The Future of Television

     We all sense that traditional television is on the way out, but what comes next? As we blaze ahead in the 21st century almost all of our media is being hosted online, and naturally Google raced to provide a marketable solution to this problem. Google TV is an android based internet television overlay that allows you to browse all of your favorite media, both internet and cable, through their interface. This is, of course, not as good as it sounds because many content providers have blocked access to their media through Google TV. It may take some time for all of our television content to be available on the internet, but even then what will we watch?

     Television's shift to the internet will also bring some change in programming. Sure, your favorite old programming will be around, but many companies are looking at how to provide content more suitable for this new medium. One of these companies is-- yeah you guessed it-- Google. Google not only wants to provide you with a service for accessing online content, but also the content itself. A little over a year ago Google spent 100 million dollars developing channels on YouTube that would function more like television shows. I guess they realized that people aren't going to spend a night browsing funny cat videos, or most people anyway.


     In addition to Google, Netflix is setting up to be a big player in the internet television industry. Netflix ended 2012 with nearly 30 million american viewers, and it will continue to grow as internet television expands. Instead of continuing to play the role as an internet startup known for streaming old movies and 'B' television series, they have recently released their own television series House of Cards to promote their service. The show is a political drama based off of a novel and has been well received and widely successful in increasing their membership. House of Cards is Netflix's first step in becoming a widely successful content provider in the dawn of internet television.

Jaron Lanier

     In reading You Are Not a Gadget it's clear that Lanier has many opinions, abstractions and meanderings when it comes to the technology industry. While his writing isn't always organized or as articulate as it could be, all of his theories are well crafted and deserve some thought. His work is controversial and certainly contains at least some view that we find disagreeable, but I think it's important that we are not immediately dismissive of his contributions.

    In class we discussed Lanier's idea of 'lock-in' which was prevalent throughout the first portion of his book. If you are a technology aficionado and an optimist, the idea that the internet and technology as a whole can get locked-in to patterns that limit the potential for advancement and ultimately restricts ourselves, is not something we can conceive as possible. The potential for technology certainly isn't limited by the architecture of MIDI, nor the 140 character limit of a tweet, and Lanier is completely aware of this. The advantage Lanier has when thinking about the direction of the web is perspective. He is completely aware that we are capable of writing our blogs on our ugly and poorly crafted html web pages, and he encourages us to do so, instead of putting ourselves in the box provided by blogger. What I believe Lanier is articulating with his idea of lock-in is not the absolutist view that we find so easy to disagree with, but rather a trend he has noticed in the past several decades of technology development. He is not trying to say that no one can ever create a better protocol than MIDI, but that MIDI has been used so extensively and is so pervasive that it becomes very difficult to break free from its grasp. In the same light, it is much more difficult for us to express ourselves accurately by developing our own web pages, than it is for us to just become another type of Blogger user.

     Another idea Lanier touches on in his book, and more extensively in the video below, is the information marketplace. His criticism of the free and open web is controversial, but I think he illustrates some important points. First we must understand that while much of the information on the web is free to attain, it does in fact have a value. One of these valuable types of information is information about you, the individual. His argument is, as I understand it, that companies like Google collect massive amounts of information by providing a 'free' service in order to sell the information they collect at a much higher price than they paid for it. Understanding information this way allows you to realize that by using Google's services you are making a financial transaction, and one heavily weighted in Google's favor. What Lanier is advocating when he discusses financial transactions associated with information exchange is not greed or more capitalism but clarity. He wants to make people aware of the value of the information at hand so that people can accurately asses the value of the information they hold and a middle class can be developed in this information marketplace. As it stands, he sees the current approach to information exchange as rigged in the favor of large corporations. In the video he discusses all of this much more articulately and suggests his ideas for avoiding this Plutocracy. Even if you don't agree, it's certainly worth checking out.