What will happen to poor little television?  Long considered to be next on the chopping block for the internet's buzz-saw--the recording industry was its first real summarily sliced and diced victim--it lingers on.  Not knowing how to compete with the weird world of YouTube and MySpace, where culture is dissected, reassembled, and then shot through with twenty thousand volts to re-animate it as some sort of postmodern Frankenstein with a mohawk, the caretakers of TV have decided instead to go insane.

This explains in part why American prime-time network programming is beginning to look more and more like Japanese television ten or twenty years ago.  We have yet to see a truly successful torture game-show--'Fear Factor' was far too tame to qualify--but it's only a matter of time.  Meanwhile self-created internet shows and personalities, like Fred of YouTube fame and Perez Hilton of, well, Perez Hilton fame, take up millions of hours of time otherwise spent on good ol' fashioned American TV watchin'.   And the operative word is 'spent.'

You see, all this 'distraction,' as TV's favorite mouths are so quick to define anything even vaguely e-related, is actually costing the networks, and their balkanized bits on cable, a lot of very real dough.  Ad Age reported last year that network television revenue plummeted, and that's coming off several dismal pre-recession years.  Most of the major networks have managed to pad their numbers by buying cable, satellite radio, and (gasp) internet properties. 

But the largest and richest of the internet properties are now far beyond TV's reach, and Boomer-era tech companies like Microsoft, which initially went into business with the networks, are no longer the main players.  Just look at how easily Google and Yahoo fended off Microsoft, a company that had to ask its much storied CEO to step aside because the stench of failure was beginning to emanate from Redmond.

And the numbers are beginning to add up into mountains on the other side.  Google, Ebay, Yahoo, Craigslist, MySpace, Facebook, Amazon, has anyone noticed the exponential proliferation of billion-dollar advertising successes online?  When you think about it, it makes TV, and its future revenue potential, seem puny by comparison.  

All this adds up to one undeniable impression: Television is no longer the 'mainstream' in America, the internet is.  Even when one looks beyond the dollar signs--into the arena of politics, for instance, where an Obama or a Franken can rise to office with the aid of online troops, or entertainment, where the next wave of celebrities is not only online, but content to stay there, since they can earn a cut of the ad buy on their sites that far outstrips any offer coming from the networks or Hollywood.  Already Gavin Newsome is beginning to build an army of online supporters out in California, and across the country, that will almost certainly unseat the Governator, a fitting end to a Hollywood icon-turned pol in the age of viral takeover.

The change also represents something of a shift in the way society, and the family, is organized.  With both parents working, the kids were left on their own, and so the kids got to inventing.  Boomers may have given them the tools, but there was nothing inevitable about the way the internet was used and is being used.  The kids grasped long before anyone else that the real power of the online universe is its self-determined nature, so that social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are not really about networking at all (it's a phrase some marketing hack came up with), but rather about creating a new identity in cyberspace, or multiple, conflicting identities.

This last bit of invention has also begun to creep up on the last great bastion of centralized, mediatized thought: political ideology.  If one can be a raging right-winger on one issue, and a rationalizing progressive on another, and if one can challenge whatever the centralized consciousness has to say--regardless of content--then the hypnotic effect of centralized media like TV and radio begins to fade.  And the strategies of response to this challenge have all turned out poorly. 

Radio executives decided to go into the niche market business and cater to the right wing/Red State culture.  But even there they're being outflanked by free online radio and music content.  Once people rediscovered the fact that music is a common cultural property, and had been for thousands of years before somebody thought they could 'own' it, the game was up.  Likewise the mass hypnosis of television--so pined about recently in the wake of Walter Cronkite's death, at least by TV personalities--has faded from our view.  Take a look around, Boomers.   Things have changed, unalterably, and essentially, right in your own living rooms, right behind your backs.

BOKO Oct 2009