Barrel Strength

The following is an imagined future talk between a teacher and student in about 2025.

- You mean they had less than a billion addresses on the Internet?”

- They had no Internet. They only had about 85 endpoints, and they were called channels then.

-  Channels?

- The information only flowed one way.

- You have to be kidding. You’re kidding me, aren’t you sir?

- No, I am not. When broadcasting technology started, there were only three or four channels of television.

- What’s television?

- A pre-computer analog distribution system which employed vast amounts of spectrum to convey signals one-way. It was highly inefficient, but it was better at conveying pictures than what went before, which was only the printed word.

- How did they talk back?

- They didn’t.

- You mean they just sat there and watched stuff?

- Yes.

- Ah sir!  That’s just too weird!

- Nevertheless, for a few decades after radio communication was invented, but before computers re-organized how it was done, there was a period there when signals went out but the back-channel was missing.

- It must have been a period of extreme conformity, I mean, everybody watching the same stuff must have meant they all thought alike.

-  Good insight. It was. The 20^th century was the century of the mass-man and the collective state, even in the parliamentary democracies. There were even people who tried to maintain that system. They called the expansion of choices ‘fragmentation of the audience’, as if we were all supposed to be watching the same thing.

- Why did they think we should all be watching the same thing?

- That’s a tough one. Your essay has to be on the social implications of “broadcasting”, and that’s an issue you should address in your paper.