Internet Carrying Heavy Downloads

The New York Times website reported somewhat breathlessly Wednesday night that the pleasures of watching network prime-time television will now be more easily transferred to the PC nearest you. "NBC Universal, acknowledging that viewers are increasingly moving away from traditional television viewing, announced plans today for a service that will make popular NBC programs available to download free to personal computers and other devices," the newspaper explained.

Matters of consumer convenience, market share and clashes between corporate-media titans — spanning intersections of digital technology and financial payoffs — are often grist for high-profile media coverage. And when mass-marketed programming is in play, the coverage tends to assume that there's wide interest in stories combining popular culture with high finance.

According to the news account in the Times, "the programs, including 'Heroes' and 'The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,' will be offered for a week immediately after their initial broadcasts. Commercials will be embedded in the programs, and viewers will not be able to skip through them."

In large measure, this could be the long-term fate of the Web — a technology that has facilitated wondrous civic engagement as well as hugely lucrative investments. A tension persists between those two basic approaches to cyberspace. Neither will completely dominate, but the investment approach is on the ascendancy.

Everyone can see that the Internet has become heavily commercialized. Even if you don't visit Web sites with appreciable advertising, the chances are that commercialization is visiting you — if only in the form of ad spam that is likely to be annoying, offensive or both.

But a more stealthy transformation of the Web also has been well underway — and the latest move by NBC to smooth the path between network TV and the PC is just the latest indication that the decentralized approach to the Internet is under increasingly effective assault.

The opposite of real decentralization is the broadcast model. When we look at a computer and see it as a way to participate in authentic communication, that's a far cry from turning on the machine so we can avail ourselves of a convenient way to watch Jay Leno.

Technology is apt to be overblown as a way of bonding people or building democracy.

Every major new media invention — including, in the past couple of decades, the telegraph, radio, television, cable and the Internet — has been hailed as the harbinger of democratic transformation. But there's no techno-fix for the extreme imbalances of economic and political power that ail the United States.

In contrast to a decentralized medium that enables people to communicate without the permission of authorities or wealthy individuals or highly capitalized institutions, as a practical matter a broadcast medium is apt to be all about a few people making the decisions. Executive suites and advertising agencies are places where convergences of big money result in basic choices on what millions of people will see and hear every day and every night.

As if by reflex, many consumers are pleased when the personal computer becomes more effectively greased as a smooth conduit for the same media products that grace television sets across America. In a society where corporate dominance so often defines "choice" as, in effect, "choosing from choices handed down by important people," we're encouraged to believe that more convenient access to corporate offerings signifies real progress.

That's a key part of the pitch. On Wednesday, the executive vice president of NBC Digital Entertainment, Vivi Zigler, went through the verbal motions of claiming that the company was bowing to the autonomy of viewers. "With the creation of this new service, we are acknowledging that now, more than ever, viewers want to be in control of how, when and where they consume their favorite entertainment," she said. "Not only does this feature give them more control, but it also gives them a higher quality video experience."

But it should be up to all of us — not corporate executives — to decide what control really means and how to make our media experiences more meaningful.

Norman Solomon's new book "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State" has just come off the press. For more information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com

Norman Solomon's latest book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," is now available in paperback. To find out more about Norman Solomon and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. ]

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