Television is a corrupt family member with charisma ...

Power windows is an interesting essay about the alleged maginalization of TV in the age of the net ... and why there are few, if any, signs that the P C will replace America's altars. Author Disenchanted argues it is more likely that TVs will become portals to the web than disappear.

[snip]
While the PC's role in the home has changed frequently through its different stages, from accounting toy to word processor, desktop publisher, communicator, and hi-fi component, it won't ever have the same emotive power as the television and therefore never command the same room presense. The relationship between a PC and its user is more like the relationship between a newspaper and its reader: one-on-one, impersonal, focused, and sensitive to interruption. The TV, on the other hand, entertains a whole family, has warmth, and can slip into the background to become a subliminal presense.

Remember we said TV was the Great Integrator, having already combined the best of the movies, radio, newspaper and magazine reporting, television has already begun to integrate the Internet into its own, pre-ARPA web. Being a form of passive but hypnotic entertainment, television channels can probably threaten established Internet portals (although not search engines) for the role of introducing new web sites to people who want to surf the Internet. In fact, the hardware to pull off that kind of PC-to-TV connection costs less than a dollar: it's just a patch cable that plugs into your PC's audio jack, plus a piece of software that runs in the background listening for cues hidden steganographically in the TV show's soundtrack. That's a hell of a lot cheaper than trying to put a tuner in a PC and buying a monitor big enough to enjoy Who Wants to be a Millionaire. To television, all the world's a stage, and the biggest web sites are merely players ...
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Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 06/30/02 at 09:14 AM
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