A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (16 page)

Gilder’s basic diagnosis runs thus. Television as we know and suffer it is “a technology with supreme powers but deadly flaws.” The really fatal flaw is that the whole structure of television programming, broadcasting, and reception is still informed by the technological limitations of the old vacuum tubes that first enabled TV. The

expense and complexity of these tubes used in television sets meant that most of the processing of signals would have to be done at the [networks],

a state of affairs which

dictated that television would be a top-down system—in electronic terms, a “master-slave” architecture. A few broad-casting centers would originate programs for millions of passive receivers, or “dumb terminals.”

By the time the transistor (which does essentially what vacuum tubes do but in less space at lower cost) found commercial applications, the top-down TV system was already entrenched and petrified, dooming viewers to docile reception of programs they were dependent on a very few networks to provide, and creating a “psychology of the masses” in which a trio of programming alternatives aimed to appeal to millions and millions of Joe B.’s. The TV signals are analog waves. Analogs are the required medium, since “With little storage or processing available at the set, the signals… would have to be directly displayable waves,” and “analog waves directly simulate sound, brightness, and color.” But analog waves can’t be saved or edited by their recipient. They’re too much like life: there in gorgeous toto one instant and then gone. What the poor TV viewer gets is only what he sees. This state of affairs has cultural consequences Gilder describes in apocalyptic detail. Even “High Definition Television” (HDTV), touted by the industry as the next big advance in entertainment, will, according to Gilder, be just the same vacuous emperor in a snazzier suit.

But for Gilder, TV, still clinging to the crowd-binding and hierarchical technologies of yesterdecade, is now doomed by the advances in microchip and fiber-optic technology of the last few years. The user-friendly microchip, which consolidates the activities of millions of transistors on one 49¢ wafer, and whose capacities will get even more attractive as controlled electron-conduction approaches the geodesic paradigm of efficiency, will allow receivers—TV sets—to do much of the image-processing that has hitherto been done “for” the viewer by the broadcaster. In another happy development, transporting images through glass fibers rather than via the EM spectrum will allow people’s TV sets to be hooked up with each other in a kind of interactive net instead of all feeding passively at the transmitting teat of a single broadcaster. And fiber-optic transmissions have the further advantage that they conduct characters of information digitally. Since, as Gilder explains, “digital signals have an advantage over analog signals in that they can be stored and manipulated without deterioration” as well as being crisp and interferenceless as quality CDs, they’ll allow the microchipped television receiver (and thus the viewer) to enjoy much of the discretion over selection, manipulation, and recombination of video images that is today restricted to the director’s booth.

For Gilder, the new piece of furniture that will free Joe Briefcase from passive dependence on his furniture will be “the telecomputer, a personal computer adapted for video processing and connected by fiber-optic threads to other telecomputers around the world.” The fibrous TC “will forever break the broadcast bottleneck” of television’s One Over Many structure of image-dissemination. Now everybody’ll get to be his own harried guy with earphones and clipboard. In the new millennium, U.S. television will finally become ideally, GOPishly democratic: egalitarian, interactive, and “profitable” without being “exploitative.”

Boy does Gilder know his “Larger Agenda” audience. You can just see saliva overflowing lower lips in boardrooms as Gilder forecasts that the consumer’s whole complicated fuzzy inconveniently transient world will become storable, manipulable, broadcastable, and viewable in the comfort of his own condo. “With artful programming of telecomputers, you could spend a day interacting on the screen with Henry Kissinger, Kim Basinger, or Billy Graham.” Rather ghastly interactions to contemplate, perhaps, but then in Gilderland
each to his own:

Celebrities could produce and sell their own software. You could view the Super Bowl from any point in the stadium you choose, or soar above the basket with Michael Jordan. Visit your family on the other side of the world with moving pictures hardly distinguishable from real-life images. Give a birthday party for Grandma in her nursing home in Florida, bringing her descendents from all over the country to the foot of her bed in living color.

