I am standing in the year 2009, at the exact center of 100 years of American media history. Behind me, into the past, I am looking at 1959. When I turn to face the future, I am looking at the year 2059.
I can't imagine what America will look like in 2059. I can barely believe what it looked like in 1959, and I was there, 16 years old, in the 11th grade. When I tell you about it, I am truly a visitor from another planet. The cars had radios, but radio stations were few and far between, and they were all AM. My town had three stations, presenting a grab-bag of news, farm news, cooking shows, Arthur Godfrey, "The Breakfast Club," and music.
The music was an intriguing mix of standards and the new music, rock and roll. It was the most interesting shock, to hear a Vic Damone song end, and in the same breath hear a Little Richard song start. When the atmosphere was right, kids cruising in their big Chevys and Fords (gasoline was 13 cents a gallon) could bring in the real rock, and blues, stations, from New Orleans and Nashville, and the background static imparted a sense of distance, and adventure.
Most towns and cities had newspapers, and cities over 50,000 had both morning and evening editions, with strong local and regional coverage. The post office delivered Life magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Look. The library had many books.
Television still had a novel feel. My town had a station, that came on the air at 6 a.m. and went dark, after "Vespers," at midnight. All the content was black-and-white. Watching television in 1959 required some technical skill. There were two tuning knobs, a big one for the VHF channels 2 through 13, and a smaller one for the UHF stations at channel 15 and above. To watch television, you turned it on and selected a channel, almost always VHF. You adjusted the antenna, that sat on top of the television set, either a "rabbit-ears" or, if you had the money, a control knob that rotated an antenna on the roof of the house.
Then you adjusted the horizontal hold control, the vertical hold control, and the fine tune control, so the picture was fairly clear, no snow, and hopefully free of a double-image. To switch channels, you got up from the couch, clicked the VHF knob, rotated the antenna toward the new source, adjusted horizontal, vertical and fine-tune controls, and hoped for the best. Most shows were 30 minutes, so at the end of the half-hour, if you wanted to go back to the first station, you got up and repeated the process.
Our local station was an NBC affiliate. The other networks were CBS, ABC and Dumont, and if you had a good ChannelMaster antenna, sometimes you could bring in the Dallas and Fort Worth stations.
And for media, 50 years ago, that was it. The planet still turned under a relatively quiet sky.
But things were happening. Television was revolutionizing advertising. Elvis Presley and other rockers were revolutionizing not only music, but creating an extension of the culture that would become a culture unto itself. Entrepreneurs were developing a product called videotape. Hugh Hefner was developing a new magazine. Research and development people were thinking about wiring, not television affiliates, but homes themselves, with cable. A federal highway system, intended to move armies efficiently in the event the Cold War turned into a hot one, instead started moving people, and products, efficiently, from coast to coast.
And computers were starting to get smaller. In the quiet sky of 1959, after tens of thousands of years of human development, conditions were starting to appear, and fall into place, for a perfect storm of media codes.
It would take time. It took 50 years, one day at a time, no faster, to get from the bizarre world of 1959 to the autumn of 2009. It is the only way people from that planet could survive the trip. If you were on Earth in 1959, imagine visitors from 2009 swooping down, beaming you up, and carrying you forward to their planet, this planet, in the blink of an eye, and dropping you off in the current media world. Could a human brain survive, that could process information only at 1959 speeds? I don't think we could survive the hour. I think our brains would blow up.
As fast as this world is, and as fast as we can process information now, we still are in a primitive age. The Internet in 2009 is like television in 1959, or telephones in 1889. You have to know something about it, in order to use it. And the Internet, for a little while longer, is still totally primitive, basically a print medium with fascinating bells and whistles developed for sale by every entrepreneur who knows a little code.
Very quickly, though, the Internet is racing toward a convergence of print, video, and audio. What will happen to media then? Well, the television and computer screens will be one and the same, and the remote will also be a mouse, or whatever the mouse, or the "interface," evolves into. But what will that mean to us? Technology is so far ahead of the user, in 2009, that no one really knows. Next week: Looking at 2059.
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