The medium is

not the message

While the days of black-and-white tvs that picked up one good channel, two if you jiggled a lot of stuff, aren’t that long ago in chronological time, they are prehistoric when you think of how far the medium has come. We are now calmly embracing interactive tv, and the accepted techwisdom is, if you can imagine it – say, satellite-surfing chip implants – it can happen.

My, how things have changed.

And that ageless truism ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’ never felt so apt as during the recent convention of Canadian broadcasters in Winnipeg.

Try to imagine someone’s reaction, even just a couple of years ago, had you suggested that by 1994 a Halifax-based company would be offering an on-line version of a television series that allowed millions of people around the world via computer link to talk to the show’s characters, discuss the show with other viewers and even create new storylines. You would probably have been dismissed as an overly stimulated science fiction writer.

Today, this is reality. Halifax’s Cochran Interactive has launched an on-line version of the Theodore Tugboat series (which Cochran Entertainment produces in association with the cbc). Available on the Internet, the interactive Theodore activity center has already drawn responses from as far away as France and Norway.

While broadcasting may be caught in a warp speed of technological change, some fundamental aspects of the business haven’t changed, and won’t change.

The Discovery Channel’s president and general manager Trina McQueen put it well when she warned convention delegates that the current obsession with technology may be diverting people’s attentions from the main course, which is content.

McQueen then went straight to the heart of the matter with an admonition that gets shot across the bow – not just of broadcasting, but of all Canadian cultural industries – on a regular basis. Broadcasters, she insisted, must invest as much time, money and effort nurturing the talent responsible for creating the message as they do in the people who are inventing the technology that delivers it.

McQueen’s message deserves special attention at a time when technology, and the byte-heads and technocrats who control it, have assumed a crucial new role in the industry.

Technological advances have placed broadcasting in a perpetual state of fast-forward, but the image that’s being delivered might only be a blur if we don’t stop it long enough to make sure that there really is something worth watching.

Which is exactly what prompted Andrew Cochran to put Theodore on the net in the first place – the need for interesting content, something you’d want to go back to visit out there in the cyberway to our future.

In this sense, nothing much has changed. The necessity of developing and delivering goods that fill actual needs – and create an appetite for more – is no different today than when only a couple of fuzzy channels came beaming into Canadian living rooms looking for attention.