In March we asked as a class “What is the future of television” and there are numerous different answers to that one question. The only thing certain is that what has commonly been thought of as television since the late 1940s will certainly changed as we head into the 2020s.

Most shows will have much shorter seasons. As streaming shows will eventually dominate television viewing, longer 24 episode seasons made for syndicating to local TV stations will no longer be the norm for making a show profitable for the producers. Seasons that consist of only 8 to 10 episodes and are all released for streaming on the same day will be the norm.

Shows will have to get used to working with smaller budgets. Without the direct revenue of television advertising, less traditional means of generating revenue will be needed. More digital placement of advertising before, after or during a show and product placement directly inserted into the show will compliment subscription fees and help offset revenue lost to piracy. The producers of shows will be working with smaller and smaller budgets, so this may mean less special effects or expensive adventure scenes. This may mean that fans of the shows may be asked to contribute to online fundraisers similar to what many musicians and bands have been doing for years now.

Television may very well become an antiquated name as most people will increasingly watch shows on phones, tablets, and eventually in virtual reality.

Video content made for viewing may increasingly be referred to as just “shows” as opposed to “TV shows”. A larger flat screen may only be occasionally used by a household on family or friend movie or show nights and even then it may be more likely in the home of the wealthy as most families will only occasionally watch the same show together.

Broadcast channels will survive initially for the next several decades by showing more live programming such as sports and live reality contest based shows. At this time and for the foreseeable future, sports fans have no choice but to continue to watch the broadcast networks and pay for specialty cable and satellite channels to watch their favorite sports teams. Contracts for sports are already signed will into the next decade and these contracts will prevent the live streaming of most sports unless greatly amended. At this time, most sports team owners and leagues appear to have a distrust with streaming and would rather stick to a similar business model they have used since the late 1970s. As time progresses, the live programming will most likely move to an internet related source as well. If increasingly no one is able to view either broadcast or cable television, those making decisions on sports programming or live reality competition will have to adapt to the changing times or risk loosing much money and the interest of the public. For the foreseeable future most larger contracts, such as the Super Bowl are for broadcast only and mostly owned by NBC, CBS, ABC and FOX.

When reading Marcus Wohlsen’s article for Wired, “Google’s Grand Plan to Make your Brain Irrelevant” it did make me think back to a time when everyone thought Google was the nice internet company compared to Yahoo, eBay, Amazon or AOL. People feared the final three companies for gathering information on them and possible exposing a side that is private to them that they want no other eyes to see. Google was the ‘don’t be evil’ company and was considered safe by many who feared that Lycos and AltaVista would place ads on the sides of their opening screen that could ruin one socially, or if a boss in an office saw, professionally.

Google had the nice clean what interface and did not distract like the other websites, overloading their main page with weather bags, news, ads giveaways etc. all. Its interface was main page was clean and its reputation was clean as well.

Nowadays Google has grown from a simple search engine to being one that can do math and show you a street in a country thousands of miles away. As a company it’s grown into one of the largest corporations of all time. What was once considered a friendly country to some is now considered a corporation that intrudes on privacy and has no respect for it.

Though Marcus Wohlsen’s article is of our current time, a company collecting people’s personal information was predicted in popular mainstream media as far back as 1978. In the NBC-TV series “The Rockford Files” private investigator Jim Rockford (played by James Garner) stumbles upon a new company in one of his investigations that is using a computer system to collect information of people around the world and then sell the information to large corporations looking for new ways to sell their business, burrows looking to find someone they cannot locate or a business or someone looking information that may ruin someone’s reputation. All of this being done for a large profit.

I find it interesting that people could see this coming from a time when all businesses still used type writers and White Out. The episode “The House on Willis Avenue” originally aired on Friday February 24, 1978 and came and went without much fan fair at the time. People of that era, though some skeptics and conspiracy addicts, probably did not think too much of companies gathering their personal information and perhaps just thought of the episode as springing from a script writers mind and need to create an episode that week.

Marcus Wohlsen’s article for Wired shows us that what was predicted in that episode was only the tip of the ice burg. With AI a program will be gathering information on people and do not have basic human emotions as artificial intelligence can only mimic or do the jobs of a human being. It cannot, at this point, start to have emotions like compassion for other humans. Even if AI can eventually have some sort of compassion programed in, it still will not have the human experience to make moral decisions based on the general morality of the society it’s in.

