McLuhan claimed that society had previously been dominated by print media–books, magazines and newspapers–but television became the controlling medium and changed us all.45 Towards the end of the television era, the average American household had the set on for seven hours a day, with actual viewing estimated at four and a half hours per adult. Japan had even higher figures–average household television time in 1992 was eight hours, seventeen minutes. These numbers constitute a huge share of our leisure hours. Moreover, the ascendancy of television coincided with a burgeoning of the consumer society and proliferation of branded consumer goods, whose growth was stimulated by new, sophisticated marketing, centred on television advertising.
Television is an inflexible mass broadcast system, simultaneously spreading the same experience to everyone in the audience. With only a single message sent at peak viewing times, the broadcasters–dominated in most Western countries by commercial networks–naturally sought messages that appealed to the largest audience, and hence to advertisers with the biggest budgets. Witness the success of The Brady Bunch or Starsky and Hutch–a clear bias towards trivial and escapist content, the pursuit of the sensational, and to soap operas which could engage the viewer and in many cases provide a more gripping narrative than was enjoyed in ‘real’ life.
McLuhan noted that television’s one-way broadcast created an immediately gratifying, uniform, passive and unexamined experience. He claimed that TV was taking us backwards, beyond the civilised life of reason and individuality created by European print culture, to the time when our ancestors lived in tribes and were afraid of mysterious outside forces. The new village might be superficially modern and ‘global’ rather than local, but essentially, he said, it was the same–everyone heard the same news at the same time, communal terror was easily stimulated by the graphic depiction of disasters, and the immediacy and inescapability of human suffering shown on television led us to emotional rather than rational responses. Instead of witch doctors, we were in thrall to the broadcasters and the spin they put on events. Furthermore, since McLuhan first published his theories, psychologists have discovered that people who habitually watch several hours of television a day typically experience mild depression.
But now it appears we have a new dominant medium. If you are connected online, you are probably spending more time on the Web than watching television. A comprehensive US study shows that the average Internet user now spends nearly thirty-three hours online each week, double what they spend watching television. The researchers conclude, ‘the time spent using the Internet will continue to increase at the expense of television, and to a lesser extent, print media’.46
Of course, the Internet is different from television and earlier media in substantive ways. Consider, for instance, the ubiquity of Internet connection. For television, there was typically only one connection point, in the home. We might also have listened to the radio in the car on the way to work, and read a newspaper at breakfast, on the bus, train or at our desk. For sure, we used to spend many hours a day ‘consuming’ various media; but if we are connected, the Internet is much more prevalent in our daily lives. We can be, and increasingly are, online at home, in the office and anywhere and everywhere else with an increasing array of powerful desktop and mobile devices. As more participants are drawn into online networks, their value and importance in our lives are likely to rise and rise.
Another difference is the vast increase in information that resides in cyberspace, far surpassing television’s informational power. Storage technology (memory), display technology (xml, html), search technology (Google), publishing technology (wikis, blogging and Twitter) and organising technology (social networks such as Facebook) have multiplied the amount of knowledge available and the ease of accessing it–and we are only in the early stages of this astonishing and bewildering cornucopia.
Earlier media–whether sermons from preachers or lectures from professors, print, radio, the movies or television–transmitted information in a single direction, from the few to the many. But the Internet is two-way. When we’re online, we not only receive information but transmit it; we can all be publishers as well as readers. Earlier media were inherently hierarchical and could bolster the central power of elites; in theory, at least, cyberspace is more democratic.
A final difference is the overwhelming choice the Internet offers and the possibility of tailoring its output to the needs of small groups or even individuals. The Web can ‘narrow-cast’ on demand.
So has cyberspace changed us? Researcher and author Don Tapscott claims it has and that the purest indications come from the young generation that has grown up with the Internet. Tapscott has conducted more than ten thousand interviews with this ‘Net generation’ and he paints a glowing picture. They use sites such as MySpace and Facebook to manage several hundred contacts–Tapscott says 700 is not unusual, far beyond the 150 contacts that anthropologists consider the typical limit of people we can know properly. Young Internet users, he says, do not accept information on the Web at face value; they are consummate sceptics, researchers, authenticators, referrers and critical customers. Given that cyberspace presents information disconnected from real-world clues to quality or reliability–you can’t squeeze the merchandise–this is a vital skill. The Net generation has figured out which sources to trust, when to get second opinions, and how to navigate the ocean of unverified information.
Perhaps Tapscott’s most revolutionary argument is that this generation is conditioned to thinking and acting in an interactive world. It is natural to be connected, to ‘talk’, to provide feedback and to collaborate; it is unnatural to be a silent recipient. The new generation will carry these critical and collaborative attitudes into every realm that they encounter. Tapscott implies that the new expectations will collide with existing practices in education, business and government, all of which still basically assume that knowledge and instructions travel in one direction, from top to bottom.
Not everyone, however, shares this rosy view of the Internet. The opposite case is that the new generation’s reading and writing have suffered; that they can’t focus or concentrate for long periods; that they plagiarise without guilt; and that they blithely create a permanent public record of their personal lives that they may later regret. The distinguished novelist Salman Rushdie has critiqued today’s ‘blurt culture’–where people push spontaneous reams of private information into the electronic ether in a ceaseless stream of low-quality self-expression. ‘Blognate’ Arianna Huffington has celebrated ‘first thoughts’ as ‘best thoughts’. Rushdie does not agree–he fears we are moving to a future where people will not think and communicate in a considered and structured way. As the world grows more complicated, not less, he sees a looming problem.
Yet, there are some problems even with McLuhan’s judgement on the impact of television, let alone the ‘all-change’ view regarding the Internet. One immediate difficulty with the idea that television changed society or human nature is that one might have expected such a powerful, centrally controlled, top-down medium to have led to a docile, conformist and mindless generation, gullible, easily manipulated, willing to do what they were told. But where are these people? Despite the forebodings of George Orwell in 1984,47 William Hollingsworth Whyte in The Organisation Man,48 and Pete Seeger in his 1963 hit song ‘Little Boxes’,49 the heyday of television coincided not only with a dose of bourgeois conformity but with the opposite–an explosion of individuality, diversity and soul-searching, an increased tolerance or encouragement of minority norms or eccentric behaviour, together with an unprecedented rejection of central authority and distrust of society’s leaders.