Why PC and Television Will Never Meet nytimes.com
Here's an article on "convergence" by an old friend. It articulates many of my personal doubts on the subject.
But is this really what we want? Our posture -- our whole physical layout -- screams otherwise. We sit 18 to 24 inches from a computer screen, a distance suitable for reading, but four to six feet from the television, a distance suitable for placid entertainment. "TV is for laying back," Koomen admits, "and the computer is more for leaning forward."
At the computer terminal, we are pretty much alone. At the television, we can watch in groups; a person can get in trouble by being too interactive with the remote control.
Television is passive; computing is active.
Television was the ultimate cool medium for Marshall McLuhan; he didn't try Web browsing, but he would have noticed that it is hot.
And no matter how the technology advances, it's hard to imagine being happy reading paragraphs of text from across the room or watching wide-screen movies in a tiny Microsoft window.
"The computer industry is very desirous of you buying a new monitor every couple of years," says Gil Schwartz, senior vice president of communications at CBS. "Conversely the television industry reaches you over a monitor that you may have had since you were a kid. That is not Bill Gates's vision. TV is interested in maintaining 100-percent penetration. Convergence tends to battle that."
Like all the networks, CBS is determinedly expanding its Internet presence. But Schwartz believes that the online and broadcast worlds will remain complementary -- supporting and feeding off each other, but not melting into each other.
We do have different modes of existence, depending on mood and time of day. Our leaning forward and clicking has made the Internet what it is. We fight our way through the underbrush, and we become information providers ourselves. And then we park ourselves down, lie back and let mass-media entertainment wash over us, on a box that never suffers a General Protection Fault.
"Any sort of model that replaces television with a complicated interactive unit that you have to get to know in a sophisticated way," Schwartz says, "well, I'm wondering."
Me too. And to quote someone else who at least used to wonder:
The Herring: Are we going to be running Windows on our TV sets?
Gates: No. The user interface on your TV will have to be very simple to use. I don't know exactly what it's going to look like, but I can guarantee you that it is not going to look like a computer. It won't be Windows on your television. It will take a new genre of software. This will not be a canned package, either. The technology and intelligence in the operating system will learn what you like and present options to you that take into consideration your preferences. (from redherring.com
But now, I guess, the proper interface involves the DNA retrovirus.
Cheers, Dan. |
