Op-Ed Contributor - Extinction-Level Television Event - NYTimes.com
Alan Sepinwall portrays the demise of network television. Networks, three of them, dominated television in its early days. I grew up in black and white CBS, ABC and NBC. It was new media and it rallied people together as no media has since.
While the Internet is wildly successful, it does not create a coherent, group experience. Instead, it enables a fragmented disconnected-in-time (email), although social networking with phenomena like Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo and many others are successful because they provide a shared experience, the same as television did initially.
George Gilder, the early technology evangelist predicted that the technology world was being turned inside out by fast, cheap processors and memory alongside fiber optics and wireless networks. Wikipedia has this to say about him: "His books include Life After Television, a 1990 book that predicted microchip would make broadcast-model television obsolete, Microcosm, about Carver Mead and the CMOS microchip revolution; Telecosm, about the promise of fiber optics"telecomputers" connected by fiber optic cable.
Gilder said that everything that travels on wires (telephony) will go wireless and that which is wireless (including TV) would travel on wires as a result of this revolution. He was/is fundamentally correct.
The social implications are less clear, but we are clearly living in a more fragmented world that will eventually see the death of network TV.
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