“The Rockford Files” episode that evening ended with a disclaimer, an odd move for a mainstream television series then and now. The disclaimer stated “Secret information centers, building dossiers on individuals exist today. You have no legal right to know about them, prevent them, or sue for damages. Our liberty may well be the price we pay for permitting this to continue unchecked. Member, U.S. Privacy Protection Commission”.

I have posted a scene for this unusual, for it’s time, episode below:

https://youtu.be/ibsEWajsrfk

When Lev Monovich asked the question “What Is New Media” from his article published in “The Language of New Media” it did make me think of my opinion of the subject itself. One could ask themselves, if they any knowledge of when new forms of technology became the norm, where does one media era end and the other begin.

Does new media of the 2010s include something like VCRs which first came out in 1975 and mainstreamed by the middle 1980s. Does it include DVRs that were introduced in the 1990s and were used by a large majority of homes by the middle of the 2000s. Are both of these technologies now old media as one increasingly streams what they want, when they want it. Or are streaming services merely an extension of something that has been slowly progressing for the past four decades.

Are video games new media when they were first introduced for home use with the Magnavox Odyssey home video game console in 1972. Video Games in research seemly reached their zeitgeist around 1982 and 1983 when the older dominant video console by Atari beat out one of the then dominant three television broadcast networks in the Neilson ratings and had several major competitors with in Intellivision and ColecoVision. Not only did they have a huge percentage of the population playing their video games in the early 1980s, the video dominated the public consciousness with every product tie in imaginable. Video Games of the time like Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Q-Burt and others not only had their own national televised TV shows but were also had their own products from canned pastas, cereals, bed sheets, watches, wall paper to just about every other product imaginable.

So one can ask themselves, did “New Media” begin in 1991 with the beginning of the Information Age in the wake of the arrival of the World Wide Web or with such mainstream accessibility to the previous mentioned products and how deep they went into the publics conscious and psych, did the New Media revolution actually start will before the 1990s. Where do these created era stop and start terms end? Some have argued, for example, that a new era was begun in 2003 with the arrival of Friendster and MySpace and the beginning of “Internet 2.0”. Others will say the the internet has continued to mostly driven by companies like Amazon, Netflix, Google, eBay etc. that have their beginnings in the 1990s. Still others will argue that a new era was begun with the introduction of the Apple i Phone in June 2007 and the arrival of the smart phone. Still, people state that is nothing more than taking the computers and laptops or the 1990s and making them smaller while others state that it’s not the start of a something new but the mainstreaming of what PalmPilot and BlackBerry introduced in 1997 and 1999 respectively.

My personal thought is that we can trace most new media from the early 1990s and the mainstreaming of the internet, at first with the wide spread acceptance of email. While Video Games may have debatable older mainstream success, much of what we use today is based around the ability of tons of information to be accessed fast and easily. This was not as possible to the general person until the arrival of the internet into the average home in the 1990s via such services as AOL, Prodigy and others. Though CompuServe and bulletin boards may have been access by a small percentage of the population, it took an easier to use system like AOL to bring it to the masses. Though VCRs let people time shift shows and watch movies when they want at home for the first time, it’s a system that is not as easily accessed and not as affordable as streaming is in our current time. Previous products will always be what influences future ones, but with New Media our current system is not brand new as some may say, but it’s also not quite a quarter of a century old yet as well.

While working on our resent New Media project comparing the services Netflix and Amazon, I did uncover a phenomenon that appears with one company more than the other. That would be Netflix acquiring or remaking old broadcast network television shows. Thus far, the other service providers, be they Amazon, Hulu or You Tube Red, have avoided America’s pop culture nostalgia love for and the attempt to make all thing old new again.

Netfilx has had much success with it’s “reboot”, as they are now called instead of remake or sequel, of the hit 1990s ABC-TV sitcom “Full House”. Titled “Fuller House” the sitcom reunites most of the cast of the original series and has been talked about quite a bit by many of my friends and aquaintances, most whom know the show better from ABC Family and Nick at Nite reruns than having experienced the show from it’s original 1987 through 1995 network run.

