Seeing is believing.
At least it used to be, in the days before television.
Now, as just about anyone will verify, images of fact and fiction are difficult to distinguish
when distorted by the blue green tint of electron rays.
To learn about the world, man naturally strives for knowledge through his experiences and
senses. Like the mirror, the lens, the microscope and the telescope, television is an extension
of our most cherished and trusted sense - the faculty of sight.
Yet in its present form, television continues to be regarded with suspicion
Paradoxically it is adored for its capabilities and reviled for its contents.
This is largely and simply because it does not show us the truth.
Imagine that mankind has been presented with a brand new pair of powerful binoculars
and then been cautioned - ahh but do not look here, or there, or even too closely
at yourselves.
Television, as it is now organized and administered carries with it
conditions of limited sight which its viewers will not accept for very many more years.
The reasons for this are becoming clearer as the medium's technology develops.
With it we have seen and gained knowledge of a tremendously expanded world.
Not a true world, to be sure, but expanded nevertheless.
After all, is it not preferable to see a larger and more complex world in caricature than
not to see it at all? Too, everyone hopes television's resolution will ultimately become finer,
its images clearer and most important more truthful. And so they shall.
The actual mechanics of television technology are known only to a very few,
hence the extension of a viewer's sight is subject to many things, oddly disparate:
marketing structures, network decisions, technical limitations, even the whims of
actors and storytellers.
Because of their complexity, television images are an expensive luxury.
They must be generated, transmitted, and administered, all at great cost.
The public is indeed paying these costs, but indirectly.
It
seems unlikely that in its present form the medium's administration and sources
of control will change. But it's easy to see that television's technological form is changing,
more rapidly now than ever before. It is after all an extremely young medium
Consider some recent innovations: increases in the wholesale origination of images,
private, community and cable networks; refinements in the technology of transmission,
cable capacities satellite channels and fibre optics; the proliferation of private image
recording devices - video cassettes and cameras, and the miniaturization of almost all
system components.
A MATTER OF RECORD
These developments are no longer subjects of speculation among executives in the film and television business. They are changes that have already become a matter of record.
Witness the growth of associated companies: Warner Video, Rank, CIC, HBO, Disney Video,
and 20'th Century Fox's wholly owned subsidiary, Magnetic video.
Columbia's cassette marketing catalogue alone offers 3000 feature titles and over 10000
television programs. Assessments of the public's acceptance of the new hardware are
more difficult to infer, but there is no doubt about the general direction.
Cassette recorders in the United Kingdom for example are generally estimated at 7 10%
of all television owners, with a predicted annual growth rate as high as 20 - 25%
this year.
Should these trends continue, alongside comparable growth in hardware research
and development, a tremendous explosion in the public use and control of television seems imminent.
New technology points directly towards a freer, user to user communication system
which is far more extraordinary than the two or three thousand pay and cable TV
channels being planned and predicted for the late 1980's.
A simple model of a user to user system is one in which the public has maximum access
to all aspects of origination and transmission and pays for them directly, as we do now
for telephone service.
The concept of the video telephone is by no means new.
As early as the 1930's, and experimental coaxial system was built by the german post office between Leipzig, Berlin, Hamburg and Nuremburg. By 1965 other similar networks had been
tried in Italy, Japan and the Soviet Union.
Between 1965 and 1970, Atlantic Telephone and Telegraph established a
corporate 'Picturephone' system between subscriber offices in New York, Pittsburgh,
and Chicago.
Yet all of these attempts suffered from a common plague, inadequate technology.
The current Bell version of the picturephone (Model II) is a 13 x 14 centimetre screen
displaying 250 lines per picture at 30 frames per second with interlaced scanning.
To send its camera focus settings are limited to two: one or three feet from the lens.
It requires a transmission bandwidth equal to 300 long distance phone calls As a public communication system it is limited, little known, and most important, expensive at
$150 - $200 per hour.
Still, communications technology has come a long way since this system was introduced. The innovations most likely to improve its cost effectiveness would seem to be in the realms of computerized data encoding, (where audio, visual, and operating data are converted into
digital pulses) and the increased capability of fibre optical cables.
A wide range of other technological developments will have an impact, such as the effect
of expanded payloads on satellite capacities, but suffice to say that communications
possibilities have greatly changed in the last 5 years. And the idea of a video telephone
has been with us long enough for its refinement to have already begun.
Suppose it should become available at a commonly affordable price.
The public at large will demand it immediately, so strong is man's love of his extended sight.
Consider a device that would enable anyone, anywhere to transmit any image he or
she wished, either to a specific receiver, or to the public at large. Probably a refined
version of a video camera, a 'personal transciever' would contain added transmission facilities
and a telephone adapter, or specified satellite frequency, it could be left on with a static image
(a visual 'dial tone') or simply turned off. Ideally, it would include a small monitor and readout
to register the number of viewers tuning in.
Should transcievers of this or a similar nature be manufactured and distributed widely, a
number of startling changes in the basic uses of television will occur.
FREEDOM TO
SEE
First and foremost, there will be a great and widespread excitement with a new found, almost unlimited (at least much less limited) freedom to 'see'. To grasp this idea more firmly, imagine
a TV guide resembling the white pages of the telephone directory, a visual service paid for
directly by those who use it.
A clue to the size such a system might quickly reach is also provided by the telephone system. There are well over 150 million telephone numbers in service in North America in 1983!
Given such a wide choice of channels, or personal frequencies, it seems likely that user classifications will appear, for example, Personal, Government, Information, and Network.
Still, at this stage, these refinements are arbitrary and less important than the public's knowledge and acceptance of user to user TV.
Today it is abundantly clear that television is overcontrolled by a relative few.
Our desire for more direct and truthful knowledge will soon change this unacceptable
imbalance.
Contemplated philosophically, future increases in our powers of sight are not necessarily
frightening or Orwellian. Viewers will just be able to see more of their world as it really is,
rather than how others feel it is, or should be.
With user to user access, real joy, sorrow, birth, death, murder, true love and romance
will be readily available to those who wish to 'wander' through the personal broadcasts
and test patterns of Toronto, St Louis, Montreal, Medicine Hat, or New York.
It is an unsettling idea to be sure.
Technological developments that expose more of the reality of the earth and its
inhabitants always are.
But look forward to it, for one day, not far in the future, the strange miracle of
Zworykin's ray will enable us to experience a visual freedom that no other people
in history have ever known.
April 1983
Cinema Canada Magazine