More and more, the grand new concept of surfing the Web through your television is joining the growing pantheon of cyber and millennial gibberish already occupied by the information superhighway, the V-chip and the fabled bridge to the 21st century.
These are ideas that, in the minds of manipulative politicians and hype-addicted journalists, advance utopian notions of technology as a miraculous cure for our social ills.
The problem is, they are no substitute for real solutions. They are "off-the-hook" notions of technology, like the V-chip and blocking software, rating systems, and censorship - all of which perpetuate the idea that technology will stand in for us as parents, make moral decisions on our behalf, or lead us to paradise and justice. They're inventions that aim to let us - as citizens, parents, and individuals - off the hook.
Mainstream journalists bite almost every time, since utopian visions are irresistible, and few news consumers understand enough about technology to grasp just how fraudulent many of these ideas really are.
Off-the-hook technology is a godsend for political leaders and for lazy parents, who don't actually have to take any responsibility for their morals or the moral lives of their children: They simply buy more machines to do it for them.
The set-top box as a cheap way to let everyone surf the Web is a popular notion in the online world, which loves off-the-hook technology just as much as Bill Clinton and Al Gore do. Most Americans haven't a clue that the V-chip is a ludicrous notion that couldn't have an impact on programming for decades (if at all), and is completely voluntary anyway. Or that a real information superhighway would cost countless billions and take many years to develop.
The fusion of digital and broadcasting technology is as eagerly anticipated as the coming of the millennium itself by greedy online entrepreneurs. There are unimaginable bucks in a new machine, for many millions of homes, that fuses broadcasting and digital technology, and in the software and means of transmission to get it to work.
The set-top box is also supposed to be the machine that permits us to stop worrying about the widening gap between people who can afford and know how to use computers and those who don't. The digital world, never big on moral issues that don't affect it directly, has always assumed that technology will miraculously take care of this problem itself. The idea is that as with TVs, phones, and cable systems, digital technology will soon become so simple to use and inexpensive that everybody will want it and have it.
Thus the computer industry and online users don't have to sweat about helping to make it so. New technologies like the set-top box and networked computers do make it more likely that this new technology will spread to more than the 12 percent of Americans believed to use it regularly now. But it's a much bigger leap to think that these machines will suddenly equalize access for all Americans to the extraordinary and diverse culture that most of the people reading this already possess.
The corporate utopians are kidding themselves - and us - if they think the digital world will go mainstream in the way cable and the tube itself have.
So the cheapest set-top boxes are slated to cost consumers only several hundred dollars, but it's a misperception that access to the online culture is simply a matter of cheap machinery. The digital world is a distinct culture - founded, occupied, and inhabited primarily by young, affluent, educated, technologically skilled, mostly white people.
Minority communities have resisted entering the computer culture - estimates of the percentage of minority computer owners range from 9 to 12 percent, for reasons ranging from economic problems to cultural differences. The vast urban underclass isn't online at all.
Many in the online world have stubbornly and arrogantly dismissed the issue of equitable distribution of technology - perhaps the leading moral dilemma facing the digital community - as one that will take care of itself. Computers will be as cheap and ubiquitous as phones. We don't have to do a thing.
A few see the issue more clearly. "Little effort is being made to bring along anyone who's not a white male with access to lots of money. This is a mistake of colossal proportions," says technology writer Denise Caruso in Digerati, "because anybody who doesn't think that this is going to cause a revolution at some point is nuts." Or unaware.
Like it or not, webheads and experienced Net users are a small and powerful elite. Instead of wasting our time and money on foolish notions like the V-chip or blocking software - or writing gee-whiz stories about set-top boxes -sincere politicians and netizens might do better to seriously consider how enormous the gap is between the computer world and everybody else, and just how much money, time, equipment, and education it will really take to close that gap.
When we follow our president across that bridge in a few years, we will have no right to be surprised when many millions of our fellow citizens are stuck on the other side.