And not just warm 2-D images of family:
any
experience will be transferrable to image and marketable, manipulable, consumable. People will be able to

go comfortably sight-seeing from their living room through high-resolution screens, visiting Third-World countries without having to worry about air fares or exchange rates…, you could fly an airplane over the Alps or climb Mount Everest—all on a powerful high-resolution display.

We will, in short, be able to engineer our own dreams.

So, in sum, a conservative tech writer offers a really attractive way of looking at viewer passivity, at TV’s institutionalization of irony, narcissism, nihilism, stasis, loneliness. It’s not our fault! It’s outmoded technology’s fault! If TV-dissemination were up to date, it would be impossible for it to “institutionalize” anything through its demonic “mass-psychology.” Let’s let Joe B., the little lonely average guy, be his own manipulator of video-bits. Once all experience is finally reduced to marketable image, once the receiving user of user-friendly receivers can break from the coffle and choose freely, Americanly, from an Americanly infinite variety of moving images
hardly distinguishable from real-life images
, and can then choose further just how he wishes to store, enhance, edit, recombine, and present those images to himself in the privacy of his very own home and skull, then TV’s ironic, totalitarian grip on the American psychic cojones will be broken.!!!

Note that Gilder’s semiconducted vision of a free, orderly video future is way more upbeat than postmodernism’s old view of image and data. The novels of Pynchon and DeLillo revolve metaphorically off the concept of interference: the more connections, the more chaos, and the harder it is to cull any meaning from the seas of signal. Gilder would call their gloom outmoded, their metaphor infected with the deficiencies of the transistor:

In all networks of wires and switches, except for those on the microchip, complexity tends to grow exponentially as the number of interconnections rises, [but] in the silicon maze of microchip technology… efficiency, not complexity, grows as the square of the number of inter- connections to be organized.

Rather than a vacuous TV-culture drowning in cruddy images, Gilder foresees a TC-culture redeemed by a whole lot more to choose from and a whole lot more control over what you choose to… umm… see? pseudo-experience? dream?

It’s wildly unrealistic to think that expanded choices alone will resolve our televisual bind. The advent of cable upped choices from 4 or 5 to 40+ synchronie alternatives, with little apparent loosening of television’s grip on mass attitudes. It seems, rather, that Gilder sees the ’90s’ impending breakthrough as U.S. viewers’ graduation from passive reception of facsimiles of experience to active manipulation of facsimiles of experience. It’s worth questioning Gilder’s definition of televisual “passivity.” His new tech would indeed end “the passivity of mere reception.” But the passivity of Audience, the acquiescence inherent in a whole culture of and about watching, looks unaffected by TCs.

The appeal of watching television has always involved fantasy. And contemporary TV has gotten vastly better at enabling the viewer’s fantasy that he can transcend the limitations of individual human experience, that he can be inside the set, imago’d, “anyone, anywhere.”
³⁴
Since the limitations of being one human being involve certain restrictions on the number of different experiences possible to us in a given period of time, it’s arguable that the biggest TV-tech “advances” of recent years have done little but abet this fantasy of escape from the defining limits of being human. Cable expanded our choices of evening realities; handheld gizmos let us leap instantly from one reality to another; VCRs let us commit experiences to an eidetic memory that permits re-experience at any time without loss or alteration. These advances sold briskly and upped average viewing-doses, but they sure haven’t made U.S. televisual culture any less passive or cynical.

Of course, the downside of TV’s big fantasy is that it’s just a fantasy. As a Treat, my escape from the limits of genuine experience is neato. As a steady diet, though, it can’t help but render my own reality less attractive (because in it I’m just one Dave, with limits and restrictions all over the place), render me less fit to make the most of it (because I spend all my time pretending I’m not in it), and render me ever more dependent on the device that affords escape from just what my escapism makes unpleasant.

