Scott Turner

IMS 390
11/06/08

George Gilder’s Life after television response

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

long-term predictions may still come true. In this response I will examine his

predictions and thesis, evaluate how they are true today, and ask 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

these new policies and initiatives would be any different—how they could be put

into place and not 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?