The Future of Media

Naturally, I think pretty frequently about where the media -- particularly journalistic media -- are headed.  Will it eventually all be on some form of the internet?  Will there be a place for print, either literal (ink on paper) or figurative (online "publication," like The Daily Beast/Newsweek or, for that matter, this blog)?  And what about broadcast, which sends me my regular paycheck?  Will there be something like TV, something that's a prescheduled, one-way experience, where the viewer arrives at a particular time of day to be fed, passively, a particular program?

I got to thinking more about that last as we moved this summer.  As with any move, there is always a gap in services -- that time when your internet service and TV (at least in our case, as we are on DirectTV*) are turned off in the old place, but not yet installed in the new one.  This isn't necessarily a clean break, though, as in this move there was a period when there was TV in the old house even though we were in residence in the new one.

My girls -- six and nine at the time -- took the blackout well, and were most happy when the internet came up in the new place, but there was an interesting point when they requested ... well, demanded that they come with us on our loading trips to the old house so they could watch TV.  And it caused me to wonder: Is there something we crave, something special about that passive watching experience that the new media just don't give us?

I guess, if you think about it, Homer didn't engage in a discussion when he would recite the  Odyssey a couple thousand years ago.  Storytelling has always been a function of human society, as has gathering together to share in that story.  This in the face of my running comment that, in years to come, our children will look at us in disbelief and ask: "So you would go to the TV at the time they told you to in order to watch whatever program they chose to show?"  Will social imperatives cause passive watching at source-chosen moments to survive?







*Here's the thing: in Southwest Virginia, where I live, something like half of the TV viewers get their signal by satellite (either DirectTV or Dish) and around another third get it on cable.  The mountain and valley aspects of the landscape have always made getting over-the-air TV signals a dodgy proposition.