Beyond Your Wildest Dreams

By Richard Zoglin

"Here I am an educated person and a writer and I watch every channel, all 75 of them, simultaneously."

-- KURT VONNEGUT

If it frightens you to think of how much TV has affected our cultural habits in just a few decades, then get ready for another zap to your system. In the future, what we know as TV will have been transmogrified from a box in the corner into a ubiquitous, wall-to-wall bath of infotainment. And the array of program choices, already so bewildering, will multiply almost to infinity. But that is the predictable part. The most tantalizing and scary prospect is what this electronic deluge will do to us. Will we become zombie consumers of Lethal Weapon 17, or connoisseurs of Greek drama on channel 894? Will our voracious image consumption erode our ability to read and speak, or will TV teach us new languages? Will we be happy in our comfy video cocoons, or yearn to escape from that cell and get our shoes muddy at an outdoor concert?

Two coming developments will take the video revolution to a new realm. Fiber-optic cable will bring hundreds, even thousands, of channels into the home. And interactive computer technology will give formerly passive viewers almost total control over what they see, when they see it and what they do with it. People will be able to call up on their screen virtually everything the culture produces, from the latest Hollywood movie to lessons in chess, from an old episode of The Twilight Zone to this morning's newspaper, custom- edited for individual readers.

The array of choices will be so rich that TV may finally break out of the current malaise described by Bruce Springsteen in 57 Channels (And Nothing On). In his book Life After Television, George Gilder predicts that the merging of TV and computers will bring the demise of network mediocrity. "Big events -- the Super Bowl or the election debates or the most compelling mass programs -- will still command their audiences," he writes. "But all the media junk food and filler will tend to disappear. People will order what they want rather than settling for what is there."

Society will pay a price for that. As the mass audience disperses, there will be fewer cultural reference points, less common ground. "We have nothing to share now," laments Vonnegut. "There are thousands of things that a person sitting at home can see that nobody else is seeing. We have become lonelier because we no longer have a few central works of art to discuss."

Lonelier and less literate. Books will almost certainly become a more elitist and rarefied art form. The common currency of pop culture and public discourse will be the quick-cut, in-your-face style of TV sitcoms and music videos. "The visual image will be familiar, more communicative to people. But at the same time, there will be a general humiliation of language," says Neil Postman, chairman of New York University's communications department. Our connection with the real world may grow ever more tenuous as images increasingly supplant words and symbolic gestures overwhelm rational argument. The portent is ominous: How can an electorate conditioned by MTV ever have the patience to solve the budget deficit?

The couch potatoes of the future, whose every entertainment wish will be granted at the touch of a button, may have trouble interacting with one another in the real world. One hypothesis: people will become more self- centered, less attuned to their neighbors and society. Bridging the gap between cultures and races could become more difficult. Civility will suffer too. "Because most public events and entertainment will be experienced privately, people will lose a sense of how to behave in public," says Postman. "Even on the screen in movie theaters, they already have to tell people not to talk."

Yet the reassuring aspect of culture is that every stifling trend seems to produce a refreshing, subversive countertrend. At least a few people will grow tired of living like pampered moles and will want to go out to see a play or a concert. "If you spend the day watching your computer, you're not going to watch your television at night," contends Philip Glass, the avant-garde composer. "You'd rather go to the park and watch someone dancing." Live drama, predicts critic and iconoclastic director Robert Brustein, "will become what Jean Genet called 'the theater of the catacombs.' It will find small enclaves with the remainder of the faithful, like Christianity in the early days."

What will transform the content of culture most of all is the artistic world's great imponderable: individual genius. A prognosticator in the year 1500 would have had no way of knowing that Shakespeare was just around the corner. A music seer in 1950 could not have guessed that Elvis Presley was warming up offstage. The next artistic revolutionary may already be waiting in the wings, ready to revitalize a tired art form or set the cultural world on a new course. And when the Next Big Thing hits, one question will hang most urgently in the air: What channel is it on?

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York