Netflix will also be remaking the 1960s science fiction television favorite “Lost in Space”. This one is loved by several generations and though myself and many of my friends and acquaintances love or loath it, I also know that many of them have never even heard of it. Despite being shows in reruns almost nonstop since it’s 1968 cancellation, many people I know seem to have missed it’s being repeated on USA Network, Sci-Fi Channel or it’s current home on diginet Me-TV. With this one can ask if this remake is a sing that Netflix is not just obsessed with people born somewhere between the Mid 1970s and late 1990s but also seeks to reach out to an older audience who still watches Broadcast and Cable television the majority of the time.

After initially announcing that he was going to remake his popular and influential 1970s television series “All in the Family” with a Latino cast, producer Norman Lear has instead announced he will be rebooting his 1975 through 1984 sitcom “One Day at a Time” with a Cuban-American cast for Netflix. The show, like the original that inspired it, is about a middle-aged women restarting life with her teenaged children after getting a divorce after many years of marriage. Though single families, especially single divorced mothers, raising kids alone was a new and edgy topic in the middle 1970s when the original premiered, it will be interesting to see what this show does to update a premise that has been pretty much everyday for millions of families in the past 40 years.

The previous two shows seem to be an option for Netflix to not only get new material, but to get new material that is not so new and will be familiar to viewers of a certain age to expand their subscriber base and widen it’s demographic age wise Remakes are not always a hit however, as in trying to get people who fondly remember the 1950s and 1960s in the the 1980s, broadcast stations failed with many reboots during the Reagan era with such misses as “The Munster’s Today” and “The New Monkees”.

One remake that looks to take nostalgia lovers beyond the 1990s is Netflix’s revival of the 2000s drama “Gilmore Girls”. Like “Fuller House” this series will come back with most of it’s original stars and show the audience where the characters are in the 2010s and allow fans to catch up with old favorites. As nostalgia tends to run in twenty year cycles, is the “Gilmore Girls” a glimpse of the way many of Netflix new series will look in the year 2024? Will we see reboots of “Two and a Half Men” and “House” by that time? It’s possible as Netflix has discovered that our culture loves its video past.

Listening to the episode of “This American Life” where Linda West talks about being harassed online by many, many people she and others label “trolls”. Most of these trolls do nothing more than try to either harass or talk about you on message boards, comment sections on various websites or directly write you inflammatory material and send it to your email. Ms. West had a different encounter when the troll she had not only dug up more personal material of her life, knowing of the recent death of her Jazz musician father for example and starting Twitter and Gmail accounts contacted her while pretending to be him, but he also eventually felt so terrible after reading of her reaction to his actions that he sent an apology.

It’s an interesting piece that on top of him getting back in contact with her, he then agrees to do an interview with her about why he became her stalker or a stalker in general. He stated he mainly choose her because she was overweight and she defended it and spoke out for people accepting of different body images. He felt angered by it, partially because he was 75 pounds’ overweight at the time. But also more so because she was a woman who spoke her mind and seemed to not care what others thought of her. He later admits that he feels he was a misogynist in a round about way. The troll then stated he was in a low point on his life where he was overweight, lost his girlfriend, spent everyday at a computer at an unfulfilling job. He then states he found a new girlfriend, enrolled in graduate school and started teaching children. Due to these things he felt better about himself and then stopped trolling not only Linda West but others as well. He also admits to having harassed her under different aliases and sending her numerous messages from many accounts.

I was think while listening to this is there was anyway to directly encounter one’s anonymous internet trolls or stalkers. Could you email or reply to each one in a way that they would see you more as a human and less as an object? Is this truly the only example of this type of thing happening, troll and person being trolled reconciling, in the almost 25-year history of mainstream internet? It’s certainly an interesting story and one that we can possibly use when we ourselves may find ourselves being harassed by online stalkers.

When trying to reason or debate with someone who hate or dissents to your own opinion it’s always best to do so in person. But since the days of chatrooms and online journals of the 1990s to social sites and journals evolving into blogs by our current time we have become more and more connected to other people, but much less so in a personal way. Can we regain the pre-information age discourse of debate and having both parties know one another, or will we continue to become more and more disconnected to the point where even more serious social issues and political outcomes are argued over with venomous discourse which drives the public opinion on such issues? Only a time traveler will know for sure, but hopefully we can regain more of a civil discourse and not let those who publically project superiority while feeling insecure personally completely dictate our own personal future or the future of connected societies as a whole.