Week Twelve

Does Media Really Die?

One problem I had with the Gilder piece, especially in the first half, was his constant insistence that TV is a doomed medium, headed for a sure death at the hands of new technology and broadcast standards. Sure, it's a little unfair to look at how the situation played out 20 years after Gilder wrote the piece, but it's a mentality I just don't understand.

Television today really only resembles television of 20 or 30 years ago in name only. Yet the medium persists. Content delivery shifted from over the air to cable, but the box still remains in every living room in the country. Computers rose, becoming more and more like the telecomputers Gilder wrote of, but the set still sits in the living room. There only functional difference between computer monitors and HDTVs is a tuner and a coax jack, but the big screens have only moved from sitting on a shelf in the living room to being mounted on the walls.

Television hasn't died, it has evolved, and this is becoming true for every form of media. We are far, far past the point of compartmentalized forms of media that become obsolete after certain advancements (although print media may be the last holdout). Rather, a breakthough in one area, such as the development of flat screen HD displays, becomes a breakthrough in every area. 

As the second half of Gilder's piece indicates, even though corporations and governments aren't quite past the idea of killing one form of media in favor of boosting their own, technology certainly is. Natural selection has worked its way into the technological sector in the form of the microchip, and it's becoming readily apparent that any media that chooses to adapt to it will survive for a long time to come.

Media will continue to blend and meld, like TVs and computers becoming nearly indistinguishable from one another, but neither is going away.