Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life
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“In Life After Television, George Gilder imagines a world in which the boob tube has given way to the living room telecomputer. . . . Mr. Gilder’s case is galvanic, at times even intoxicating.” ―Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal
In his visionary new book George Gilder brilliantly and persuasively outlines the sweeping new developments in computer and fiber optic technology that spell certain death to traditional television and telephony. In their places, he argues, will emerge a new paradigm in which people-to-people communications give way to links among computers to be found in every home and office. The rise of the telecomputer (or “teleputer”) will utterly transform the way we do business, educate our children, and spend our leisure time, and will imperil such large, centralized, top-down organizations as cable networks, phone companies, government bureaucracies, and multinational corporations.
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company; Revised ed. edition (June 17, 1994)
Language : English
Paperback : 220 pages
ISBN-10 : 0393311589
ISBN-13 : 978-0393311587
Item Weight : 10.1 ounces
Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.3 inches
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Steve Sewall, Ph.D. –
Time to set the record straight . . .
This radical and amazingly prescient little book enthralled me when I stumbled on it in a Chicago bookstore in 1990. (Thank you Stuart Brent.) Today I’m amazed at its neglect by academic and professional media people, including, with all respect, the other Amazon reviews here.I read all the good media books I can find. I find few. Most can be boiled down to 10 page magazine articles.Nowhere in the past 20 years have I found anything as good as this. It’s a joy to read, the work of an angry, hopeful, creative man. Gilder wrote it as a polemic against U.S. government plans to ape the Japanese in supporting the development of HDTV. Given the promise of emerging digital technologies, Gilder saw such research as waste of America’s best creative and productive energies: those of its people.Gilder saw HDTV as a digitized version of an analog network TV system that makes couch potatoes of us all because it “squeezes the consciousness of an entire nation through a few score channels”. More than this, he condemned the analog system as “an alien and corrosive force in democratic capitalism” (p 47).”Life After Television” predicted the overthrow of the “tyrannical” medium of analog TV by the liberating medium of the digital PC, or “teleputer” as he quaintly calls it. […]OK, so we have HDTV and are hooked on it. But look at the role of the digital PC in electing Barack Obama and tell me if Gilder was right or wrong.This book grounded me in the crucial difference between analog and digital technologies. It is full of fresh ideas. It’s the first book I recommend to aspiring journalists. Second is Marshall McLuhan’s much denser “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man” (1964). Third is Shelley Palmer’s “Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV, 2nd Edition: The Transformation form Network TV to Networked TV” which, while silent on politics, is invaluable for its expertise.Hope this sells a few copies.
Ken S. –
Out dated
Boring read
Amazon Arizona customer –
Historically accurate prediction of Future we are now living.
1990 book that predicted the future, used with wear, but what a treasure, saving it for nieces and nephew to read later. George Gilder is an amazing mindâbooks are collected items!
A Customer –
Excellent
Well -written, incredibly perceptive. I can’t wait to read his most recent book “Life After Google”.
DontWorryBoutMyName –
Five Stars
This guy is a friggin’ prophet.
Timothy M. Arends –
Amazingly prescient book
At first, this book may seem to have badly missed the mark. After all, television is still here. However, with the careful reading, you realize just how much the author got right. (The âtelevisionâ in the title really refers to the mainstream media.)Remember that this book was originally written in 1990. Thatâs almost 30 years ago. Yet the author mapped out an amazingly accurate picture of what the future was going to look like. He describes how fiber optics were poised to revolutionize communications, which it did. He speaks of the easy availability of user created videos to challenge the mainstream media (think YouTube). He writes of telecommuting, distance-learning, HDTV and more. He even envisions a smart phone device. Remember, all of this is before HDTV, the iPhone, and even the Internet arrived. The author was a little over optimistic about how soon all of these marvels were going to revolutionize everything, but he certainly had an amazingly good picture of what the future looked like.
Manoj Ranchord –
A Modern Day Josef Schumpeter expounds on the modern era
I read this book when it was published in 1994. Its a tour de force and has effectively been updated in Gilder’s latest release Life After Google. Its a brilliant and breezy read and is extremely insightful. Although written 25 years ago, its still prescient and worth a purchase to flick through as you please. I especially recommend the first and last chapter – Life after Life After Television. Gilder is like reading a modern day Josef Schumpeter, applying the principles of “creative destruction” to the modern day context and illuminating the trajectory of where things are moving, how and why. A worthwhile companion to anyone who has or is about to read Life After Google.
T. Burrows –
A vision of television’s future that has passed its expiration date
Gilder is an important high tech hypester/pundit who I have seen profiled in The New Yorker and have listened to on the radio. Apparently he was raised by the Rockefeller family – his father was a Rockefeller’s roommate in either college or WW2, and when he was âkilled this Rockefeller fulfilled a pledge to raise and educate the boy. Gilder has worked as a right wing magazine editor and has written a few books: a couple of anti-feminist tracts, a book touting capitalism as being the most godly form of economic activity (one of Ronald Reagan’s favorites), and a couple of books on high tech issues. He is an Ivy League, free market Republican and a cultural elitist.This short book was already way out of date by the time I started reading it. Published by Whittle Communications and full of ads for Federal Express, it must have carried a very low price tag at one time. Gilder predicts that the TV viewer will soon have much more power over what to watch and when, what camera angles to use, etc. A lot of this has already arrived, especially with the advent of internet video streaming. But the large corporations that dominate TV and turn out the lowest common denominator entertainment that Gilder dislikes are showing no sign of making major changes to content. He also discusses a company called QuoTrek which used radio waves to send out stock quotes and other info – a technology that has since been surpassed by other devices like smartphones and tablets.