By Andreas Kessaris for Curtains Up! (@AKessaris)
“This book is about what happens when the smartest people in the room decide something is inevitable, and yet it does not come to pass. Omens have been misread, tea leaves misinterpreted. Not only has the Web not destroyed TV, but the source of new media’s strength – attracting ever more traffic, truly phenomenal traffic – may in fact become its greatest weakness.”
-Michael Wolff (from Television is the New Television)
I remember the day my family got its first television. I was three-and-a-half years old. We had just moved into the second floor of a duplex on Birnam Street. I can recall with great detail how my brother and I looked out our living room window with excitement and anticipation as my parents carried the used set from the trunk of my father’s ridiculously over-sized sedan and up the front steps. The TV was an old mono, analog, black & white from the 60’s that someone else gave them for free rather than throw out. We had two English channels: CFCF and the CBC. (But at least they were free, and the reception from the rabbit ears was pretty good.) A few years later we got cable, which almost tripled the stations we could catch. Not long after that we invested in what was at the time a state-of-the-art entertainment console: A Zenith System 3 (never head of System 1 or 2, but hey, a 3 must have been at least a notch or two better than those!) with imitation wood mouldings; it looked like a heavy piece of furniture. Today I have a cold, sleek, black plastic, high-definition, flat-screen TV with surround sound hooked up to a cable computer box that gives me access to countless programs (I however still manage to watch only half a dozen or so channels regularly…something is definitely wrong here).
Technology has changed the way western society enjoys entertainment and absorbs information. From music to movies, from TV shows to literature and news, times are evolving. Record shops and movie rental locations are almost gone. Motion picture theatres are fading away, as are (gasp) bookstores! Newspapers and other periodicals are also on the endangered species list. Could TV be next? As someone who has lived through the birth of the digital age and the rise of the internet, I look back on how it used to be and ponder: How did it get here? Where it is going? And who will decide: A corporate CEO or “we the people”? That is the subject of the new book Television is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age by award-winning author and journalist Michael Wolff.
Television is the New Television is terse but detailed. Wolff pulls no punches and takes no prisoners as he recounts the history of digital entertainment, the people who built it to what it is, and the resilience of TV and old-school executives who refused to accept the coming tsunami, which ultimately proved to be little more than a gentle wave.
The book reads like a stock-holder’s report with personality and attitude; it feels more like a rant that was written in one caffeine-fueled sitting. The author’s analysis is smart and his observations are sharp. At times he is quite witty as well, with delicious lines like: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to retweet it.” (Page 193). And Wolff’s conclusions are quick and solid.
I recommend Television is the New Television, and can foresee it as a textbook in communications classes, but it would be of limited interest to anyone not heavily into the business side of the media and broadcast industries.
