Predicting the future of human technological and telecommunications development is not as simple as many would have us to believe. Often, what is predicted will happen, doesn’t.

After the success of the first moon landing in July 1969, now-defunct Pan American Airlines began taking reservations for the first commercial flight to the moon scheduled for the year 2000. That same summer the administrator of NASA predicted a $5,000 lunar vacation by 1990.

Decades ago we were told that we would all have picture phones before the 1970s were out. AT&T tried to launch videophones in the early 1970s and again in 1991. The forecasters failed to recognize that sufficient demand would not develop, in part because the devices were too expensive, halting the diffusion necessary to make them viable.

Critical facts of human nature were missed. After all, one of the delights of the telephone, one typically taken for granted, is that one cannot be seen. One can communicate by phone wearing most anything or while doing something else simultaneously.

And it’s a safe bet that a fair amount of what is being currently predicted about the future of television, multimedia, and the Internet won’t happen. Much forecasting about interactive television technology and computers involves the technological tail wagging the dog. “If it can be built, people will buy it,” the developers think.

But the future rarely happens in the precise ways that the technoprognosticators predict. There will be a great many successful developments that no one forecast. This is the nature of technological development. As the television series Connections showed us, many great inventions are the result of planning and genius, but just as frequently they are the result of serendipity, luck, or accident.

Technophiles often miss the human factors, the individual and mass behavioral predilections that drive the adoption of new communication technologies.

Television viewing habits are substantially influenced by enduring features of how we live and when we go to work, how daily life is structured, even such factors such as how we respond to the weather. On any given weekday evening, for example, about one-third of the U.S. population is watching TV. In the winter when there is less daylight and people spend more time indoors, the fraction of the population watching television during prime time rises to one-half.

Work patterns dictate how much time people have available to be in contact with the leisure oriented media. While the world of work is currently undergoing considerable change, these patterns are not about to change radically for most people in the near future.

More to the point, there are only so many hours in the day, a fact consistently lost on the technophiles and business interests that predicted and promoted the idea that we would all soon have 500 channels. Where is all the time and money going to come from to support 500 channels? And why was the number “500” so frequently bandied about in the first place? The very fact that so many people used such an incredibly round number should raise our suspicions as to how much thought, relatively little I would suggest, had really gone into such projections.

Consider what various so-called “experts” say and write. Andrew Lippman of the Media Lab at M.I.T., for example, wrote in a formal memo to Representative Edward Markey in 1994, “Forget television sets. In three years there won’t be any. Instead, there will be computers with high-quality display screens.” Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Media Lab wrote, “The traditional ‘mass media’ will essentially disappear.”  George Gilder, in his book Life After Television, predicts a profound move toward high culture and a much more discriminating audience. He writes, “TV will be irrelevant in a world without channels, where you can always order exactly what you want when you want it…All the media junk food and filler that stretches out toward the horizons of mass culture, like so much strip development will tend to disappear.”

The ideas that computers and the Internet will completely displace television, whether it be in the near future or even in a few decades, or that people will soon watch television very selectively and discriminately are very poorly founded in my view. As is Gilder’s notion that consumers will precisely retrieve the information and entertainment that they want and that this will cause the disappearance of sensationalistic “media junk food.” His view that people will become attracted to high culture and what he deems “valuable” information if only given the chance, is wishful thinking and in all likelihood, both naive and wrong.

Public and university libraries have long been reservoirs of information but how many people spend much time in the library or have ever even learned how to use a library well? Yes, the Internet offers enormously convenient access to much information, but if people were nearly so thirsty for information and books as Gilder claims, libraries would long ago have been packed.

Contemporary television technology does obviously allow for a great deal more discrimination in viewing than only 15 years ago but that hasn’t meant that this potential is being taken advantage of in a manner congruent with Gilder’s predictions. The vast majority of Americans now have cable and own a VCR, but how often do people use these innovations to plumb the depths of video information, entertainment, or film already available?

It’s revealing that at conventions of video rental store operators, participants pass on the observation that tens of millions of U.S. homes contain VCRs that are blinking “12:00.” Meaning, of course, that no one in the household has yet made the effort to learn to program the clock, and by extension no one in the household can program the VCR to tape asynchronously. A study by the Stanford Research Institute concluded that Movies On Demand, one of the interactive TV services thought to be most viable, would only attract two million customers over the first five years. Another study reports that only six percent of those who have ever bought pay-per-view prefer it to going to the video store.

These studies and stories serve as great palliatives for those in the video rental trade as it indicates to them that they don’t have a great deal to fear at the coming of more pay-per-view and complicated digitized services. Most people still prefer to rent their videos from a store and bring them home. Precisely, how many VCR programming-challenged people there actually are is an uncertainty, but I certainly know Ph.D.s and professors with computer background who have confided that they cannot, or have never learned to, program their VCR.

