Douglas Rushkoff : online
Gathered together beneath the chandeliers of the Beverly Hilton’s main ballroom earlier this year, Hollywood’s best and brightest (dressed, anyway) had paid about $1 500 each to rub elbows with the interactive media-makers who would soon, they feared, replace them.
Meanwhile, a demonstration floor crowded with technology from Compaq and other Silicon Valley behemoths offered a platform for sales reps seeking to hook the contracts a digital Hollywood would surely spawn.
The purpose of this conference was to orient the entertainment industry to the promise of networking technology. The consensus of the group was that there was money to be made on the Net – most probably by taking the content and talent they owned and repackaging it for the online environment. Conversely, those who chose to ignore the coming digital revolution knew they would only suffer the slow, certain death of obsolescence.
I had the dubious pleasure of addressing this conference, suitably entitled Networked Entertainment World. If only I hadn’t been asked to speak first, I may not have felt so compelled to dash their hopes. “Networked entertainment is an oxymoron,” I proclaimed. Indeed, entertainment literally means “to hold within”, while networking is to branch out.
A studio executive equated this argument with the anti-technology rhetoric of the Unabomber. Little did he realise that he was the one turning back the clock by insisting that the Internet reduce itself to just another content delivery system.
The rush to converge the Internet (a communications medium) with television (a programming medium) is ill-founded and ill- fated. I don’t want to watch TV at my desk, and I don’t want to send e-mail from the couch. TV could be considered a “yin” experience – a passive acceptance of entertainment programming.
The Net is a “yang” experience. Even when we use the Net to make a purchase, the sensation is that of moving out through the networks and procuring objects.
The power of the Internet is its ability to foster communication between people – networking. It’s not the content that makes networking so special and the Net so engaging – it’s the living human beings.
Likewise, TV is fine just the way it is. No matter how much we all complain about the quality of today’s programmes, after a long day of sitting at the computer most of us would prefer to shut it off and then collapse on the couch. We use the TVremote control to escape bad programmes. The object is to find something good and toss the remote aside.
A “Web TV” interface might allow us to choose a movie from a menu rather than going to the store, but that’s hardly “networked entertainment”. It’s just an electronic TV listing.
If networking is about contact, and entertainment is about content, then how can the two be combined? The best examples of networked entertainment I’ve seen are interactive gaming sites. Players can log on to networks and play with or against one another. Most of these sites allow players to chat with one another.
The appearances by famous guests in AOL “auditoriums” also provide entertaining group experiences for those who participate. Although the guest celebrity could be seen as the “content”, the potential for live interaction with him or one’s fellows in the stalls provides the networked context.
If Hollywood hopes to venture into networked entertainment, its developers must think of themselves more as the hosts of parties than the providers of content. They will have to come up with new ways to stage more of the “be-ins” that give the Internet its character.
Until they do, I’ll look for my entertainment on the TV.
c Douglas Rushkoff
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