Let's talk about television and newspapers. The most important thing to notice about this kind of mass media is that you can't talk back to it. Sure, you can mail in a letter to The Post saying that you think headlines like "Ivana: `Donald is a Jerk'" are despicable, but your letter isn't going to have the same presence that the 150-point headline on the front page has. Same thing with television. Oftentimes they'll have an address you can write letters to or a 900 number you can call with your comments. But your response will never take the same priority that their stories and opinions take. This unidirectionality is the fundamental problem with the mass media of today and it is at fault for most of the "junk-food for the brain" (as Wayne Gale says) that comes our way. Stories in today's mainstream media that actually inspire discussion or a desire to talk back to the medium are usually bad from the point of view of the market-hungry editor or producer. Stories have to be about shallow topics--such as mass murderers like Mickey and Mallory Knox on American Maniacs--and not inspire much discussion, or else the medium falls apart. When a viewer or reader does not agree with what a medium has to offer and has no means by which to make his own opinions known, he will ultimately turn off the television or close the newspaper out of frustration.
Notice that the editorials (opinions that are deemed such and invite response) are usually kept to two columns of print out of a whole newspaper, and that shows like Meet the Press or "Town Hall Meetings" make up less than 5% of the total programming on television. Seventy or so people can participate in a "Town Hall Meeting," while the millions of viewers can't express their opinion equally through the medium. The problem is not that the masses don't want to think; the problem is that they're unable to say what they do think in such a way that many others can hear--that's why the shows on television generally aren't intelligent.
Relatively newer technologies such as CD-ROMs and the World Wide Web are susceptible to the same problem, but only the Web has the potential of avoiding it. A CD-ROM is an outlet of info-rmation that doesn't have a true and equal inlet for res-ponse. If news-papers and magazines move to distributing CD-ROMs periodically as their medium instead of paper, the same problem ensues, because the magazine editors are still acting merely as information providers, and only the physical medium will have changed. The Web, however, could be a two-way street. Every user can make opinions known, and to everyone else, through Web pages. However, there's an obvious problem with precedence in these opinions on the Web. For example, if your Beatles fan page is connected to the NCSA home page, you're going to get a lot more viewers than an Anti-Beatles page that's connected to the stupid.com home page. There is hope: a new feature called Group Annotations slated for Mosaic will allow users to post annotations at the end of a page that are seen by everyone within a workgroup. If the concept is carried further, and the group annotation server is used by the whole Web community, we have global annotations. In this case, the Web becomes a viable medium in which discussion can occur and in which ideas can be expressed by everyone. If you disagree with Alan Braverman's claims that The Bad Examples are the best rock group in the world, for example, you can put your comments right at the bottom of his Bad Examples home page.
To abolish the junk on television from future information technology, and have a "media" that is intelligent, informative, and allows each user to express his or her opinions, we need to establish media that can go two ways. The USENET is a really great example of a medium that everyone can participate in equally (well, as long as the group isn't moderated.) The LBL multicast tools, such as Visual Audio Tool (an audio conferencing program for workstations), WhiteBoard, and nv (a video conferencing tool), allow everyone to participate. You can have real "Town Hall Meetings," because that is the kind of interaction that this technology promotes. This medium also has built-in checks against programs like American Maniacs, since there is almost no way to tolerate having just one reporter asking questions when every person has the technology to join in. Future media must be interactive if we are to avoid the society that Natural Born Killers plays upon.
The Banks is an interactive medium and welcomes response. If you have something to say about information technology and the future of mass media, send it to us and we'll try to print it in the next Banks. If we can't, I promise to give your opinion its own Web page linked from the page for this issue, so you can have as much say in the matter as I do. Hey, if I didn't do this, I'd look like a hypocrite, now wouldn't I? :-)