By John M. Smart

The elephant in America’s living room right now is that there is not nearly enough quality choice, specialization, and personalization on television. According to many social critics, 70 years of lowest-common-denominator, mass-produced, big-business-driven TV content and news has hobbled Americans’ education and narrowed their worldview. It has stunted their social participation and increasingly distracted them with entertainments, as in decadent Roman times.
Those who want sustained, in-depth television coverage of any particular issue; who want more transparency, accountability, foresight, and the ability to measure progress (in their own or their party’s terms) on an issue; who strive to see the United States in global context; and who desire collective action to fix a problem are today unable to use society’s primary electronic medium. They can’t use it to interact with their fellow citizens or to produce programming worthy of their communities.
As the Internet advances, however, this is beginning to change.
In recent decades, many European and Asian developed countries have become more equitably regulated in media ownership and transparency, and they are much further along in wired and wireless access to the Internet than the United States. Not coincidentally, these countries also have superior educational performance, much stronger social safety nets, more-extensive personal rights, and greater citizen participation in governance. Many, including Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, are centers for world-leading manufacturing run by high-paid workers.
The same can no longer be said for the United States, as demonstrated by the nation’s persistent trade deficits and the 60-year collapse of steel, auto, and manufactured goods industries. Only 4% of all American firms and 15% of manufacturers do any exporting at all, according to Matthew Slaughter of Dartmouth College. The export economy has so little diversity that just 1% of U.S. firms account for 80% of exports.
But perhaps the deepest problem that the United States faces, as documented by the Gini coefficient, is that the rich–poor divide has grown so much in the last 40 years that it now rivals emerging nations, countries like Venezuela, Argentina, China, and Mauritania. Meanwhile, the developed countries mentioned earlier have all become more income equal over the same time period. Data-backed books like Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level (Bloomsbury Press, 2009) document that income inequality leads to greater crime, educational failure, illiteracy, unemployment, poorer health, teen pregnancy, obesity, mental illness, homelessness, class warfare, and political deadlock.
Ingenuity and the right incentives can fix these problems, but the United States will first need new groups of citizens that recognize them as problems. U.S. leaders don’t have the ability to change the system on their own. Furthermore, as the income gap data suggests, these leaders are increasingly among the ultra rich, so they may not be motivated to change the system.
To change this state of affairs, access to true Internet television, not the walled gardens that cable companies offer American consumers, will be a critical piece of social equity.
I argue that access to the Internet’s media universe in our living rooms, with appropriate content controls for youth, should be the right of every citizen in a developed society. It’s also something that the major telecommunications companies like Verizon and cable companies like Comcast want to slow down, according to testimony from public-interest groups like Public Knowledge, the Center for Public Integrity, and even industry groups like the Competitive Telecommunications Association.

How Television Could Rise From the Wasteland

Robert Putnam’s perceptive book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon and Schuster, 2001), chronicles the loss of social identity and interpersonal relationship complexity that occurred in U.S. towns and communities from the nation’s 1950s zenith to today’s nadir. Putnam names a number of culprits for this, but principally blames television.
Network television steals our eyeballs out of complex, two-way, social interactions in human space. It focuses us instead on one-way electronic messages. In The Assault on Reason (Penguin, 2007), former U.S. Vice President Gore says that average American consumers have seen a steady loss of complexity in the political conversation in the last 50 years, and the quality of American media is directly to blame. Network television is, on average, a “vast wasteland,” and has been so for decades, as then-newly appointed FCC chairman Newton N. Minow said in his famous speech in 1961.
TV production quality now rivals the movie studios, and programming choice has slowly expanded over the years (as noted in The Economist’s May 2010 report on the future of television, Changing the Channel). But compared with video on the Web, which includes user-created channels like YouTube’s Disco project and peer-to-peer offerings, television is less competitive than it was. Cable television gave U.S. viewers first 50, then 90, then 150 channels of slightly more interesting wasteland.
I argue that access to tens of thousands of specialty channels, a variety of content-aggregation options, and collaborative filtering by peer and trusted expert rankings would better serve U.S. social needs. Such a system will enable all those who wish to do so to eliminate unpersonalized advertising. What we need is two-way communication: person-to-person and many-to-many, not one-to-many. What we need is an electronic re-creation of the interactivity of the 1950s communities that Putnam chronicles, but in digital space, with the modern world’s collective intelligence and diversity. Social networks are a start, but not nearly enough. Web 3.0, comprising TV-quality peer-to-peer video delivered on the Web, will be the next major step in this progression.
Film and television remain among the least competitive and democratic of all media. They have historically high development costs (your average Hollywood movie costs more than $106 million). We’ve seen small cracks in the film distribution monopoly in the last decade, with all the new documentaries produced by “filmanthropists”—folks who mortgage their house and self-finance low-budget films with $100,000 of capital or less. Many of these filmmakers can now make their money back, plus a small profit, just by using the personalized Netflix content distribution and rating system (“you told me you liked this film, so you may also like this new film”), which surfaces such niche films for users to consider. Most of these films would never get on cable TV or the retail floor in any Blockbuster or Hollywood Video store. More recently we also have Netflix’s Watch Instantly (streaming video), iTunes movies, and a few other Internet outlets for independently produced specialty content.
Imagine how much more important, entertaining, and educational video we will see once most of us have Internet televisions at home, managing our access to thousands of online video aggregation environments. Want to see a three- to five-minute public domain film summarizing a Wikipedia page? You’ll be able to pay 25 cents for it through the iTV of tomorrow, and eventually someone will make that film for you (and all of us), and make a profit. The media marketplace will be forever splintered. The old media corporations, and their big federated ad clients, will have given up trying to keep the lid on our choice. The new video universe will finally have arrived for everyone.