Sitting around my apartment kitchen one afternoon 20 years ago, a friend and I invented the Internet.
Well, I guess it was already there in some form, for all those eggheads and geeks to send each other messages and to share text-heavy files, but my pal Doug and I elaborated a scheme in which the television and computer would merge, to receive interactive information and entertainment via satellite.
Is it too late to get a patent?
I wondered recently after reading James Surowiecki's report in The New Yorker about Blackberry's woes. The handheld, wireless e-mail device was invented in 1999 by a small Canadian firm, Research in Motion, which was sued in 2001 by a Virginia company for patent infringement. The latter company—if that is not too-generous a term for it—had patented the idea of a handheld, wireless e-mail device, without going through any of the stifling and exacting bother of actually making anything.
Surowiecki goes on to bemoan the state of American patent law, which is skewed generally toward patent-holders. Roughly 95 percent of applications are granted by an overloaded staff, and patent-law judges, not surprisingly, tend to side with people who know and work their system, says Surowiecki.
I mention this not to echo Surowiecki's complaint—he makes the case well-enough without my help, certainly—but to note how imagination laps innovation. Back in 1968, Stanley Kubrick plausibly elaborated moon-mining, interplanetary travel and menacing mega-computers in his adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, but that title date, you'll note, passed without any of those developments at hand. Of the three, the Hal-like computer seems closest to the horizon, albeit without the walk-in (float-in?) processor.
That was the news, of sorts, from the Consumer Electronics Show last week, that Hal is here. Convergence has emerged, "the long-promised coming together of entertainment and computing that's finally a reality," as The New York Times put it recently. That reality is still developing, of course, and it appears to await the resolution of a key debate. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates' asserts that convergence makes the audience the producer and the counter-argument that someone needs to create and organize content for the audience.
The emergence of a shuffle-play society—just do it for me—vindicates the latter viewpoint. The hype about Howard Stern riding into the satellite-radio future highlights this. Talk radio might be the easiest listening around. If All Howard, All the Time is worth paying for, the paradigm is shifting along another fault line entirely, one that threatens the broadcast TV and movie industries. We demand easy or no choices, but when we want to make one, we expect the options to be available. Thus TiVo. Thus the DVD, and the morphing of Must See into Must Show. Devotees of 24 watch it on DVD, following a season's arc in a day's viewing. An increasing number of viewers will wait for the DVD set of high-end cable productions rather than watching when they are on, just as movie-goers used to wait for cable.
The end product, whether DVD player, desktop PC or or iPod, is likely to influence any producer's sense of narrative structure and production values, and it will be interesting to follow how this plays out. The principal outcome of the on-demand convergence world, however, is likely to be economic. We've already identified a "digital divide," and the chasm seems to be widening. It might be that as convergence sweeps the land, its tools will become broadly affordable. If not, however, we will have a society riven between those who can choose whatever they want when they want it and those who have to take what "free" broadcasting gives them.
Of course, marketers have found clever, if not diabolical, stratagems for mining into our minds. Advertisers have started digitally adding products to sitcom sets, a process known as "digital placement." As a story in the Times noted: "...[W]ith the explosion of new formats like DVD, video-on-demand and online video in the last few years, digital placement gives advertisers and producers the option of cutting multiple deals ... placing one brand of soda in a first-run movie, selling placement for another brand in that movie's DVD release and a third in the portable video player version."
And convergence is no guarantee of escaping more traditional "placement." Reuters recently reported that Wall Street analysts expect online advertising, to swell from $13.2 billion and four percent of the total market last year to $35.9 billion and 11.1 percent of ad dollars in 2010. It turns out that people who flee television commercials flock to online commercial productions and podcasts. You have to wonder, however, how soon the gloss will fade on that practice, and what schemes will replace it.
Meanwhile, the crucial question remains: How many will remain on the far side of that divide, and what will their choices be?
Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website,
www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.