Doomed from the Start
Reason’s Jesse Walker on Gore TV:
As I read about this top-heavy effort to rebuild something that had already emerged from the ground up, I kept thinking of the Digital Entertainment Network, a short-lived, super-expensive child of the dot-bust era. My colleague Matt Welch worked there for a few weeks in 1999 and wrote a widely circulated memoir of the experience for the Online Journalism Review; he described a dysfunctional but extremely well-compensated corporate hierarchy that kept changing its business model, touted itself as “a cross between CNN and MTV for the Internet Generation,” and didn’t understand the Web well enough to recognize why you might link to other people’s sites. (“I don’t think we need to be sending people away from our site! I don’t think that’s how we make money!”) What I didn’t remember, until Matt kindly reminded me, was that the self-infatuated guru atop the Digital Entertainment Network was a Channel One veteran named David Neuman. Neuman’s current job? He’s programming director for Current TV.
Read the whole thing, because Jesse is really on to something here. However, there’s another reason Current TV sucks, and it has nothing to do with Al Gore or David Neuman.
TV is, by its nature, passive entertainment. You can’t make it participatory by farming out your programming to a large stable of producers. Even today, the Big Four (Five? Six? Seven?) TV networks do just that – and yet somehow people (in declining numbers) just sit there and watch. Why? Because that’s what TV is: Something you watch.
Just because Gore TV picks from a larger stable of producers doesn’t change the fact that somebody – not you – has to choose what to broadcast. Somebody – not you – has to decide what you get to see. Somebody – not you – has to decide what’s worthy.
On TV, the only choices you really get are which pre-programmed station to watch, and for how long (if at all). There aren’t any buttons on the remote to let you do much else. Unlike, say, the internet, where everyone who wants to really can have a voice.
When it comes to TV, you have only a few choices. You can watch what they give you; you can turn the damn thing off; or you can throw a brick through the screen. That last option is what got me to start a blog.
I mean, have you seen the price of bricks these days?
Heheheheh Stephen great punchline.
Al Gore gives “the Albatross” a run for its money as the literary harbinger of bad fortune. Once he makes the scene, its like a new chapter in ‘dantes inferno’ every time.
Good god. An Al Gore TV Channel? Havent we tortured the poor bastards in Gitmo enough?
Al Gore – a face and voice made not for radio or television but for 12th century monanstical bookbinding.
Hard to believe that Al Gore — The Inventor of the Internet™ and The Inspiration for Love Story™ — could have so badly missed the meaning and consequence of his invention… But then again, he is Al Gore after all.
My Comcast digital cable remote has buttons that let me choose from a list of several hundred shows (many of them at no charge) that I can watch whenever I want with pause rewind and fast-forward controls. Even newly released major movies in widescreen with Dolby 5.1 surround sound only cost $2.95.
TV sucks because Joss Wheden doesn’t currently have a series.
I stopped watching TV about 5 years ago, other than sports, Special Report w/ Brit Hume, and a handful of other shows that I might happen to catch. In short, I cant stand to have the TV on with 99% of the programing that is available.
By contrast, some people can’t stand to NOT have the TV on. Going to bed, eating dinner, even while playing poker, they turn it on and keep in the background. Even when someone puts a CD, they STILL want to watch re-runs of the Simpsons with no sound… WHY!?!?
Used Red Brick = $0.35 @ Home Depot
9mm ammo = ~$0.09 / round (in quantity)
Elvis was on to something.
Scott: Because FOX will cancel anything that’s any good after a half a season to bring on The Swan and My Big Fat Obnoxious [Relation].