Life After Television

Predicts that personal computers linked into a global network will soon replace television, and thereby overthrow the tyranny of mass media, renew individual power, and promote democracy worldwide. Urges American business to get on the ball with fiber optics. Reprinted from the 1990 edition published by Whittle Books. No index or bibliography. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

If Gilder ( Wealth and Poverty ) is correct, television will become irrelevant in the bright new interactive age of the telecomputer. A telecomputer is a personal computer adapted for video processing, and linked by fiber-optic threads to other telecomputers around the world. In an exciting, visionary glimpse of the future, Gilder conjures a global village where viewers can tap into any station or into newspapers, where people can transmit their own video images and access an endless feast of specialized programs. Scrutinizing the fledgling U.S. telecomputer companies and the massive resistance they face from entrenched interests, he predicts that the Japanese, already in the lead, will steal the show unless the American telecommunications industry mounts a coordinated effort. The age of the telecomputer may be decades away, but even couch potatoes will be stimulated by this thought-provoking essay.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gilder's thesis, written in layman's terms, is that the United States wil soon lose its rightful preeminence in the telecommunications field to foreign competitors, particularly the Japanese. Unless, that is, American business executives, legislators, judges, and consumers look beyond separate, limited, and hierarchical forms of communication such as television, telephones, and online databases to a multifunctional, interactive, and democratic "telecomputer." Instead of envisioning a brave new telecomputerized world, the powers that be in American business, government, and law are wasting time protecting obsolete existing systems, he posits. Gilder also warns that expensive, user-unfriendly online databases such as Dialog and NEXIS are, at best, transitional technologies. Though much of Gilder's argument is based on his own opinions and peculiar personal preferences (Gilder doesn't seem to like to leave the house) rather than real evidence, his thoughts make interesting reading. Recommended for large public and academic libraries.
- Mary C. Kalfatovic, Telesec Lib. Svcs . , Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.