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Media Influences: Past, Present and Future

I grew up with TV. I don't remember not having a TV. I think that for as long as I have been alive my family had a TV set. That is saying something because in the mid 1950's, when I was born TV's were expensive.

The first TV I remember was a Philco black and white set that only had a VHF (channels 2 through 13) tuner. It was eventually replaced in 1966 with an Admiral color TV that had anadditional UHF tuner to receive channels 14 through 83) . Color TV had been around for a while but I think it wasn't until 1965 that it started to really become a standard all shows on the three broadcasting networks.

In rural Ohio, you had to erect a fairly tall antenna and use a motor to turn it to get the best signal. We pulled in TV from Columbus and Dayton. Springfield had a UHF station (Channel 26 as I recall) for a while in the late 1960's. It didn't amount to much.

I studied Radio and TV Production while I was at Purdue. The department at the time was relatively small, not well known and not all that well funded. The equipment that we had was fairly old but at least a and undergrad a student could expect to have hands-on experience with real TV equipment.

Later I interned at a TV station in Lafayette, IN which was the 192nd TV market in the nation at a time when there were 212 markets. In other words this station was in the minor leagues of broadcasting. I pulled AP and UPI wirecopy and composed a scripted version for the news anchor. I was very impressed with her professionalism and as a young man with overactive hormones I also had a tendancy to stare at her. At least I did not drool.

Early on in my internship, the sportscaster was editing a tape in the production machine that shared the same room where I not only pulled the wire copy but also typed up the script. We are talking old school typing here. He started to taunt me a little about the fact that I had to pay to work at the station, tehcnically the station was using the learning opportunity in exchange for some free labor and since I paid the university for the course, I was paying to work there. I fired back something to the effect, "Well this is the 192nd TV market in the nation and if we were all truly professional we would not be here, now would we?"

I did not know that the anchor had walked into the outer office until she came through the door. I thought I was going to be sumnmarily dismissed but instead she smiled broadly at me as she said, "You appear to have a quick mind. That is good. I am also impressed with the quality of the script you compose."

"I'm really in production so I am used to working up scripts, usually camera angles and lighting set-ups but there were no openings in the internship here for that and since I am also in journalism..."

"You are good with a camera, then?"

"Yes, very good actually."

"That's something good to know," she patted me on the shoulder as she walked by and checked the tear sheets that I had not yet had a chance to work up into a script.

I barely knew her before that. Even so she amazed me. She was the only one that worked at the station that I really sensed belonged somewhere else. Lafayette was a stepping stone for her, a line on a resume attenting to her having paid her dues in the minor leagues, a place to work up a decent porfolio tape.

On weekends and days when I did not have classes or did not have to work at the hi-fi store, I operated the camera for some of her on location reporting. She usually arranged for things like that in advance. She was very organized. Still, every so often she would call me on a moment's notice and ask if I was available to operate camera for her.

I did not mind. For one thing I was learning a lot more than my internship was supposed to teach me. The station did not have a large staff and so the anchor did a lot of her own editing and preproduction. She was competent at it but I was a little more experienced doing fancy electronic effects that made the finished product more attractive. In a way we each learned something from the working relationship.

I was glad to help her out. One time she was doing a remote near my fraternity and so she offered to pick me up. A couple of my faternity brothers saw her come into the frat house and even if they never watched the local news, they realized that she must be lost. No one that looked like her would ever end up in our fraternity. Ever after that they ribbed me suggesting that we were having some sort of clandestined relationship. Guys seem prone to jumping to that conclusion. I have to admit the first time she asked me to meet her on Saturday at the stadium on campus the thought ran through my mind. She was single, and only a couple of years older.
She had brown eyes and dark hair, was a little taller than my preferrence but every other box on the checklist was marked yes. It was not to be, though. She really respected me for my ability with a camera and the fact that she usually didn't have to rewrite whatever I typed up for the script copy.

I learned a lot about television from her but unfortunately I also learned that I did not want to be a broadcast journalist. I could not see me standing up in front of a camera. As I said I was very good at operating the camera, though. I was becoming more interested in advertising and public relations at that point and so I started to take a few business courses.

She went on to work for an Indianapolis station. I lost track of her after that. I don't know if she ever made it out one of the coasts. I am sure where ever she ended up, she dazzled them.

Anyway, that is why I know a good bit about TV.

The science behind TV had existed since my parents were young but it was not until the 1950's that TV became a major medium. When TV came into the mainstream there were all sorts of dire predictions that TV would supplant both movies and radio as entertainment media. I recall reading such predictions even into the 1970's.

Obviously TV did not replace radio or movies but eventually supplimented each and turned into a viable medium of entertainment and information all of its own. The reason radio and movies suirvived the onslaught and popularity of TV is that there was a process of adaptation that preceded a period of evolution. Prior to the rapid growth of TV as a medium both radio and movies were very different. TV actually served to define and customize radio so that it capitalized on its core strengths, immediiacy where pictures were not necessary. Movies were forced to improve, becoming larger-than-life, spectacular and entertaining in a big budget way that television could not afford to compete.

