Remember the Great Global Communications Revolution? Not much more than a year ago, it was the hottest topic around. We were all going to interact with whatever entertainment or information we wanted, whenever and wherever we wanted to, by plucking it from a limitless, virtual vault. The demise of newspapers, magazines, cinemas, video stores, bookshops, music shops, libraries, call-centres and much else would be only a matter of time.
For once, neither business nor government was to be caught napping in the face of a transformation that both pronounced “inevitable”. Media companies, including Britain’s, invested untold billions in the creation of new forms of “content” to meet the needs of this new world. The mighty Time Warner threw itself into the arms of upstart America Online, in a spectacular act of obeisance by the old media to the new. The Blair government, beside itself with excitement, brought out a white paper proposing that all telecom and media regulators should be merged into one, to confront the anticipated “convergence” of the industries they supervised.
You may have noticed that recently we’ve been hearing rather less about the global communications superhighway. You may have spotted that the companies which bought into it most heavily are now tottering under mountains of debt, with their once awe-inspiring valuations shot to pieces. You may have wondered why our government now hesitates to implement its oh-so-far-sighted white paper. You can hardly have missed the dotcom crash.
Yet those with huge stakes in the communications revolution insist it is still firmly on track. They admit there have been some hiccups, but invite us to put down most of these to the recession. Breakthrough technology, they tell us, often follows a roller-coaster trajectory. Excitement surrounds its invention; then, when it takes longer than expected to materialise, disillusion sets in; finally it goes on to become even more successful than was originally anticipated. The transformation of our communications may not now happen overnight, they confess, but it remains pretty much as inevitable as ever.
Unfortunately, statistics just published, showing what actually happened in 2001, tell a very different story. This story doesn’t challenge the revolutionary commitment of business or government. Nor does it question the efficacy of the technology, which seems to work fine. It concerns a less celebrated but, as it turns out, no less important player in the march of techno-history: us. We, the people, were asked merely to marvel at the bounty in prospect, and to embrace it by making minor adjustments to our habits. Unfortunately, we seem, none the less, to have gone off-script.
If the revolution is to come to pass, we must all start accessing and storing the data we use in new and supposedly vastly superior ways. We should either download it from cyberspace when we need it, or keep it on huge hard disks in our homes. The market-leading product treating TV and films in this way, called TiVo, is so smart it can learn and act on our preferences. It has been available for more than a year in Britain, and for several years in the United States. Regrettably, in spite of heavy marketing, by year-end it had attracted fewer than 300,000 users worldwide.
This doesn’t mean, however, that we haven’t been changing our approach to entertainment storage. While TiVo and its equivalents have flopped, the DVD, or digital versatile disc, has become the fastest-growing entertainment product of all time. In Britain alone, we bought 36 million DVDs last year, while DVD players became the best-selling product at Dixons. Yet, digital though DVD may be, it is a disgracefully reactionary phenomenon.
By now, we ought to be starting to pick and mix from the limitless virtual library of cyberspace, without thought of the morrow. Instead, apparently, we are reinforcing our archaic habit of squirrelling away physical copies of conventionally constructed artefacts. Why? Well, ominously, it is the physicality itself of DVDs that seems to attract us. Because the discs come in neat and colourful boxes (unlike data down a wire), we can display them in collections expressing our tastes, just as our parents displayed their vinyl LP collections. So it is, unfortunately, the very virtuality of the revolutionary approach that we are rejecting.
Once we have invested in the DVD habit, we become even less likely to sign up for something like TiVo. But that’s not all. Since we carry in so much of our data through the front door, we also become less likely to want a “broadband” link to bring more digital data into our homes. We can now rent access to broadband, the central nervous system of the new communications world, from BT and some cable companies. Sadly, by year-end, less than 1 per cent of households had seen fit to do so.
Lack of interest in broadband cannot be blamed wholly on DVD: we were supposed to want high-speed data links for much more than downloading movies. Our computers and TV sets were going to merge into one instrument, on which we should spend much of our lives sending unimaginably new kinds of information and entertainment back and forth. Sadly, this vision is also looking misconceived. We seem to view slumping on the couch in front of EastEnders as a different kind of activity from sitting up at a computer, so we keep the two devices in separate rooms. The attraction of “surfing the internet” as a pastime seems to have worn off and, to use the World Wide Web for booking tickets or checking the weather, we can manage without broadband.
Mobile communication is another field in which things have happened, but not the right things. No one can accuse us of failing to take to the mobile phone. This device was, however, supposed to grow into a mobile slipway on to the multimedia superhighway. Telecom companies paid £22.5bn to the Treasury alone for licences to send web pages, music and even films into our handsets. However, nobody seems to want to watch a movie on the phone. To the amazement of the experts, we have decided that what we most want to do with our mobiles is to transmit tiny messages in, of all backward-looking things, the written word. In Britain last year, we sent 38 million text messages a day.
So it goes on. By year-end, most of us had still not bothered even to plug into digital television, despite its heavily subsidised cornucopia of channels and promise of interactivity. Downloading music from the internet seems less of a threat to CDs now that, with the collapse of Napster, the music is no longer free. Indeed, the initial appeal of the web is increasingly being put down less to enthusiasm for the medium than to its launch offer of the greatest free lunch in media history. Now that such dotcoms as have survived are trying to recoup some of their investment by charging, more and more of us will doubtless turn away.
Meanwhile, in spite of the rise of the DVD, cinema admissions in the UK last year grew sharply to 156 million, compared with 54 million in 1984. Apparently, the back row still offers something that cyberspace cannot. Bookshops grew bigger, sprouted cafes and became the smart places to meet. To fill their shelves, 116,000 new titles were published last year in Britain alone. You can download the full text of books from the internet (try Project Gutenberg at https://promo.net), but who does? Perhaps we just prefer turning well-bound pages between colourful, glossy covers.
The people, it seems, have spoken. The global communications revolution is not, it seems, compatible with human behaviour. We are going to continue entertaining and informing ourselves much as we always have done, because that’s the way we like it.
This discovery has immense implications. Unravelling a masterplan can be more difficult than constructing one. The temptation is to shut your eyes and carry on regardless. But in Britain, BT shareholders should be wary of their new chairman’s desire to plunge their ravaged company into multimedia broadcasting. The Blair government might like to scrap its proposed merger of regulators, which is throwing up untold problems. It should also perhaps recognise that virtual learning is not, after all, likely to solve the problem of teacher recruitment, nor virtual medicine the problems of the NHS.
The rest of us can congratulate ourselves on our unexpected triumph over technological determinism. Entertainment moguls readily acknowledge that, when it comes to the software of their business, “nobody knows anything”. Perhaps, after this great disaster of misplaced certainty, everyone will also acknowledge that, until the free will of humanity has been factored in, this goes for the hardware, too.
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