In 1969 I wrote a report for the Markle Foundation which I called "The
Age of Television and The Television Age." It dealt with the potential
benefits of television for children and how they might be realized. A
few introductory sentences described "The Age of Television":
Nineteen hundred and fifty was a notable year: India was proclaimed an
independent republic; President Truman instructed the Atomic Energy
Commission to produce the hydrogen bomb, and also, in that year, signed
a bill creating the National Science Foundation; George Bernard Shaw
died at the age of 94; and after years of debate, CBS was given the
right to start color television broadcasts. Though these were the
headlines, the mid-mark of the twentieth century may come to be
remembered best as the dawn of the Age of Television.
Like many other new times, the Age of Television dawned suddenly, and
reached a zenith so rapidly that it is hard to remember what life before
was like. In 1947 the medium was a rarity in the United States, and only
about 14,000 families had sets. By 1950 five million American families
owned sets. From that point on, television quickly became omnipresent in
American society. Today over 95 percent of American households in all
sectors of the country, and of all income levels, own at least one
television set. Now more families own two television sets than owned one
in 1950.
This is the Age of Television, not only in the sense of wide ownership
of television sets, but much more importantly in the sense that an
entire generation of young Americans is growing up in a time when
television is available to them and widely used. Nineteen hundred and
fifty was a watershed year. Americans who were born, went to school, and
became adults before 1950 did so without television being part of their
lives. After 1950 we came to take television for granted, and began
organizing our lives in both obvious and subtle ways around the reality
of the one, or perhaps two or three, television sets in our homes.
The First Definition of Television
The television that we organized our lives around and came to take for
granted was dominated by the three networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC. Despite
the presence of PBS and independent stations, "television" was the
programming produced by and for the three major networks. It was the
nightly news, the situation comedies, the dramatic series, the daytime
soaps, and the specials. With small variations to accommodate different
time zones, most Americans could see the same program at the same time.
Most Americans began to say that they depended on television for their
news and information more than any other source. Television
personalities became familiar visitors to our living rooms and achieved
not only fame but, in many cases, stature and credibility. For example,
Walter Cronkite, the acknowledged dean of newscasters, embodied
integrity and authority in the presentation of the news.
Television was also, without doubt, the greatest advertising medium the
world has ever known. As a result of almost every American family
purchasing a television set and the dominance of the three networks,
popular programs drew huge audiences. Although the costs of programs
steadily grew and seemed astronomical, television reached so many people
that the cost of advertising per person reached was low--lower in fact
than most other advertising media. The circle seemed complete: three
dominant networks, huge audiences, effective advertising, more money for
programs, and thus the ever greater supremacy of television.
The ascendancy of television in the 1960s and 1970s gave rise to new
visions of life in the future. As we had become a television society, it
was only natural that more and more of our news, education, culture, and
literature would be created on television. There were whispers that
television literacy would become equally or, perhaps, more important
than traditional literacy. Evolving from a culture of symbols, we might
become a culture of images, in which knowledge depends on the decoding
and manipulation of visual images rather than on words and numbers. An
America enthralled by television and with little patience for history
rarely acknowledged that despite its cultural supremacy, television was
still a novelty with all the uncertainty surrounding any novelty.
The Second Definition of Television
As is so often the case, the seeds of change had already been planted.
Of course, we still have television, but it is not the television of the
1960s and l970s. Two new technologies, cable television and the VCR,
have dramatically changed the television landscape. After a slow
beginning, cable TV is now available to about 80 percent of American
homes, and two-thirds of American families subscribe. Originally simply
a means to improve broadcast reception in certain areas where reception
was poor, cable now routinely delivers 30 to 50 additional channels, and
that capacity is being dramatically increased to 150-500 channels. The
use of fiber optic transmission lines combined with compression
technology will allow most cable systems to achieve this much higher
capacity within a very few years. The existence of greater choice of
channel inevitably meant reduced dominance for the three major networks.
Previously accounting for 90 percent or more of the audience, the
networks now account for 60 percent. Increasing revenue to such cable
channels as CNN, ESPN, Discovery, and Bravo will allow them to compete
even more effectively. The erosion of network share will con-
tinue.
Along with the growth of cable, VCRs have become staples of the American
household. Approximately 80 percent of households own at least one VCR.
First thought of as a means of recording television programs while away
from home, and often used for that purpose as well as recording for
viewing at more convenient times, the VCR has led to a major industry in
the rental and sale of entertainment tapes for home viewing. No one
really knows how many hours people spend watching rented or purchased
motion pictures, but the revenue to the home video industry was more
than $12 billion in 1992. To put home video industry revenue in context,
$12 billion is approximately the same amount as earned by filmed
entertainment on television, and twice the revenue of box office motion
pictures.