That is a brief even glossed over view of the power of the TV medium in the general context of influence. It is necessary to know about TV because it was at one time the killer cutting edge of technology, a place not held by The Internet. For about the last ten years or so I have been reading about how The Internet is supposed to somehow evolve into the be all and end all for information and communication. It has even been predicted that cyberspace will replace the VHF and UHF electromagnetic spectrum broadcasting, making all communications closed circuit, cable based or linked through the digitized microwave transmissions between a satellite uplink and downlink.

Former Vice President Al Gore referred to The Internet as 'the information superhighway' and was jokingly given credit for having even 'invented it'. The term that he coined was made in reference to the work of his father in the Senate in the 1950's for establishing the Interstate Highway System that was largely constructed in the 1960's and 1970's. Just as traveling in America by car these days would be a very different experience without the Interstate Highways so we are also becoming increasingly dependent on the instant communication and intimacy of the The Internet.

It is perhaps ironic that when the concrete and steel rebar of the original Interstate System was being laid down the infastructure upon which The Ineternet was based were also being put into place. Most serious geeks know that The Internet was created as a survivable means of communications after a nuclear disaster. It was designed with multiple routes and optimum redundency. Even though the military application was gratefully never put to the real life test for which it was created, the academics used the backbone of the system for a decade or more to transfer data across phone trunk lines even before the general public even had heard of personal computers.

Just as the Interstate Highways were considered a very expensive project and of dubious value people have often doubted the wisdom of allocating resources toward the further development of the underlying communication infastructure. It is shameless that our nation pioneered the technlogies in use in every country for accessing Ihe Internet. Even so we lag behind almost all other developed countries in the distribution of broadband access to the general public. When Japan and Korea were rewiring their entire nations our companies were counting up the epsnse of having to essentially rewire everything. We are a much larger country and the costs of the project are daunting. Even so investing in infastructure given impetus to growth and further development.

How much more advanced are The Internet 'pipes' in Asia? In Japan and Korea broadband Interet access costs the same or less than it does in this country while offering at least Ten times the bandwidth.

In my lifetime I have noticed that we invent a lot of things as a nation and within a decade or two the Asians teach us how to make it better and at a lower cost.

I have wondered who determined that The Internet should be capitalized. Maybe Al Gore did that too, as in The All Mighty Internet. If I ever meet him I'll remember to ask.

Somehow I have never been able to grasp how The Internet would replace any other medium. As was the case with TV it is more likely that it will redefine the place and nature of other media while it finds its own niche. The Internet will certainly force other media to evolve and it may actually take on a role that other media have inadequately served. The very ability to post a Blog and have almost direct and instant communication through something that is self-published is a mind boggling achievement. Blogger have already had some major impact in politics and the mere fact that news services pay attention to Blogs speaks for itself.

A few people have suggested to me that I am a futurist. I even cast my alter ego, Brent as a futurist. Anyone that has read much of the series knows that Brent has a slight advantage on other futurists. He speaks from direct experience as a time traveler.

I do not think of myself as a futurist. It is not because I lack Brent's ability to be in another time and place almost instantaneously. I am of the mind that we all do a little traveling in time, a point that you will unfortunately have to read One Over X in its entirety to comprehend. Even then I am not certain how clear it is stated. It is a very complex concept that is determined as much by perspective and aspect as point of view.

I am not entirely certain what the label futurist pertains to although it is something that others have pinned on to me. Maybe it is because I have always been able to see just a little ways ahead. I think anyone with an ounce of common sense could do as much. I base what I think might happen on current trends and knowledge of cutting-edge technology. I work with computers on a daily basis. I understand them and can usually repair them.

Predicting the future is risky. There are remarkable examples of myopic predictions recorded in the pages of newspapers and magazines. I spent a whole afternoon at the local library perusing archive copies of Life Magazine. Toward the end of my research, my daughter Sarah joined me and found it rather interesting seeing the fashions in the 1940's and 1950's while I was totally focused on the technology. There were things advertised in Life that I have never seen, technological advances that did not sell in the marketplace. That fascinated me.

For me, studying the back issues of Popular Science is even more interesting. Did you know for example that a prediction from the 1930's was that one day there would be a computer device that would weigh merely a ton and could occupy a single room. Imagine that!

I was telling Rob, my son that when I was in college a 128 kilobyte memory core was a huge thing that needed to be cooled from beneath the column where it rested in the floor. Even then it had to be exchanged out periodically to be given a rest so that it did not overheat and melt. I am presently using an Athlon XP processor to write this and it has 128 kilobytes in its level one cache which occupies the width of a few eyelashes on the actually core. In the course of 30 years memory has been compacted from several pounds to barely noticeable.

I carry in my pocket a keychain device that holds 128 megabytes of memory, or about the same capacity of 88 floppy disks. There are other devices that occupy the same physical space as my keychain device or even less space that contain up to 2 gigabytes. Eight years ago that was a huge hard disk drive. Ten years ago 1 gigabyte was just beginning to appear and very few systems could actually recognize the drive. You had to have one of those new Pentium processor based motherboards to address such a huge capacity.

