Customer Reviews

Life After Television

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As former Director of Broadcast Engineering for Alabama Public Television, (America's oldest PBS Network) I can say that my 38 years of Telecom, Technology, and Broadcast experience strongly suggests that everthing I've ever read by George Gilder is excellent. George's books and Forbes /ASAP articles are an excellent reference for anyone concerned in how technology has and will continue to affect the economy of the U.S. and the World. James Foley -- Alpha Communications & OMNI Telecom

George Gilder has been hailed as one of the foremost science and technology writers for Forbes Magazine. His book, Wealth and Poverty, was one of the "Bibles" of '80s supply-side economics. Although I may not totally agree with his economic views, his extensive research of telecommunications and how this vast and intertwined conglom of industries affects humanity is unquestionably thorough, thought provoking, intellegent, and timely. Some craggy rocks which potentially ground Gilder's predictions of a tidal wave on the technoscape are FCC auctions; mis-directed consumer advertising; lack of consumer education on what cell phone towers "really" are (you know, fear of radiation, cancer scare, etc.), and the inability of competing telecoms, cable companies, computer megopolies, etal to install fiber-optic cable and satellites at a break-neck enough pace. All I know is, wherever TCI has tried Internet services, the "Alpha Test" consumers not only wouldn't give it up after the test was over, some people would not move to an area where they couldn't purcase the service! So readers: Ride premiere prognosticator Gilder's technowave, and be one of the first to hang ten in a prospective post-Mellenium promised land! And be sure to pick up his other books, such as Microcosm. I believe he is updating this for 1998, and he's "write-on" in his first edition. Surf's up!

Fiber and wireless, he is amazingly correct in predicting the technology trends, can't wait to see what he is going to talk about in his next book.

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.

George Gilder is one of the new media visionaries who saw that television is really about screens and interface and content -- the big three not about programming or about Networks or about producers or even about writers. This truly one of the bibles of the new media industry although it was published many years before the Internet took off. I've enjoyed it and we used it as a reference in writing my own books. It's still a fascinating resource for those of you who are creating new content.