A Dumbed-Down Version of the Internet

Media

by David Burke.

Obviously, no one who criticizes television can unreservedly embrace the internet. One cathode ray tube can be as bad as another, and there are many users wasting their lives in chat rooms who should be out chatting with real people in their street or local bar. But the internet has, to some extent, managed to threaten television. It has put a glossy new front end on the old idea of human contact, and made people wonder why they should have to spend so much time watching commercials. It reminds them that they can do better than TV's lifestyle of risk-free entertainment.

Open access: Like the cheap, hand printed leaflets of the 18th century, the internet has given anyone with an opinion or a story their chance to be heard. High distribution costs no longer stack the deck against a single author or small group.
Less censorship: The structure of the internet was originally designed by the U.S. military to withstand nuclear attack by operating without any central control. Governments have had a difficult time trying to limit access to such a system, and have sometimes just given up.
No programming: Unlike a TV viewer, an internet user logs on, gets what he or she wants and leaves. The user is not tied to a schedule. . . . This arrangement is sometimes referred to as "pull technology," and people like it. Advertisers are less happy.
E-commerce: The internet has the potential to break open national economies, providing small businesses with the same sales and distribution network as huge multinational corporations.
Text based: Even with better and better pictures, and the advent of sound files, animation and mini-cams, the internet has revived popular excitement about reading and writing. Just when we were told they were obsolete, we can again feel the power and living importance of words.
Communication: If you want to exchange messages with people all over the world, you have to have something to say. You have to have a personality robust enough and resourceful enough to reach out to them. You have to care enough about subjects to converse about them. TV has always shielded us from those requirements. The internet challenged its users to rediscover them.

This is real interaction, not just pushing buttons, but using the buttons to meet human beings. And it makes television look bad.

Saving Television

The television industry's response to the internet has been predictable. Companies have formed with names like Videotron, Two Way TV, Rupert Murdoch's BskyB, British Interactive Broadcasting, Microtime Media, WebTV, Sky Digital and Cable & Wireless. They are teaming up with telemarketers, video game designers database vendors and companies like Microsoft to invent a new paradigm.

First, convergence. They spoke at first about the need for investment in the internet, to clean it up, weed out the rogue elements, improve the picture quality and standardize the e-commerce. In other words, make it fit the television model. This did not work. The internet proved too big to tame.

Second, subversion. They bought, and continue to buy up, the internet portals, those search engines and home pages where people go first. These immediately became more TV-like and, as much as possible, promote the kind of leisure "surfing" that fits in with television. The portals now promote television brands and programs using the familiar words "Tonight only!" or "Don't miss it!"

Third, replacement. Digital interactive television is meant to satiate viewers' desire to join the digital age, while reassuring them that there is nothing new at all--just better commercials. As one advertising manger admits, "The endgame is to create a more profitable platform than the internet."

We are all about to take
the next step, as
computers move from
observing households
to observing individuals.

==========================

It keeps only the bits of the internet it can use, while shutting out any elements that constitute a threat to the old business model.

The Fabulous Features of Interactive TV

Limited access: The people who make and control interactive television are broadcasters. No one has any intention of opening the airwaves to everyone and every message, the way the internet does now.
Censorship: Believe it or not, this is a selling point. For all the commercialism and violence on TV, interactive TV providers still hope that viewers will be more nervous about the internet. There is a clear corporatist interest in demonizing the internet. Tight control over content, exercised by a few large companies, is meant to reassure people who have heard that cyberspace is nothing but a rendezvous for pedophiles and bomb makers.
Push technology: The push concept is crucial to interactive television. If a large choice of programs increases the risk that users will turn off their sets altogether, it is necessary to limit that choice again--package it dynamically into something fleeting and exciting. Television depends on the "big event." Something has to get viewers staying in to see it. That something is the Electronic Program Guide (EPG)--the on-screen television listing which allows users to choose programs. It's like a web browser, except it doesn't go where you tell it to go. It only goes to the places it offers, and is designed to nudge viewers into profitable directions.
E-commerce: If e-commerce on the internet threatened to open up competition so that every tiny business had the ability to trade with the world, interactive television closes that threat. As with commercials on ordinary TV, e-commerce on your television will be costly and tightly controlled. Participation will be limited to the same kinds of companies who advertise on television at the moment.
Picture based: Interactive TV's big advantage over the internet is its bandwidth. Rather than a few still pictures and some crude video, interactive television delivers all the flashing, sexy, moving images that a viewer could ever hope to sit and stare at for hours.
Entertainment: Interactive TV is not about communication. It may offer email, but the primary goal is escapism, just like ordinary TV. And the only interaction most viewers will have is with the software. Like a video game, or a coin operated gambling machine, an interactive TV is designed to get you deeply involved with a machine.