It is dangerous to predict the future. It is unlikely to do so with any accuracy. You cannot possibly conceive of every variation and nuance of causality or the relationships between discoveries, needs and events that determine which products make it to market and which do not. This is the 21st Century. This used to be the future and when it was forty years in the future all sorts of really far out things were anticipated.

Case and point: The Jetsons was a mid-1960's primetime cartoon that was optimistically set in the 21st Century with flying cars and colonies in space. I suppose it is still possible that in the next 95 remaining years, the world may evolve into something that more closely approximates that of George and Jane Jetson but I reallty do not think that it is very likely. I do not think there will be cities suspended on towers and cars that navigate an airborne superhighway.

Today's space stations are a far cry from the optimism of Arthur C. Clarke's vision in 2001: A Space Odyssey that was based on his short story "The Sentinel".

I have always been reluctant to predict the future. Of course what does it matter whether is predict things that linger a century away. There is little chance I will ever be there to hear how wrong I was. I could profess that rhinos would dominate the earth in a hundred years and you could never disprove it in the here and now. You could cling to the unlikely aspect.

Today I have witnessed the most amazing thing I have yet seen in computers. I opened a Apple Mac Mini and set it up for a display. Hooking up a 20" Apple monitor to it dwarfs it on such a radical scale that it is almost laughable. It is a square that is roughly 6 1/2 inch by 6 1/2 inches, (probably an accommodation for the slot loading DVD/CDRW combo drive) weighs 2.9 pounds and is 2 inches high. Its processor (at least the one I was working with) is a G4 with the velocity engine for graphics and a bus speed of 167MHz running at a core clock speed of 1.42GHz. The system utilizes 256MB of RAM and a 80GB hard drive. It boasts a ATI Radeon 9200 graphics solution with 32MB of DDR dedicated video memory able to support up to the 23 Inch Apple monitor at 1920X1200 pixels. It sports a Firewire 400 Mbps port and two USB 2.0 ports for connecting external peripherals. It may not be the cutting edge in performance when compared to dual G5 Power Macs but it is well beyond the curve in utter coolness.

When you see this the marvel of computer engineering you will want to buy one. At $599 for this particular version or $499 for the lesser version I kinda think a lot of disgruntled Windows machine users that hate all the popups and the spyware that is plaguing Internet Explorer may migrate into the Apple camp.

We are almost at the design limits of the materials we are using to produce microciruits and processors. The next processors scheduled to be produced are to be 65 nanometers as opposed to the 90 nanometers and the 130 nanometers processors on the market at the moment. If I recall from the few engineering courses that I took at Purdue University, 65 nanometers is just about single file for electrons passing through a conductive medium. Both Intel and rival AMD plan to produce mutliple core devices on a .065 micron process. Initially Intel will produce multiple core Pentium 4 (32-bit) devices using 130Watts of power while AMD plans to produce multiple core 64-bit processors in their Opteron series for servers using 90 watts of power. Intel will migrate toward their own 64-bit x86 processor cores later in the year, but no power consumption specification are yet available.

Clearly, using electrons as a means of transferring data has been exhausted. We have only to stick the fork in it to see if it is done. There are alternative technologies which are being tested and developed. Photon technology is the most immediately practical and easily implementable as it has been under development since I was in my 20's. Photons weight a lot less than electrons, cause less friction and therefore generate almost no heat. If a processor core could be based on photons verses electrons a whole new world of processor development could evolve.

We will call that prediction number one as at this point I do not see how electron based processors can dip below say .05 microns which would necessary for power conservation and greater transistor integration.

Prediction number two: The Internet will collapse or at least frequently falter within five years. The Internet was designed to be survivable so to say that it will collapse is not really accurate. It will become unusable at peak demand times. It is a volume verses bandwidth issue. The solution is to protocol the bandwidth allocations for discrete transactions instead of letting the call go free form onto the Internet and access the maximum bandwidth available at the moment. That will require some heavy duty software to control everything from server to the end user so that packets can be sent from point A to point B with the maximum bandwidth allowed at the moment. This is a monumental opportunity for an innovative software developing company to get a foothold and dominate the world of communications as a result.

Pediction number 3: We will land a manned mission on Mars in the not so distant future. Such missions capture the imagination of many of the people and almost all of the children. Overall it is a good thing. It will be a internationally funded mission with a multi-ethnic crew and international funding and cooperation although the bunk of the expense will be covered by wealthier nations of course. The craft will be prelaunched into orbit and docked with the international space station where final fittings and supplies will be loaded. The nuclear powered booster that will power the craft into a trans-Martian projection will also be fitted at the space station, as the risk of a nuclear accident and launching that much hardware from Earth in one chunk will seem inefficient and unwise.

I will not predict when we will land a man on Mars only that we will. I do not know what will confront and frustrate us. I only know or at least feel that it has to come about. I sense that there is something important that comes from the human desire to test the unknown and cross the boundaries of a new frontier.


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posted by Unknown @ 11:07 PM