Media Wars

Every Brit knows that television was invented by John Logie Baird. Ask an American who invented it, however, and you will be told that it was either Vladimir Kosma Zworykin or Philo Taylor Farnsworth. A bit of research will reveal that the answer is too involved and complicated to give credit to one person. Plenty of people were trying to invent the darn thing in the twenties and thirties and these are merely the three guys who managed to produce something that worked. Vaguely.

What the Brits can claim without dispute, however, is the world's first public high-definition/electronic television service. This was broadcast from Crystal Palace in London from 1936. Two factors prevented it from being the real birth of the television age, however: the high cost of sets meant that only a tiny percentage of the population were able to own one and then Mr Hitler ruined everything by starting his war. Television broadcasting was shelved until the fifties.

In 1954, when I was six years old, my family returned from Cape Town to England on vacation for a few weeks (oh yes, it also ensured that my younger sister was born in Britain like the rest of us). That visit included my first sight of a working television set, something that we had heard of and hungered for out in the colonies. The lady next door had a set.

I can remember very little of the experience. Every week we were allowed to watch an episode of a serial running at the time, The Man in the Iron Mask, but please don't ask me about the story; all that remains is a shadowy impression in black and white. I do recall that my older sister and I found it scary yet were avid to see each episode. Just to see anything on the magical new invention was enough for us.

What we did not know at the time was that other media did not look on television as magical at all. Both radio and the movies saw in it the seeds of their demise. How could radio compete with moving pictures in the home? And why would the public go out to see movies when television could deliver the same experience in your living room?

The glory days for both media were over but they survived by adapting and finding new ways to present themselves. Television was king from then on, however. We still live in the era of television but, since you are reading this, you already have access to the pretender to the throne, the computer and its accretion, the internet.

Many believe that we will see television, computers and the internet merge into one medium. They call this "The Home Entertainment Center" and Microsoft designs operating systems specifically for it. Everything in one box, is the catchphrase.

But is this really the shape of things to come? I wonder. You see, I have experienced attempts to force TV and the computer together and they don't work very well. Either you try to surf the internet through the TV's clunky interface and end up getting very frustrated, or you turn your computer into (guess what) a TV. I think we're missing something here, something that means television and the computer will always be separate. It's called interactivity.

Television has interactivity now, you tell me, but I think not. Yes, you can choose what to watch in all sorts of ways; yes, you can mix and match programs in many different combinations. But can you be in the program? Can you be a leading player in what is happening on screen? Of course you can't, this is TV after all.

But that's what interactivity is all about, an involvement of viewer in the action. And computers supply this. Even without the internet, they enable us to create worlds of our own, where we can dictate what happens without reference to a script. It becomes a dialog between man and machine, a joint effort to create a new reality. Add the internet and the possibilities multiply out of sight as other players join you and your computer in a new world. Television reflects reality; computers make a new one, something we call a "virtual world".

Internet chat has taken the place of the conversation over the yard fence between neighbors. Now your neighbors can be on the other side of the world and there is no need to see your real neighbors, let alone talk to them. Blogging creates a new world where everyone is a reporter, a contributor to an all-embracing discussion where nothing is sacrosanct. Gaming puts us in situations and places where the rules are totally different from reality's. We are creating an entirely new way of life.

Television is essentially concerned with entertainment. It's something we turn on when we couldn't be bothered to think for ourselves. Of course, you may use your computer for entertainment too, but that is only scratching at the surface of its potential. It's an empowerment machine and the person it empowers is you. That is something that television can never be.

So why try to arrange an unholy marriage between the two? Would it not make more sense to let them develop apart? Both have their uses and both attract their devotees. But note that it is rare for one person to be into both media. Those who love television we call couch potatoes, those who love computers we name geeks. And never the twain shall meet, it seems. We might as well face the fact that there are two kinds of people in the world and let them use the technology as they will.

Oh, I nearly forgot. There is one more type of human, a rare beast indeed: the reality junkie. He's the one who will listen for a while as you rant on about your computer or the program you watched last night and then, when you run out of steam, will offer the suggestion that you "get a life..."