Part I: Hope.
Don’t laugh, but old-timers and academics (who, whatever their chronological age, tend to act, think, and write like old-timers) refer to the 1950s as the "Golden Age of Television."

Come on, come on. Restrain those guffaws. There was a period in that forlorn decade when a bit of creativity actually crept into television and onto those blurry black-and-white screens of yesteryear. A little quality drama (mainly on the Hallmark Hall of Fame—I know, I know, just bear with me here), even an occasional (you ready?) opera (Menotti’s perennial "Amahl and the Night Visitors" had its world premiere on NBC). And then you have the deification of such second-rate comics as what’s-his-name who with Imogene Coca made Your Show of Shows (OK, so the decade was not good at coming up with titles) mainly because of the writers involved, i.e., Neil Simon in his pre-Broadway apprenticeship days.

If you’ll just calm down and let me make my point.

Grant that there was some pretty good work done on network TV then. (I will not ask the possibly embarrassing question: how many recordings of those only barely watchable kinescopes have you ever rented and sat through.) Still, those old shows must be good, because they are now enshrined (and apparently watched, at least by media scholars) in the Museum of Radio and Television in New York City.

But we all know and live with what eventually happened to television. From the tiny seed of a few national networks sprang a thousand international satellite channels of unwatchable, wholly predictable garbage.

The invisible hand of the hallowed free market went to work. Clever persons in production and advertising quickly realized that television had enormous profit-potential as a conditioning medium of consumption: Show consumers enough stuff often enough and they will not only want it, they will buy it. All you need is a bit of semi-attractive, eye-catching packaging around your ads. This packaging, the so-called creative content, could in turn be used to create famous faces which could in turn be used to hawk still more stuff. And so on. A process which gave us such cultural pinnacles as David Letterman, Martha Stewart, and This Old House.

Anyway, the result was television as we know it and live it every multi-tasking day of our media-saturated lives.

In other words, the profit guys won. The creative guys lost. And television become an ever vaster wasteland.

Part II: Despair.
Maybe you’re already seeing where I’m going with this.

Now we have early days on the Internet. Get online and there spread out before you, FREE FOR THE TAKING, is the whole world, or at least as much of its as we’ve so far been able to digitize.

Some of it’s old media content translated to pixels. Some of it’s new-new-new stuff. But it’s all right there, waiting for you to click your way to it.

And some of it is good. Even very very good.

It is for example truly wondrous that I can click into the complete content of every day’s New York Times FREE OF CHARGE. Or, for that matter, every day’s LA Times, the Times of London, or The Village Voice, or, God help us, Screw. Or I can roam through the digitized galleries of the Louvre. All FREE.

But.

What kind of capitalism is this, I ask you? You think the profit guys are going to let this go on indefinitely? No way.

The New York Times is an excellent case in point. Whatever you may think of their political myopia, this huge, global outfit with its huge, global staff of really smart reporters and writers every day churns out an amazing amount of high-quality reporting, analysis, and commentary. And they’re making a lot of money, but that money is still almost entirely coming from their old paper publication and its advertising. How much longer, do you think, are they and the countless other similar operations, going to subsidize free Internet distribution of such valuable content?

To take a different, hipper example, consider Google. Out of nowhere, the Google guys, using one really good idea, shot to the head of the search engine pack. When was the last time you used, or even though about, oh, say, Alta Vista, or Lycos, if you wanted to find something on the Internet? And there sits the Google page, pristine and ad-free, getting millions of eyes to look at it every day.

How much longer can this last, I ask. And I answer: not much.

Napster, with its sorry fate, was but a tiny hint of capitalist things to come.

My crystal ball’s a little cloudy, so I can’t say what will replace this wide-open Internet. My point is that the signs are clearly in place, comparing us cybernauts now with the TV watchers of the 1950s, to indicate that before long we’ll be looking back on the turn of the millennium as the Golden Age of the Internet, when everything, EVERYTHING, was out there, free and uncensored for the clicking.