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LIFE AFTER LIFE AFTER TELEVISION: With nearly 20 years of hindsight, the blurb for George Gilder?s b?

By Ed Driscoll

LIFE AFTER LIFE AFTER TELEVISION: With nearly 20 years of hindsight, the blurb for George Gilder’s book Life After Television, published in 1992, shortly before the first browser was available for consumers to access the still-nascent World Wide Web, sounds remarkably prescient:

Gilder’s thesis, written in layman’s terms, is that the United States will soon lose its rightful preeminence in the telecommunications field to foreign competitors, particularly the Japanese. Unless, that is, American business executives, legislators, judges, and consumers look beyond separate, limited, and hierarchical forms of communication such as television, telephones, and online databases to a multifunctional, interactive, and democratic “telecomputer.” Instead of envisioning a brave new telecomputerized world, the powers that be in American business, government, and law are wasting time protecting obsolete existing systems, he posits. Gilder also warns that expensive, user-unfriendly online databases such as Dialog and NEXIS are, at best, transitional technologies. Though much of Gilder’s argument is based on his own opinions and peculiar personal preferences (Gilder doesn’t seem to like to leave the house*) rather than real evidence, his thoughts make interesting reading.

In the latest issue of Videomaker magazine, video producer D. Eric Franks takes Gilder’s thesis to the next level: “TV is Dead,” adding “Everything you grew up with in terms of mass multimedia is dead; it just doesn’t know it yet.” (Franks’ Videopia blog is also a fun browse, even if DIY video isn’t your thing.)

* Given a new round of rising gas prices, who does like leaving the house, knowing that telecommuting is an increasingly viable option? And incidentally, in-between Gilder’s book from the early ’90s, and Franks’ article today, it’s also worth flashing back, via this 2008 Slate piece by Jack Shafer, to the late Michael Crichton’s equally prescient thoughts on how the legacy news media got that way.

Related: Still though, no media ever dies entirely: James Lileks has some thoughts on “The Persistence of Print,” including the announcement of a new Lileksian publication!

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on May 18, 2010 (boomark / email).