by David Burke

The chances are you spend one quarter of your waking life in front of a TV set, perhaps saying, "it's like having someone in the room." Meanwhile, because of television, you have fewer conversations, and fewer people know you intimately.

But a new type of television is being developed, called "interactive TV." Millions of dollars are being spent to create a device that really is someone in the room with you, someone who will know you intimately. Matthew Timms, head of programming at Two Way TV in London describes this digital revolution you have heard so much about:

"Somehow they feel they're sitting there, it's just them and the television--even though the reality is that it's got a wire leading straight back to somebody's computer. So it actually gets sort of interesting information back."

Timms is talking about his customers, the people who pay him money each month. Perhaps they were attracted to his company's subscriber list by its promises of Choice, Fun, Convenience, Empowerment, Control--that's what interactive television offers. Sitting on your couch, you will soon be able to have almost any product or service you desire, delivered at the touch of a button.

But what if you prefer to monitor people in their homes, any time, day or night? What if you want to build up, over years, psychological profiles of individuals from a distance--what motivates them, what makes them anxious, what makes them jump? What if you want to use that knowledge to manipulate what they know, how they feel and, finally, what they do?

Interactive television can deliver that as well. It can provide all this control to any company or government that is able to pay the money. "We can build up profiles of people," says Two Way TV Managing Director Simon Cornwell, "based on what they say and on their actual behavior. Eventually the product will target itself to individual customers, and what one customer sees will be very different from what another customer sees."

Interactive television will be used to invade viewers' privacy. Contrary to what you may have heard, that is important, because privacy was never about information; it's about power--the individual's bargaining power with the rest of the world. If you have nothing left to hide, then your negotiating position is impossibly weak. Your free will is exposed to tampering, and you may have much to fear.

This technology creates experimental conditions in the home ... a loop of stimulus, response and measurement as carefully designed as those boxes where rats hit buttons to get food and avoid electric shocks.

If asked, people who work in interactive television will admit that this technology creates experimental conditions in the home. The machines that control your TV set will show you something, check to see how you react, and then show you something different. That's not just convenient. It's a loop of stimulus, response and measurement as carefully designed as those boxes where rats hit buttons to get food and avoid electric shocks.

A digital interactive television will be able to do some or all of the following things:

• Broadcast content

• Address content to individual sets

• Customize content on the fly

• Send video on demand

• Receive information from the viewer's set

The people who sell it call interactive television "a convergence." And it is--of so many things: marketing, child psychology, advertising, public relations and politics. Not to mention complex adaptive systems software.

But how will it affect you? You are about to accept a powerful new device into your home, and interact with it every day for an average of four hours, that is half the time you are not sleeping and working, for the rest of your life. What is this machine designed to do?

It is hard to find out the truth about this machine, and decide whether to accept it. The only people who know anything, and are doing all the talking, are the companies trying to sell it. And they haven't been telling the whole truth--not in the television commercials, glossy booklets or their carefully worded contracts.

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