Blanc Weber wrote:
Technology is a display of the heights of human creativity and inventiveness. The end-users are often a display of the depths, and a presentation of the fact that even though endowed with intelligence and inalienable rights, an individual must participate in the process of their own existence, investing personal effort into determining its quality or else suffering the consequences of mental stagnation and & psychological degeneracy.
"an individual must participate in the process of their own existence" You have perceptively pinpointed the major downfall of TV as a medium which has a potential capacity to expand the horizons of those whose lives it influences. The fact that it indeed takes little "personal effort" to 'participate' in the flow of information coming from the medium leaves the viewer open to external manipulation of what they come to see as 'their' thoughts, 'their' emotions, and 'their' views. Once government experienced the 'runaway train' of Vietnam war-coverage, which exposed the true power of free access to information being a nadir point of vulnerability to the powers-that-be, then they adjusted their approach to media/information accordingly. Operation Desert Storm is a prime example of this. They now herd broadcast media into their pens and count on them to bring the rest of the populace into the fold. The ascencion of WebTV, or whatever form the new interactive media takes, will remain a battleground for both government and corporate interests, with individuals and various groups/factions of individuals struggling to force the main players into maintaining some form of options for those who genuinely wish to preserve their privacy and freedom, including freedom from being spoon-fed their reality by the major-players. If the future InterNet/WWW/TV configuration is allowed to become nothing more than another pawn in the designs of the rich and powerful, then the best that mankind, as a whole, can hope for, is to become 'interactive sheep'. -- Toto "The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre" http://bureau42.base.org/public/xenix/xenbody.html