LET A THOUSAND CHANNELS ...

CHOOSE YOUR WORLD THROUGH DIGITAL TV.

Digital TV was officially launched in the US last week -- immaculately timed so that the first image to materialise on the digital screen would be the launch of the space shuttle Colombia. This was appropriate enough, given that both the space project and the new media technology contain a whiff of (slightly stale) transcendentalism -- the public grows weary of yet another space launch; we are perhaps already tired of digital TV hype. According to Elisabeth Murdoch however, something new is here. The golden age of television is just beginning. Digitalisation offers the individual `unlimited access, information and data'. The sheer explosion of channels and choice will allow a person the chance to `live anywhere', `roaming unhindered' through countless media landscapes. (`Background Briefing', 8/11/98)

If they had heard of him, these digital pundits and media evangelists would probably be citing Walter Benjamin as a precursory celebrant of their cause. Over fifty years ago he argued for the radical and liberatory potential of media technologies because they could reveal the world in new ways. Indeed, one of the new possibilities offered by digital TV is the capacity for viewers to edit their own images. Programs of the future are to have dozens of cameras filming the one scene so that consumers can choose their own camera angles and editing strategies. Thus, it is claimed viewers will be empowered through having control over these powerful tools of perception.

There are, though, rather important differences between this type of `radicality' and Benjamin's theory. Instead of radical perception, digital TV is more likely to give us bland pornography and other forms of voyeurism. Significantly, the high-definitional focus of digital screens was promoted through the fact that at a recent American football game the resolution was so clear that (in close-up mode) you could see through the costume of the cheerleader to discover that she had a ring through her navel.

As well as the reduction of visual attentiveness to voyeurism, there is another important difference that undercuts any claim to radicality. Benjamin argued that the importance of cinema lay in the fact that it was received collectively: masses of people seeing the same thing. Not so with digital TV. It brings with it, according to Murdoch, the transformation from mass audience to `countless personal audiences'. The implications of this are worth considering.

Digital TV promises to extend the degree to which the public sphere is being fragmented into a series of smaller, personalised domains. This already occurs to some extent with the Internet, but digital TV offers us the chance to further `customise' our media environments, so that any points of commonality with our neighbours become even thinner. With the proliferation of media and entertainment outlets in the future, one wonders whether the events that linked the older `imagined community' could ever filter into a larger public consciousness. The dramatic events which would otherwise shape our public identity may not have the same significance in a diverse mediascape containing hundreds of channels and different ways of looking at them. The array of choice over what we choose to see binds us less to any shared sense of common purpose.

If this is a possible future, something is happening to our past as well. The same `Background Briefing' report revealed the extent to which the legal rights to the world's images are being bought up by the world's richest people -- John Paul Getty and Bill Gates -- with alarming rapidity. It is no longer possible to show certain images without paying substantial sums to whoever owns the rights. For instance, the image of Nelson Mandela being released from jail is now owned by ITN, an English multinational company that recently merged with Reuters news service. Most of this century's famous events have now been bought up. Entire film and media archives are being sold off to private companies and the images which reveal our collective past increasingly commodified.

These developments point to a further narrowing of the public sphere, our past only accessible as commodified image, our future increasingly privatised and fragmentary, as each member of the family `surfs' channels on their TV or computer monitor. Paradoxically, the more we enter the space of the `public' -- via extended communications that once reflected common concerns -- the more we inhabit private and disconnected media worlds.

Our increasing fascination with the voyeuristic possibilities available through this privatised `public' domain is being registered through TV, via the surveillance tactics of current affairs shows or programs like the House from Hell, in which we were invited to watch the antics of a shared house equipped with hidden cameras. Digital TV hopes to cash in on this trend through the implication that we'll be able to `see' more -- that somehow `secrets' will be revealed through the use of more powerful media. On the other hand, anxieties are being reflected about this emerging world, most recently in something like The Truman Show, about a character whose entire life is a TV show that the rest of the world watches -- only he doesn't know it.

Yet The Truman Show in its own way reveals how the dilemmas of this expanded mediascape are often mitigated by a more powerful sensibility focussed upon the possibilities of the individual. Certainly the film reflects our paranoia and unease concerning the `media society'. Truman's environment is entirely manufactured, his friends are hired actors, his object world consists of products for sale. Yet it is Truman's struggle to `escape' the conditions that hold him back -- the transcendental desire to `go beyond' -- that undercuts any radical message or critique of media and consumer culture. The initial paranoia staged by the film is easily enough reconciled to Truman's greater quest to break free.

This struggle to break free, once the driving force behind mass religious or political movements, is today increasingly recast in terms of individualised consumption. Freedom and liberation are the key concepts that fuel the rhetoric of media pundits. They sell us the dream of powerful interactivity: `you' control what you watch -- hundreds of channels, camera angles. As Murdoch says, `you can be anywhere' (because you don't want to be where you are). Like Truman, we can escape small town parochialism and go beyond to `roam unhindered', through digital interactivity. Like Truman, no one asks where it is that we are breaking free to.

The fate of the public sphere is uncertain in an age where public history is sold as a commodity and where the spaces through which a public might connect with the world at large become increasingly fragmented and privatised. Such is the appeal of the rhetoric of freedom that this development is subjected to little analysis. At many points it sits easily with a postmodern celebration of pluralism, difference and multiplicity. At other points, however, it complements the sensibilities that underlie the politics of the New Right.

The Howard Government is currently doing all it can to dismantle the public sphere. In its desire for small government it is in the process of reducing public health, privatising welfare, selling off public utilities, and changing the tax system, all along the lines of emptying out any shared culture of contribution, replacing it with a culture of individual choice and privatisation. Howard's `nation of shareholders' is emblematic of this shift. The effect of this is significantly cultural -- if we stop contributing to a public sphere, we no longer feel symbolically part of a greater community. Our sense of obligation towards the other decreases as well. If we are increasingly able to ignore or remain oblivious to our neighbours, we may soon question our need to contribute to their welfare.

The rhetoric of individualism that will soon be selling us customised media environments may not be quite the same as the New Right's scaling down of the public sphere, but there are similarities. The break-up of `the public' into a series of individual audiences may provide us with greater freedoms in the virtual realm, but what gets left behind in the process? Will this capacity to remain oblivious to our neighbour when engaged in digital interchange cause a gradual cultural shift whereby we more easily assent to similar kinds of abandonment currently being practised in the `real world' by the Government's dismantling of the public sphere?