest Dreams


TV will dazzle us with choices, but will we be happy in our
cocoons?

BY RICHARD ZOGLIN - With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York


    "Here I am an educated person and a writer and I watch
every channel, all 75 of them, simultaneously."

    -- KURT VONNEGUT


    If it frightens you to think of how much TV has affected
our cultural habits in just a few decades, then get ready for
another zap to your system. In the future, what we know as TV
will have been transmogrified from a box in the corner into a
ubiquitous, wall-to-wall bath of infotainment. And the array of
program choices, already so bewildering, will multiply almost to
infinity. But that is the predictable part. The most tantalizing
and scary prospect is what this electronic deluge will do to us.
Will we become zombie consumers of Lethal Weapon 17, or
connoisseurs of Greek drama on channel 894? Will our voracious
image consumption erode our ability to read and speak, or will
TV teach us new languages? Will we be happy in our comfy video
cocoons, or yearn to escape from that cell and get our shoes
muddy at an outdoor concert?

    Two coming developments will take the video revolution to a
new realm. Fiber-optic cable will bring hundreds, even
thousands, of channels into the home. And interactive computer
technology will give formerly passive viewers almost total
control over what they see, when they see it and what they do
with it. People will be able to call up on their screen
virtually everything the culture produces, from the latest
Hollywood movie to lessons in chess, from an old episode of The
Twilight Zone to this morning's newspaper, custom-edited for
individual readers.

    The array of choices will be so rich that TV may finally
break out of the current malaise described by Bruce Springsteen
in 57 Channels (And Nothing On). In his book Life After
Television, George Gilder predicts that the merging of TV and
computers will bring the demise of network mediocrity. "Big
events -- the Super Bowl or the election debates or the most
compelling mass programs -- will still command their
audiences," he writes. "But all the media junk food and filler
will tend to disappear. People will order what they want rather
than settling for what is there."

    Society will pay a price for that. As the mass audience
disperses, there will be fewer cultural reference points, less
common ground. "We have nothing to share now," laments
Vonnegut. "There are thousands of things that a person sitting
at home can see that nobody else is seeing. We have become
lonelier because we no longer have a few central works of art
to discuss."

    Lonelier and less literate. Books will almost certainly
become a more elitist and rarefied art form. The common
currency of pop culture and public discourse will be the
quick-cut, in-your-face style of TV sitcoms and music videos.
"The visual image will be familiar, more communicative to
people. But at the same time, there will be a general
humiliation of language," says Neil Postman, chairman of New
York University's communications department. Our connection with
the real world may grow ever more tenuous as images increasingly
supplant words and symbolic gestures overwhelm rational
argument. The portent is ominous: How can an electorate
conditioned by MTV ever have the patience to solve the budget
deficit?

    The couch potatoes of the future, whose every entertainment
wish will be granted at the touch of a button, may have trouble
interacting with one another in the real world. One hypothesis:
people will become more self-centered, less attuned to their
neighbors and society. Bridging the gap between cultures and
races could become more difficult. Civility will suffer too.
"Because most public events and entertainment will be
experienced privately, people will lose a sense of how to behave
in public," says Postman. "Even on the screen in movie theaters,
they already have to tell people not to talk."

    Yet the reassuring aspect of culture is that every stifling
trend seems to produce a refreshing, subversive countertrend.
At least a few people will grow tired of living like pampered
moles and will want to go out to see a play or a concert. "If
you spend the day watching your computer, you're not going to
watch your television at night," contends Philip Glass, the
avant-garde composer. "You'd rather go to the park and watch
someone dancing." Live drama, predicts critic and iconoclastic
director Robert Brustein, "will become what Jean Genet called
`the theater of the catacombs.' It will find small enclaves with
the remainder of the faithful, like Christianity in the early
days."

    What will transform the content of culture most of all is
the artistic world's great imponderable: individual genius. A
prognosticator in the year 1500 would have had no way of
knowing that Shakespeare was just around the corner. A music
seer in 1950 could not have guessed that Elvis Presley was
warming up offstage. The next artistic revolutionary may already
be waiting in the wings, ready to revitalize a tired art form
or set the cultural world on a new course. And when the Next Big
Thing hits, one question will hang most urgently in the air:
What channel is it on?