Another important use of the television set, but one that is often
overlooked is playing games. Game devices as add-ons to the television
set were introduced in the 1970s, and the Atari company was
spectacularly successful for a short time. After an initial burst of
popularity home video games seemed to be a passing fad, but two Japanese
companies, Nintendo and Sega, have had enormous success with their game
devices offering ever more sophisticated visual and auditory effects.
The hardware game players produced by Nintendo, Sega, and now 3DO are
actually specialized computers. It is estimated that about 40 percent
of American households own a home video game device. Sales of game
system software are growing rapidly and surprisingly are approaching
revenues from box office motion pictures. Because of the popularity of
interactive video games with the young, and not so young, more people
than ever before are coming to regard the television set as a
multipurpose display device and not necessarily as an outlet for
broadcast programming. As video game devices are predominately in the
homes of families with children, an entire generation is growing up with
a very different experience of television than those of us who were
introduced to it in the 1950s and 1960s. Clearly, our idea of what
television is has already changed. Television is no longer simply the
programs produced by the networks; it has become whatever uses we make
of the television set.
The Evolution of the Television Set
The evolution of the television set from a simple receiver for broadcast
television to a multipurpose display device is being pushed by several
trends and developments. Cable television and the VCR were the first of
these developments. The advent of cable required a slight modification
to the television set to accommodate a cable connection. Then, as the
number of cable channels increased, the tuner needed to be improved, but
the source of the signal was still a broadcast studio or the studio of a
cable operator. The VCR put control of the source of the signal within
the home. The remote control was a technological innovation that
accompanied popular acceptance of cable TV and the VCR. Perhaps first
thought of as a mere physical convenience to eliminate the necessity of
getting up to change channels, the remote control actually gave
television viewers increased freedom--freedom to channel hop and to mute
commercials. The next major development that is being planned is the
introduction of high-definition television. The initial vision is that
high-definition television will be to television as high-fidelity sound
was to the broadcasting industry and the music lover. This analogy is
only partially true at best. It is not at all clear that the television
viewer values greater clarity and better color in the way that the music
lover values higher-fidelity sound. In addition, the tradition of record
purchases was already strongly established before the introduction of
LPs, stereo sound, and CDs. In the television industry the tradition of
videocassette rental is much better established than that of purchase.
Regardless of the economic implications of high-definition television,
it will definitely have the effect of improving the resolution of
whatever appears on the screen.
The spreading digital revolution also will almost certainly encompass
the television set in the next decade. While digital television sets are
already available, they are expensive and there is no programming for
them. We also have an enormous national investment in current television
sets. For this reason, the transition to digital television will be
slow, but it is likely because digital television will reap many of the
same advantages found in digital computing and recording. Cable and the
VCR began to give the user of the television set greater control;
digital television has the potential to increase that control greatly.
One of the major advantages of digitally encoded information is that it
can be manipulated and transformed far more easily than information that
is analogically encoded. With digital television the viewer will not
necessarily be a "viewer" any longer. The user of the set will be able
to interact with the images that appear on the screen in ways that we
can hardly imagine. At the simplest level, the user easily will be able
to edit what is being seen and, for example, eliminate advertisements--
making real one of the darkest fears of broadcasters.
Is It a TV Set or a Computer?
While developments within the television industry have made the TV set
begin to resemble a computer, developments within computing have made
the computer screen resemble a television set. For many years modern
computing has been based on a digital standard. In this respect
computing long ago arrived at a place that television is only beginning
to explore. Similarly, computing is inherently interactive. Apart from a
few commercial experiments, television remains a one-way broadcast
medium. On the other hand, the color set is standard in television, but
the color monitor is probably still the exception rather than the rule
in the installed base of computers. Motion and sound, the very essence
of television, are increasingly possible additions to computers, but
they are rare. Because computer graphics demand high resolution,
computer screens have steadily incorporated higher degrees of clarity;
high-definition television will bring that clarity to the television
set.
The vision of "multimedia" is speeding all of these developments.
"Multimedia" is the integrated use and display of visual images, motion,
sound, data, graphics, and text, with the user being able to interact
creatively with the display. So far multimedia is in a very early stage
because computers have only recently had sufficient memory and speed to
make experimentation in multimedia possible. These early experiments,
like early experimentation with any new technology, have sought to
demonstrate capability. Demonstration records of early stereo amazed
people with the ability to shift the sound image from side to side and
to the center of the audio space. Violins could be heard clearly on the
left and horns on the right. As it has matured, stereo has come to be
used in the service of the music rather than to demonstrate the
technology.
