The color of the revolution in media is orange. When you see telephone workers unwinding a big spool of orange colored cable, it means fiber optic cable is replacing the copper wire in your neighborhood, and this orange cable will eventually free us from the toxic propaganda of America's commercial Main Stream Media (MSM).
The "Most Trusted Names" in television news helped BushCo lie us into the trillion-dollar Iraq fiasco. They could not have done it without a choke hold on the TV audience. The domination of the broadcast media arose from the commerical orientation of American broadcasting, the capital-intensive character of the industry, and the scarcity of bandwidth that characterized most of the history of broadcasting. All that is about to change. Read how below.
With each passing day, it becomes more evident that the collective news-gathering and informative power of the blogosphere is rivaling that of the MSM. What the blogosphere lacks is access to the living rooms and kitchens of Low-Information America (LIA). LIA is controlled by the MSM because the MSM owns the cable and broadcast pathways into the LIA households.
Fiber optic cabling, currently being deployed by the regional telephone companies to compete more effectively with TV cable operators, will give the blogosphere the same access to the public that the MSM have enjoyed, and this will radically alter the character of American politics. Here is how I think it will happen:
- Leading blog sites will deploy video production capabilities to complement their traditional web-page formats. Josh Marshall's TPM site is already using YouTube clips in this manner. The blogosphere can do everything TV can do, but the reverse is not the case.
- Microsoft and Asian consumer electronics makers will build no-brainer dedicated web browsing appliances that can connect to the telco fiber optic networks and provide single-button preset access to desired blogosphere channels.
- New interfaces for hyperlinking video will be developed so that viewers can follow a threaded series of video clips. This will allow self-directed exploration of the news, and a much more productive kind of "channel surfing." This hybrid medium, Netvision or Blogvision, will attract substantial commercial advertising, because it can be demographically targeted with great precision.
- Commericial revenue of the MSM will begin to plummet and a death spiral will ensue. The existing cable news networks will dry up and blow away, as their sluggish monolithic practices make them ineffective competitors to Netvision.
- The explosion of Netvision news sources will cause a new class of intermediaries to arise. Newsguides will bundle sets of Netvision "channels" to match the interests and tastes of Netvision surfers. The Newsguides will act as dynamically updated bookmarks and programming guides for those lacking the time to assemble their own suite of Netvision information sources.
- The MSM will fight like devils to throttle widespread access to Netvision. They will use the FCC, Congress, and the courts to "protect" the citizenry from the unregulated alleged evils (pornography, violence, terrorism, etc.) of Netvision. These efforts will only slightly retard the unstoppable movement to full citizen control of interactive news media.
- Once the shift from dumb TV to Netvision gets rolling, it will accelerate, and broadcast TV will become a vestigial technology, consumed by the mentally handicapped and the severely disadvantaged. Decades from now, children will ask their grandparents "How could so many people have been fooled?" After they receive the reply, they will ask "What was television?"
In DKos and the other pioneering sites of the Blogosphere we have the precursors of the next generation of vibrant, honest, interactive electronic information media. To fully realize it, we need the Orange Revolution of universal fiber optic broadband access. It cannot come too soon.