Word: dials
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What's in the news this month? Well, let's take a spin around the local TV dial...
...CHANNELS YET? THE LATEST channel to vie for a spot on the increasingly crowded cable dial is the TV Food Network, which will serve up a 24-hour schedule of recipes, cooking tips and news of health and nutrition. Among the programs being planned: an interview show in which celebrities talk about food with host Robin Leach and a consumer series on feeding your family for $75 a week...
...with cable companies. Bell Atlantic is scheduled to begin offering video on demand to 300 homes in northern Virginia this summer. U.S. West has announced plans to deploy enough fiber-optic lines and coaxial cable (the pencil-thick wire used by cable systems) across 14 states to deliver "video dial tones" to 13 million households starting next year...
...last night's Seinfeld or the latest Spielberg. They are exploring the market for addictive video games and trying to figure out how much they can charge for each minute of play. It won't be long before someone begins using video phones for the multimedia equivalent of "dial-a-porn" telephone-sex lines. All these services can be delivered easily and efficiently by the information highway, and they can be backed up by a threat with real teeth. As TCI chairman John Malone puts it, "If you don't pay your bill, we'll turn off your television...
...bureaucrats, chosen by a small elite of broadcasting professionals and governed by the need to target the lowest common denominators of public interests." Other seers are as depressed as Gilder is sunny. "I worry seriously about a world in which it's too easy to simply flip around the dial and think you are gaining access to the world of knowledge and meaning," says Todd Gitlin, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "There's a kind of mental and emotional laziness that gets built...