We can expect the same sort of transition in multimedia. It will proceed
from a "gee whiz" stage to a functional means of achieving the goals of
designers, programmers, producers, and authors. It is even too early to
tell what we will come to call the creator of multimedia. Although we
are at the beginning, we do know that technology has made multimedia
possible. The vision of an author combining any visual and auditory
forms to achieve artistic, educational and entertainment objectives, and
a user directing the resulting display, is so powerful that I believe we
are entering the multimedia era.
Confirmation that we are entering the multimedia era comes from two
sources. Almost daily we hear corporate announcements and alliances that
begin to position computer manufacturers, entertainment companies,
telephone companies, consumer electronic companies, and many others to
take advantage of multimedia opportunities. IBM joins with Apple to form
Kaleida. Apple joins with America Online to begin to network its new
personal digital assistant, the Newton. The 3DO Company is a joint
venture of Matsushita, AT&T, Time-Warner, and Electronic Arts. Few, if
any, companies believe they have the capability necessary to exploit
this new world, and many new partnerships are being formed. The second
confirmation of the new era comes from the agreement of the computing
and television industries on a joint standard for future television
sets. The joint standard will accommodate both high-definition
television and the use of the television set as a computer monitor. This
very dramatic coming together of the computing and television industries
confuses us about what to call the display device that will be in our
homes. Is it a computer or a television set? The answer is that it will
be neither. It will be a multimedia monitor.
Criticisms of Television and Computing
In the great years of network television there were critics, but their
voices were drowned out by rating numbers and financial success. One of
the criticisms leveled against television was that it offered little
choice and enslaved viewers to a fixed schedule not of their own
choosing. The success of cable television and the rental tape industry
has proven that there was merit in those criticisms. The technologies of
cable and VCR did not address other criticisms. Because television, and
radio before it, were broadcast technologies, they were inherently
centralized. Messages originated in the networks or stations and were
sent to viewers. There was no easy way for the viewer to interact with
the message source or other viewers. The model set by broadcasting
seemed to confirm descriptions of the mass society that divided it into
producers (in this case the broadcasters) and consumers (the viewers).
In addition, although television could be an effective teacher, it did
not lend itself easily to discussion, deliberation, or conversation. As
a visual medium television had a notoriously difficult time presenting
complex ideas.
The triumph of the television image devalued written and spoken
language. In television broadcasts the spoken word became secondary to
the visual image; television advertising is the extreme example. The
written word had almost no place in the world of television, mostly
because television was a world of images, but also because the
television screen was a poor medium for print. Designed to present
moving images, the television screen had relatively low resolution, and
as a result, it offered little competition to print on the pages of
books, magazines, and newspapers.
The criticisms of computing were different. Computing was forbidding and
complex as it depended on the mastery of computer codes, computer
languages, and a whole set of conventions that were foreign to most
people. Computing was also elitist as the cost of really useful
computers together with a special monitor and possibly a printer was
usually several thousand dollars. Then, too, computers lacked color,
sound, and the ability to present full screen video. The convergence of
television and computing combined with the rapidly lowering costs and
increased ease of use of computers will address many of these
criticisms.
Unexpected Consequences
The new world of multimedia will usher in many social, technological,
and cultural changes. Some of these changes are likely to be surprising,
and perhaps the first surprise will be the reemergence of print. The
electronic domain where print--letters, numbers, and symbols--has held
sway is the world of computers. While within the television industry,
cable and the VCR have been powerful forces of change, the impact of the
computer industry is only now beginning to be felt. Traditionally,
computers have been part of the business world, and television was for
home entertainment. In part this separation was because computers were
far more expensive than television sets, and in part because the main
uses of computers in the business environment were for word processing
and data analysis using spreadsheets.
The convergence of computing and television, concretized in a single
standard for television sets that will accommodate both the needs of the
computing industry and high-definition television, means that the
electronic multipurpose display device of the future will be far more
congenial to print than the television set of the past. At this most
basic level it will be possible to produce print on the electronic
screen that is crisp, clear, and easy to read. Simply because the
display of attractive electronically produced print will be possible
does not necessarily mean that it will be an important feature of the
electronic environment. The emerging goals of multimedia creators, the
informational advantages of print, economic necessity, and the universal
desire of people to communicate with each other will insure the place of
print in our electronic future.
