Al Gore tells Seattle Weekly that television is on its way out:
GORE: [In] the early 1960s when the television became the source of information for the majority, for a couple decades after that, the TV news operations mimicked The New York Times, and The Chicago Tribune, etc. The struggle at the heart of Good Night, and Good Luck chronicles the point when that began to change, and entertainment values asserted themselves. Add in conglomerate ownership with a smaller and smaller number of owners, and then all of a sudden the fundamental nature of television began to be apparent: It is one-way. It's one-way. It's like the medieval monastic scriptorium. If you wanted to be a writer in the Middle Ages, you had to be a monk, and then you could copy a dead guy's book in a dead language. Now, if you want to be Thomas Paine on television, you can't. You have to go work for a studio, and then you play a bit part on a show about people eating dogs.
The Internet is changing all of this, and once again creating a multiway conversation with low entry barriers for individuals. However, due to the architecture of packet switching, it will not support mass distribution of full-motion video, which is essential to produce the quasi-hypnotic effect that television has. The average American watches television four hours and 39 minutes a day, up four minutes from last year. Most of the people using the Internet are watching television simultaneously. So television is dominant; it won't stay that way, but right now it is.
This sure is a lot of talk to say: what, exactly? That people persist on getting their televison news from actual telvision news because they're slavishly addicted to a "quasi-hypnotic effect"? That people are too stupid to turn off the television and agitate for a Max Headroom-type delivery system of the news...but with the advent of technology, humans will be forced to evolve into an internet-dominant existence?
Al Gore is being patronizing and talking dumb--because television news will never be replaced by the internet. If "mass distribution of full-motion video" became the norm, then guess what? Your computer would become, by definition, a television, complete with commercials. And hard cold headlines will never replace flesh and blood anchors, as long as viewers remain flesh and blood humans with basic and inextricable psychological needs for the basic relatability and empathy a human news correspondent provides.
Yet Gore yaps on....well, I guess if you invented the internet, you're going to proclaim its imminent omniscience until the last dog gets eaten.