Military Surveillance for the Rest of Us

Of course, computers have been doing this for decades. In the 1960s Nielsen audits gathered 8 million bits of information about what was produced. In the 1970s, warehouse data was used to compile 130 million bits of information about what was sold to retailers. In the 1980s, store scanner data was used to amass 200,000 million bits of data about what people bought. And, according to Andersen Consulting, the 1990s have seen the focus move closer, to the household level. Systems that hold your address now produce 300 million million bits of information.

But we are all about to take the next step, as these computers move from observing households to observing individuals. Taken to this smallest unit, the use of such data becomes one-to-one marketing, a philosophy of "relationship marketing" that has exploded in popularity.

Databases are already collecting information about you including your address, occupation, family members, ages, income, purchases and ownership of various things. It will be easy for broadcasters to create the following additional reports about viewers of interactive television:

Viewing hours over week
Channel choice over week
Loyalty to shows
Who watches a certain show or shows, in order by wealth of neighborhood
Advertisements missed or seen
Viewer restlessness by type of program
Viewer restlessness by type of advertisement
Response to big events

These reports are simple but powerful. they describe behaviors in each household that broadcasters and advertisers have long dreamt of knowing. How many people are watching a car program, for how long, and how many of them live in wealthy neighborhoods? Who are they? What are their addresses?

Cluster Bombs

Neural networks will be used with digital interactive television in a number of important ways. This first is called collaborative filtering. And if you ever buy books on the internet, you can see it at work. Search for the book 1984 by George Orwell at the online bookstore Amazon.com and the page you get informs you, down at the bottom, that people who bought 1984 also bought:

Animal Farm by George Orwell
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

To come up with this advice, the software has been observing all people who buy all books. As more Amazon customers are seen buying the same two books, you can imagine those titles moving closer together on some virtual map. Evenually, clusters of titles appear, and the computer has invented a category of book.

To an extent you never
thought possible,
what you like and don’t like
to do will become known,
and even predictable.

==========================

What you do with your TV will fit you into clusters of activity that extend far away from your television, to areas of your life you thought were yours alone. To an extent you never thought possible, what you like and don't like to do will become known, and even predictable.

Consider that every program is also, to some extent, a commitment to think certain thoughts and spend time with certain imaginary people, and it is easy to see that what you watch will say more about you than your choice of detergent. It can hint at the answers to such questions as:

What anxieties do you have in your life?
What is your attitude toward sex?
What issues will determine how you vote in the next election?
How would you define a healthy family?

The second important application of neural network software to digital interactive television will be used to help segments of the population find themselves. This is a version of the clustering technique described above, except that instead of clustering actions around people, the software clusters people around the things they do, or products they buy, or opinions they hold.

The Amazon.com website features the use of this application as well. If you go to a service of theirs called "Book Matcher," you will be invited to rate five books from a long list. The service is then able to recommend other books you might like. To come up with these recommendations, the computer uses the collaborative filtering described before. But in this case, when looking for clusters of products you might like, the computer pays more attention to purchases made by people who have already shown themselves to be similar to you.

So for instance, if next to George Orwell's 1984 you selected "Loved it!" then the computer would pay more attention to the recommendations of someone else who liked that book, or someone who liked Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

A company called Andromedia that makes this kind of software refers to these people as your "like minded peers," and Amazon.com also describes their Book Matcher as "a meeting of minds." The funny thing of course is that you will never meet these other people you seem so well matched with, except on Amazon's terms. You have not come together for any purpose of your own, but instead have been identified as a segment of the population for someone else's purposes.

Excerpted from Spy TV: Just Who Is the Digital Revolution Overthrowing?