Cable TV seems to have become the home of any programming with the least hint of political controversy. Meanwhile, the networks grow increasingly brave about broadcasting shows featuring lingerie models parading in the latest fashions, and ordinary people competing for cash by eating live insects.

At this time of year, we can be thankful that "free" television is so aggressively engaged in its own creative destruction. Would that other outmoded industries shared this apparent zest for death.

The ineffectiveness of much-maligned "banner" advertising is not a failure of the Internet in general or the Web in particular. Rather, it is a sign of the times.

In the industrial era, the typical middle class laborer suffered through day after day filled with tedious, repetitive tasks. Many workers found themselves performing one simple task, over and over, for hours on end. Television was an escape and a diversion that delivered variety, in rapid fire segments, interspersed with messages from sponsors promising to satiate the public's new and growing desire for consumer products. At a time when much of the public was still employed in jobs that involved manual labor, an evening on the couch in front of the television was a well-earned respite after a hard day's work. The intangibility of television was a welcome contrast to the hard products of the assembly line, and the intentional inanity of the sitcom was simple escapism.

In today's world, sedentary "knowledge workers" spend their days at a desk, in front of a computer and a telephone, struggling to juggle a multitude of ill-defined tasks. In many cases, workers can no longer point to a pallet full of products, neatly packaged for shipment, as evidence of eight hours' effort well spent. Instead, they are left to measure their productivity by tallying up the number of emails sent and the PowerPoint slides generated. At the end of a day like that, broadcast television is far less attractive than it was in the previous era. When friends can reach each other by telephone, immediately, at any time of day or night, regardless of their location, without any prior coordination among them, and when even a "normal" family rarely gets everyone together for evening dinner, it hardly seems appropriate to demand that the entire nation sit down together for an episode of "The Bachelor." As the world of work becomes increasingly unreal, television adapts to the change, foil-like, to offer viewers the real, but it overcorrects, and thus ends up creating the surreal.

TiVo is the cellular telephone of television. TiVo does to time what mobile telephony does to space. To argue against the inevitability of TiVo is to deny the proven successes of Nokia, Motorola, Qualcomm, T-Mobile, and the rest. The broadcast flag is but a finger against the dam that is the Internet.

In this environment, the road less traveled by is the product less advertised, or not at all, and this will make all the difference. This apparent contradiction of Metcalfe's Law is in fact the very engine of growth in a network society, because it keeps the world forever in transition.

Cable TV seems to have become the home of any programming with the least hint of political controversy. Meanwhile, the networks grow increasingly brave about broadcasting shows featuring lingerie models parading in the latest fashions, and ordinary people competing for cash by eating live insects.

Comments from Jeremy:

At this time of year, we can be thankful that "free" television is so aggressively engaged in its own creative destruction. Would that other outmoded industries shared this apparent zest for death.

The ineffectiveness of much-maligned "banner" advertising is not a failure of the Internet in general or the Web in particular. Rather, it is a sign of the times.

In the industrial era, the typical middle class laborer suffered through day after day filled with tedious, repetitive tasks. Many workers found themselves performing one simple task, over and over, for hours on end. Television was an escape and a diversion that delivered variety, in rapid fire segments, interspersed with messages from sponsors promising to satiate the public's new and growing desire for consumer products. At a time when much of the public was still employed in jobs that involved manual labor, an evening on the couch in front of the television was a well-earned respite after a hard day's work. The intangibility of television was a welcome contrast to the hard products of the assembly line, and the intentional inanity of the sitcom was simple escapism.

In today's world, sedentary "knowledge workers" spend their days at a desk, in front of a computer and a telephone, struggling to juggle a multitude of ill-defined tasks. In many cases, workers can no longer point to a pallet full of products, neatly packaged for shipment, as evidence of eight hours' effort well spent. Instead, they are left to measure their productivity by tallying up the number of emails sent and the PowerPoint slides generated. At the end of a day like that, broadcast television is far less attractive than it was in the previous era. When friends can reach each other by telephone, immediately, at any time of day or night, regardless of their location, without any prior coordination among them, and when even a "normal" family rarely gets everyone together for evening dinner, it hardly seems appropriate to demand that the entire nation sit down together for an episode of "The Bachelor." As the world of work becomes increasingly unreal, television adapts to the change, foil-like, to offer viewers the real, but it overcorrects, and thus ends up creating the surreal.

TiVo is the cellular telephone of television. TiVo does to time what mobile telephony does to space. To argue against the inevitability of TiVo is to deny the proven successes of Nokia, Motorola, Qualcomm, T-Mobile, and the rest. The broadcast flag is but a finger against the dam that is the Internet.

In this environment, the road less traveled by is the product less advertised, or not at all, and this will make all the difference. This apparent contradiction of Metcalfe's Law is in fact the very engine of growth in a network society, because it keeps the world forever in transition.