There is, of course, an entity the broadcast/cable moguls never saw coming. They’re increasingly ill-at-ease with the Internet. Their fear is borne out in Republican FCC rulings designed to counter what they rightly perceive as a gathering threat to centralized media power. But their analysis is D.O.A. They hope to staunch the free flow of media formation by giving the moguls yet more access and ownership to the tattered remnants of an obsolete media paradigm. No matter the number of radio and television operations they may accrue, no matter the daily papers and magazines they add to their roster, unless they succeed in locking down the free-flow of media-matter over the Internet they’ll be eating their skid-marked undies for lunch.
Who in the know, after all, trusts GE, Disney and Rupert Murdoch to give them the straight dope? Besides, with multi-tasking, who devotes undivided attention to a passive, unresponsive and tedious medium whose only reason for existing is to manipulate you into product purchase?Only dopes and zombies.
All this said, there remains an alternative sub-genre, which, while it necessitates active participation, is in many ways still a progeny of the couch potato: The incredibly successful video gaming industry, and the full-immersion life style it’s fostered. Like the consumer/zombie, the vid-gamer is taken out of his or her family/community experience and placed amidst an Alice in Wonderland fantasy. Take this mushroom you grow big, eat that one you grow small. Reality is effectively replaced with an increasingly perfected near-reality or virtual reality experience.
stimulating communication and change, by which actual problem-solving platforms replace adolescent wanker fantasies.P. Joseph Potocki