The palette of the creator of multimedia is made up of images, motion
video, sound, data, print, and the choices that users can make as they
interact with the multimedia creation. The goals of the multimedia
creator may be education, entertainment, artistic expression, or simply
information, but multimedia elements will be chosen to achieve those
goals. In many cases print will be an important ingredient. A play by
Shakespeare was intended for the stage, but it was also a written
document. A full expression of Shakespearean intent is likely to require
both the staged play and the written document. Devotees of soap operas
often want to catch up on episodes that they have missed. Commercial
services are available to provide synopses. How much more convenient it
would be for the soap opera fan to simply call up on the screen a brief
summary when it is needed. Annotations and footnotes may not be needed
when listening to a symphony or watching a ballgame, but they can
greatly aid the serious music student or the baseball fan who follows
team statistics. Before multimedia the Shakespearean play was on
television and the book was in the library; the soap opera on television
and the synopsis of past episodes available over the telephone; the
symphony was on the stereo, the score printed, and notations in a book.
In the world of multimedia all of these and more will be available on
the electronic screen to be called up when the producer or user deems it
necessary.
Quite simply, written language--print--is often the best way to convey
information. A written document can be skimmed or studied closely, and
reading something almost always takes less time than hearing it or
seeing the idea enacted in images. Complex or abstract ideas are
notoriously difficult to compress within the framework and time of a
television program. A thought that might be well expressed on a single
printed page and easily read in five minutes might well prove to be
difficult or impossible to convey in an hour of conventional television.
In the world of multimedia the ability to intermingle images and print
opens up many new production possibilities, using each medium when it is
most advantageous.
Publishing books in electronic form meant to be "read" on a computer
screen is a very recent business. Why, you may ask, would anyone want to
read a book on a computer screen when it is available in normal printed
form? The Voyager Company's Expanded Book project shows some of the
advantages of books when they are published electronically. It is easy
to access the occurrence of any word instantly. Have you forgotten an
early but crucial conversation in a mystery? Rather than leafing through
the pages, simply type in a word or the name of a character and that
passage will appear on the screen. Do you like to make your own notes or
underline significant passages? When you do this with a library book you
deface it seriously, and you render it less attractive to the next
reader. On a computer screen you can make whatever notes you wish and
highlight to your heart's content, and then save those annotations for
yourself or wipe the slate clean for the next reader. Would you like to
follow an idea, theme, or character through the book? The computer makes
it easy. Finally, the book that weighs a pound and takes up two or three
inches of shelf space is fully available on a small floppy disc. This
brings us to what may be the eventual driving force that makes print
blossom on the electronic screen: economics.
It is already true that the cost of a book in electronic form is about
the same as one printed on paper. Yes, you must have a computer to read
that electronic book, but it is likely that in a very short time the
convergence of television and computing in the world of multimedia will
mean that practically everyone will have a multimedia display device.
Not only that, but the smallest multimedia devices are already about the
size of a paperback book. The costs of computing and electronic delivery
are going down. Soon, if the time is not already here, it will be
cheaper to deliver print electronically than on paper. When the means of
distribution and display are widespread, economic forces will inevitably
lead to a blossoming of print on the electronic screen.
One final, but very important, force that will lead to the reemergence
of print in the multimedia world is the universal need and desire of
people to communicate with each other. The single greatest use of
computer networks, such as the huge Internet, is electronic messaging
(e-mail) and its close relation, the computer bulletin board. This same
penchant for using e-mail is also found on the commercial networks, such
as Prodigy, America Online, and CompuServe. The Imagination Network
(formerly the Sierra Network) is devoted to playing interactive games,
but most of the traffic on the network is people sending messages to
each other both about the games and an endless variety of personally
interesting topics. This phenomenon is not new. Almost from the
beginning of computer networks users found sending messages over the
network easy, convenient, and fulfilling in a way that may not be
matched by the telephone.
The advantages of e-mail are several. The originator of a message can
take as much time, or as little, in composition as seems desirable, but
once the message is sent, delivery is almost instantaneous. An e-mail
message can be sent to one person or an entire mailing list with the
same ease. Receiving e-mail, you can study those messages you wish and
reply at your convenience. The ease and convenience of e-mail introduces
questions about being overloaded with messages, but I expect that
computer applications are just around the corner that will sort your
mail according to your priorities and automatically discard third-class
mail if you wish. There are also issues of privacy that will need to be
addressed. Despite these issues the speed, convenience, and low cost of
e-mail are certain to make it an important part of the electronic
future.
The theme of this essay is that one important consequence of the
developing world of multimedia will be the reemergence of written
language, print, as an important part of the electronic environment.
Television and computing are coming together in a digital world of high
bandwidth and massive computing power. Multipurpose electronic display
devices will mingle motion video, sound, data, graphics, and print. The
electronic screens of the future will have much greater resolution than
television screens and be able to display print that is crisp and clear.
Written language is an essential element of culture, an economical and
rich way to convey meaning, relatively cheap to produce, and convenient
to use. These age-old merits will have newfound value in the world of
multimedia.
Prepared for the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation annual report.
Lloyd N. Morrisett is president of the John and Mary R. Markle
Foundation