Oooh--nice deck chair
We're in a recession. People are screaming Bomb
Iran. We've lost our right to habeas
corpus.
And I'm happy. Because Steve Jobs
gave this speech at MacWorld.
Yes, I have it
bad.
Of course, it's nice to see things that
you can just admire. And it's nice to see someone deliver the future on a
regular basis. And who doesn't go wow just a bit at a laptop that can fit inside
a manila envelope?
Sometimes it's just nice
to see your team win.
But this time there's a
bit more than that. What really gave me a positive jolt was Steve's announcement
on the Apple TV. Instead of being a junction box between your computer and your
TV so you can play YouTube on your TV, now the box doesn't require a
computer.
Yes, you plug the Apple TV into
your broadband connection and your TV, and using the chewing-gum-stick Apple
remote, you can buy (and rent!) movies. And Hi-Def movies. And TV shows. And
video podcasts.
The iTunes Music Store
offering TV shows for $1.99 was, as I saw then, the first beat in the death of
network television. The Apple TV was another. But now I think the first violins
are coming in.
This is not just the NetFlix
killer, and the Cable-On-Demand Killer. For many people, this can replace, right
now, today, one's cable connection.
And
that's more than cool, that's the sound of big things
shifting.
With the battle between
Blu-Ray and HDDVD just now being resolved in favor of Blu-Ray (which still
sounds like a cleaning solvent), we are presented with an alternate system: buy
your HD movie and keep it on a hard drive. Rent your HD movie and play it on
your HDTV without a Blu-Ray player or anything else. Steverino even dropped the
price on the AppleTV box from $299 to $229.
I've tried the Apple Rental setup, and it's
pretty simple and seamless. Without the streaming built into the Apple TV,
downloading Ratatouillle took about an hour, I watched it on my computer, and in
24 hours it will vanish from my hard drive. 4 bucks.
I'm not going to replace my cable
until Turner Classic Movies develops an ITunes feed. But you think that won't
come? (Disclosure: this is particularly nice for me since my big ol' Sony has
lost its green gun, and is OK for black and white, but color stuff resembles 3-D
movies. So there's a plus watching a movie on a computer
screen.)
It's not irresistible yet for a
number of reasons: TV shows are the next day, and there's a lot of more marginal
stuff unavailable. But it's available completely without subscription or any
other commitment. And the YouTube and podcasting stuff opens your TV up to
unprecedented variety. Millions of channels available by the same process as
renting a movie. Completely ad hoc TV. Now.
Today.
That's more than just more stuff
to amuse ourselves to death with at a lower price. Changing TV changes America.
In its history, the postwar period is a very peculiar one indeed. As a nation
we shifted from provincial echo to world cultural leader. We had this new
suburban model which combined rural homeowner with corporate cog, egalitarianism
with consumption, all very different and strange, and hopeful. And into that
transformative time, the channels of culture narrowed down radically. # TV
networks that replaced not only the whole crowded spectrum of radio but the
movie studio as well. It boosted cultural solidarity in that it suddenly became
easier to guess what people were watching, and hearing. (and in those days, with
most family having only one set, there was more family solidarity as
well.)
That's not altogether a good
thing, of course--we all know the conformity it tended to foster. But it may
have been necessary: we needed to have a better sense of who we were before we
could make the changes that were going to be necessary. It was, among other
things, a cultural refutation of the South: before the war, the racist South
and the segregated nation as a whole were too much part of our picture of our
nation. But after the establishment of the Suburbs as America, equality with the
African American was easy to envision: black folks barbecuing in the back yard
of a suburban split level with a sliding glass door looking in on a living room
with wall-to-wall carpets, Swedish modern furniture and a big ol' tube-packed
television. Black equality could be envisioned as a fulfillment rather than a
shattering of the American picture, and the Southern cultural picture could be
seen as anachronistic, out of touch and, well,
un-American.
(There's of course more to it
than that, and it's not fixed yet, but I don't think that cultural break and
that cultural redefinition should be
underestimated.)
But a side effect of
that cultural isthmus was a narrowing down of the vision of culture, and its
corporatization. Unless it came through that narrow cathode-ray gate, it was
strange. THe infinity of books was flied down to the Book of the Month Club, and
things needed a corporate imprimatur to be
'ours.'
I've said this before, but for large
portions of America, the Marx Brothers and Humphrey Bogart were esoterica
(Groucho was a game show host, and that was it.) Old movies were lost forever
unless they were in the library of a local station.
The VCR changed the shape of
America--especially when combined with that innovation borrowed from the porn
industry, tape rental. Suddenly our new culture had a history and a breadth. (I
was talking about the rise of film and media studies in academia, and realized
that before the VCR, our postwar culture didn't really include movies in any
real way: 'Saturday Night at the Movies' only premiered in 1974, and that was
the first network show that showed movies. Before then it was an ultra-super
special feature--and the non-ultra super=special movies did not exist. Movies,
instead of being part of our landscape, were part of a great corporate rushing
river that Americans could not bathe in the same place twice. The VCR brought
movies to dry land, and Americans' memory became
better.
The VCR moved us further
indoors, further away from books and theater and other good things, and further
from each other. But we had been weaned from the corporate teat, and now were
accepting solid food from the table. You no longer knew what your neighbor was
watching on the Big Bright Box, and that is good as well as bad.
And now we have a box that can
effectively end that corporate suckling for the rest of it. It's not perfect,
but it's here, and the flaws will go more quickly than we expect. It will give
us a library that is just as easy and accessible as the nipple. And America has
been ready for the library for a while
now.
Is this going to make a
difference? Maybe not. It won't stop us tumbling into recession and it won't
stop the nuking of Iran. Severe damage has been made to our economy and our
polity. Dealing with global warming just gets harder the longer we're shackled
to this Republican chain gang. Better TV won't keep away that big
iceberg.
But our culture remains
largely undamaged. We have been steadily widening that corporate infantile
narrowness. If we survive, we very well might find a world in which every music
company looks like an indie record producer, and where every TV company looks
more like an indie film company. It wouldn't end our appetite for junk, or make
us wiser or more inclined to read Jane Austen, but we'll be free of the high
chair and the huge figures feeding us.
For on the table is a banquet. We will
almost assuredly eat too much dessert, and that first, but maybe, just maybe,
we'll learn not to swallow just anything that is put to us.
Nice going, Steve. Still want my
flying car, though.
Posted: Friday - January 18, 2008 at 06:35 PM