New Media in European Households

Abstract

When it comes to the future, technologies are easy, markets are harder and societies hardest of all.

The “various rhetorics” and complacency of the multimedia industry try to blind decision-makers to the variety of options in heterogeneous environments in the private home and are intended to provoke rash investments by easy simplifications. Thus, the communication revolution in European private homes is moving at a slow speed. “The European household of the future will… be, at best, mid-tech as opposed to high tech environments” (Silverstone). The interactive scenario in the private home seems to be hyped and TV will remain essentially non-interactive: “Just as the average consumer can not imagine what interactivity might be, he or she is just as likely to find difficulty… with the principle that television might no longer be a screen that you just watch” (Silverstone).

You stay at home and send your eyes and ears abroad for you. Wherever the electric connection is carried — and there need be no human habitation how ever remote from social centres, be it the mid-air balloon or mid-ocean float of the weather watchman, or the ice-crushed hut of the polar observer, where it may not reach — it is possible in slippers and in dressing gown for the dweller to take his choice of the public entertainment given that day in every city of the earth. (Edward Bellamy, Equality, 1897)

Early in the next millenium your right and left cuff-links or earrings may communicate with each other by low-orbiting satellites and have more computer power than your present PC. Your telephone wont ring indiscriminately; it will receive, sort, and perhaps respond to your incoming calls like a well-trained English butler. Mass media will be redefined by systems for transmitting and receiving personalised information and entertainment. Schools will change to become more like museums and playgrounds for children to assemble ideas and socialise with each other all over the world. The digital planet will look and feel like the head of a pin. (Negroponte, Being Digital, 1995, 6)

… the prediction of future events is more difficult today than it ever was in the relatively static, custom bound society of the past… The wonder is not that older systems of divination should have lasted so long, but that we should now feel it possible to do without them. The investment programmes of modern industrial firms, for example, require decisions to be taken about future policies at times when it is often impossible to form a rational view of their outcome. It is not surprising that industrialists sometimes use barely relevant statistical projections in order to justify what is essentially a leap in the dark. (Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 1971,791)