In short, people often do not use technology in the ways that the prognosticators would have us believe they will. On occasion, I’ve gotten sucked into a film being run on cable and watched it to its conclusion when I already had the film on tape nearby in the same room. I could have watched it any day over a number of years yet the tape sat solidly on the shelf never having been played. When it came on over the air or via cable, I began to watch.

I am not at all alone in this propensity to view less discriminately and to enjoy watching a program that is being televised in the here and now even when it’s already available in one’s video collection. Some people report that they like the fact that millions of others are watching the same program or film simultaneously, and of course this is especially true for live sports and breaking news. Suffice it to say that there is still a place for traditional television scheduling and mass dissemination even in the face of new superior communication and television delivery systems that some would have us believe are going to completely alter how we view. They won’t.

  What Research Tells Us About the Future of Television

Much of my skepticism for the over-claiming about the future of interactive television is based on other researchers’ work as well as my own. Reported in Television and the Quality of Life, written with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is that people use television more for escape, and for entertainment and distraction, than for information gain. People often seek out and enjoy the passivity, escape, and easy distraction that television viewing provides.

They often want to “blob out.” To be sure, they also enjoy interactivity in the form of video games, e-mail, and the Internet but by no means do they want to interact all the time, or even most of the time.

Though Time-Warner insists it was not a test of market viability and merely a $700 million experiment in technical feasibility, the company announced in May of 1997 that it would shut down its interactive television experiment in Orlando, Florida that included features such as banking, shopping, and movie ordering. As David Westin, president of production for Capital Cities/ABC Inc. has said, “People want to come home and relax and be entertained by their television set. They don’t want to have to program it themselves.”

Research also indicates that people don’t want 500 channels. Few cable viewers watch the majority of the 35 - 100 channels they already receive and most would prefer 30 - 40 channels that they like and that would permit them to pick from a smorgasbord of well-matched channel choices. But even then, research indicates that they would gravitate much of the time to five to seven favorites. This is why most cable channels have learned to define themselves with the fact in mind that viewers are most likely to keep returning to their preferred channels with a definite, memorable identity. Viewers want to know what they can expect from a channel whether it be CNN, C-SPAN, MTV, Nickelodeon, or BET. Except for those with very peculiar interests in television or have scads of time, who needs 500 channels? And, of course, the simple economics of the situation preclude adequate financial support for hundreds and hundreds of channels. To assume that consumers will ratchet their price resistance levels ever upward is a mistake.

As early as May, 1994, the New York Times was already reporting that the growth of new cable channels was slowing substantially because the number of available subscribers had begun to level off. Some industry analysts were predicting even then, that cable channels that reach “only” 20 to 30 million subscribers may be in substantial trouble. Thirty months later, the Times quoted industry analyst Marc Riely saying, “If you don’t have the equity interest of a larger operator, or you aren’t backed by a media company like Disney or Time-Warner, you’ll have a really tough time getting launched.” These economies of scale also explain why “niche” programming (e.g., jazz, ecology, Afro-Caribbean culture), some of which would be of special interest and value to various populations, is experiencing increasing problems finding cable systems that wish to carry it.

A related problem, seldom considered, is that there may be real limits on the amount of talent that can be brought together to make all the programs necessary to fill so many new channels. The industry already sees itself as being short on talent. Susan Harris reported to me during my research for my next book, Creating Television: Then and Now, that one summer she nearly jettisoned a new situation comedy pilot because she simply couldn’t find an attractive, solid young male actor who could carry the lead in a comedy.

What the audience has always gotten from television, and what it will continue to want, is novelty and predictability simultaneously. Novelty in a safe context - in a box. Most fundamentally, that’s what TV offers. Human beings only like to handle so much complexity and often prefer to simplify their worlds.

In a search for immutable notions about how people will use entertainment technology in the future, Part II, to appear in Fall 2000, will begin with two basic and inescapable premises: humans are social animals and they simultaneously seek both novelty and familiarity. Two principle corollaries follow: Viewers will prefer to watch familiar people and characters on television, especially in the intimate environment of their homes; second, viewers will prefer traditional storytelling over new, interactive stories. ‘Till next time.

  Robert Kubey is director of the Center for Media Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey where he is associate professor of journalism and mass media. Professor Kubey is the co-author of Television and the Quality of Life. His next book, Creating Television: Then and Now, will be published in Spring 2000 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates and features interviews with a number of Caucus members. This is the first part of a two-part article based on talks originally given at The Centre for Literacy, Bellcore, MTV Networks, The British Film Institute, The Interactive Television Conference of SIP - Italian Telephone, and the Cable Television Administration and Marketing Society.