OFF-TOPIC barry, this is really beyond the scope of the thread, but to briefly answer your question... what people want is unidirectional, not bidirectional. more channels rather than higher quality (won't digital cable actually decrease the resolution of analog cable, in order to squeeze in more channels?). online shopping galore. proprietary, plug-n-play technology. etc, etc. this is all anathema to what the internet elites (probably most of the participants on si) want people to want.
not only is 95% of web traffic directed at something like 1% of sites (i forget the exact stats), but think of the ratio of downloaded data to uploaded data in connections to those sites. does this sound more like cable tv, or more like the old internet some of us knew & loved?
case in point. webtv: the damn thing looks like a cable box and doesn't even come with a keyboard! a good indication of how participatory people want their experience to be. indeed, the big selling point for web tv seems not to be interactivity, but more content, like a new cable box that gives you twice as many channels.
etc, etc. i can go on. i wrote a big angry letter about this stuff to the ny times last summer -- the first time i ever had enough of a visceral reaction to an article to do so -- and they published it. what sparked my letter was an editorial thanking cable companies for wiring schools. and the basic point of my letter is go back and read what cable tv was supposed to be, and then what the cable companies (acting upon the wishes of the mass public) made it into. it ain't any different today with the infohighway stuff. imho, of course. |