It’s tough to see how Gilder’s soteriol vision of having more “control” over the arrangement of high-quality fantasy-bits is going to ease either the dependency that is part of my relation to TV or the impotent irony I must use to pretend I’m not dependent. Whether I’m “passive” or “active” as a viewer, I still must cynically pretend, because I’m still dependent, because my real dependency here is not on a single show or a few networks any more than the hophead’s is on the Turkish florist or the Marseilles refiner. My real dependence is on the fantasies and the images that enable them, and thus on any technology that can make images both available and fantastic. Make no mistake: we
are
dependent on image-technology; and the better the tech, the harder we’re hooked.

The paradox in Gilder’s rosy forecast is the same as in all forms of artificial enhancement. The more enhancing the mediation—see for instance binoculars, amplifiers, graphic equalizers, or “moving pictures hardly distinguishable from real-life images”—the more direct, vivid, and real the experience
seems
, which is to say the more direct, vivid, and real the fantasy and dependence
are
. An exponential surge in the mass of televisual images, and a commensurate increase in my ability to cut, paste, magnify, and combine them to suit my own fancy, can do nothing but render my interactive TC a more powerful enhancer and enabler of fantasy, my attraction to that fantasy stronger, the real experiences of which my TC offers more engaging and controllable simulacra paler and more frustrating to deal with, and me just a
whole
lot more dependent on my furniture. Jacking the number of choices and options up with better tech will remedy exactly nothing so long as no sources of insight on comparative worth, no guides to
why and how
to choose among experiences, fantasies, beliefs, and predilections, are permitted serious consideration in U.S. culture. Umm, insights and guides to value used to be among literature’s jobs, didn’t they? But then who’s going to want to take such stuff seriously in ecstatic post-TV life, with Kim Basinger waiting to be interacted with?

Oh God, I’ve just reread my criticisms of Gilder. That he is naïve. That he is an ill-disguised apologist for corporate self-interest. That his book has commercials. That beneath its futuristic novelty it’s just the same old American same-old that got us into this televisual mess. That Gilder vastly underestimates the intractability of the mess. Its hopelessness. Our gullibility, fatigue, disgust. My attitude, reading Gilder, has been sardonic, aloof, depressed. I have tried to make his book look ridiculous (which it is, but still). My reading of Gilder is televisual. I am in the aura.

Well, but at least good old Gilder is unironic. In this respect he’s like a cool summer breeze compared to Mark Leyner, the young New Jersey medical-ad copywriter whose
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
is the biggest thing for campus hipsters since
The Fountainhead
. Leyner’s novel exemplifies a third kind of literary response to our problem. For of course young U.S. writers can “resolve” the problem of being trapped in the televisual aura the same way French poststructuralists “resolve” their hopeless enmeshment in the logos. We can resolve the problem by celebrating it. Transcend feelings of mass-defined angst by genuflecting to them. We can be
reverently ironic
.

My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
is new not so much in kind as in degree. It is a methedrine compound of pop pastiche, offhand high tech, and dazzling televisual parody, formed with surreal juxtapositions and grammarless monologues and flash-cut editing, and framed with a relentless irony designed to make its frantic tone seem irreverent instead of repellent. You want sendups of commercial culture?

I had just been fired from McDonald’s for refusing to wear a kilt during production launch week for their new McHaggis sandwich.

he picks up a copy of
das plumpe denken
new england’s most disreputable german-language newsmagazine blast in egg cream factory kills philatelist he turns the page radioactive glow-in-the-dark semen found in canada he turns the page modern-day hottentots carry young in resealable sandwich bags he turns the page wayne newton calls mother’s womb single-occupancy garden of eden morgan fairchild calls sally struthers loni anderson

what color is your mozzarella? i asked the waitress it’s pink—it’s the same color as the top of a mennen lady speed stick dispenser, y’know that color? no, maam I said it’s the same color they use for the gillette daisy disposable razors for women… y’know that color? nope well, it’s the same pink as pepto-bismol, y’know that color? oh yeah, I said, well do you have spaghetti?