Television is nowadays taken for granted. If somebody wants amusement all he has to do is turn the TV on, he will probably have a large number of channels to choose from. Television is no luxury any longer. The time of the old black and white TV's when only few families could afford to have a TV set of their own is long gone. Television has become the most basic element of telecommunication by now.
The most important task of televison is not only to entertain viewers but also to transfer information. An incredible amount of information is being transferred every second through TV news, advertisements, interviews. With televison people can get to know the events of the different parts of the world far faster, without having to travel. Televison can broadcast both sound and picture at the same time, which helps the viewer create a more complex image and makes the process of understanding easier.
Besides these obvious advantages televison has also disadvantages. People are liable to sit back in their armchairs with the remote control in their hands staring at whatever is on. Not only do they waste their time but they also deprive themselves of the chance to go out to see what the real world is like with their OWN eyes. Watching the TV equals to see with somebody else's eyes. The one whose only resource of information is televison can be easily manipulated and will have a distorted point of view. Most people seem to be aware of the fact that they are manipulated by the soft voices and the colorful pictures of advertisements. Still, they will keep on watching the same old programs day by day. Why? Because they have no other choice. Even if there are more than enough channels available one still has no real choice as one can not decide on the programs of any of the channels. It equals to having ten one-way streets to choose from. The reason why conventional televison remains a one-way street is that it lacks the most important thing that would offer a real choice: interactivity.
The television of the future will be different. The difference will not only be that the resolution of the screen will be higher (the picture will be sharper) or the frequency of the picture refreshment will increase (the screen will not be flashing so much, watching TV will not be so hard on the eyes) but television will be able to give answers directly to the questions the viewer asks. To achieve this there has to be an interface added to the TV set to enable the user (rather than the viewer) to operate his/her system. This is not possible without the introduction of the computers. Computers have gone through an incredible process of development during the last couple of decades. The multinatonal computer manufacturers have all released their own versions of high-end computers and work stations. Most of these systems will have intuition interfaces, which means that the user does not have to give commands to the computer the only thing to do is to choose one of the icons (little pictures) on the screen. The icon of the word processor is a keyboard, the icon of the painter-utility is a brush, so the user does not have to know anything about the system he can make his choice only by following his intuition.
The operator of these new devices will be neither a viewer nor a programmer. Not a viewer because it will take a little more to deal with this new TV. One has also tell the system what one wants to gain information about. And not a programmer bacause the new system will not be much harder to operate than a remote control.
But what's the point in staring at a monitor screen instead of reading a newspaper? If one gets used to not operating the new TV but the idea of gaining information through a network and reading it on a screen it all becomes extremely exciting all of a sudden. Just imagine that you don't have to wait for the postman to deliver the paper, instead, you can choose a certain article you're interested in from a huge directory of topics of any kind. No more waiting for Time or Newsweek to arrive you can read them not a whole second after they are released. In addition to everything being extremely up to date you might read articles written by the best journalists all around the world and you can even get sound along with it or the TV will read it out for you if you don't feel like reading. Already a large amount of information is stored electronically so with the progress of the information networks more and more becomes available to everyone.
All in all, even though there will always be people who object to improvements of these kinds the television of the future is now more than a daydream. The technical development of this device is already under way and once it replaces the old tubes obtaining information becomes far easier. There is a time yet to come when everyone will be allowed to make his own opinion of things and the television won't be called an idiot box anymore.
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