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T A B L E__T A L K

AOL and privacy: Are the two mutually exclusive? Join the discussion in Table Talk's Digital Culture area

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R E C E N T L Y

Festival in search of a medium
By Karlin Lillington
Cannes' multimedia showcase loses its way
(02/17/98)

Metal madness
By Andrew Leonard
The battle for heavy metal on the Web
(02/13/98)

Friction or fact?
By Andrew Leonard
Trendy theories of a "friction-free economy" hit some bumps
(02/12/98)

Just pay for it
By Andrew Leonard
Technology may bring the Olympics to your desktop someday -- but not for free
(02/11/98)

21st Challenge
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
Ticklers for every situation
Plus: Haiku error message winners
(02/10/98)

BROWSE THE ARCHIVES FOR LET'S GET THIS STRAIGHT

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The real problem Hollywood has with the telephone analogy is that telephone calls are not an advertising medium. The closer the prototypes for new media ventures stick to the old broadcast models, the more easily they can fall back on the old revenue models. Products like Intertainer, with their ability to target individual consumers, are a marketer's wet dream: The TV/computer knows all about how to sell to you, and you can't talk back (except to say "buy").

But for Intertainer or any other enhanced TV service to succeed, it will have to assemble a mass audience of users, and that's where it may falter. "Consumers are clamoring for a visually rich digital multimedia experience," Compaq VP Robert Stearns told conference attendees -- but that clamor hasn't exactly been deafening. For large numbers of people to adopt a new home-entertainment technology, the product of course needs to be cheap, easy to use and reliable; but it also must offer a payoff for the extra time you'll spend setting it up, making it work and learning to use it. Intertainer is now running pilot tests in Palo Alto and Buena Park, Calif. If it can get the technology to work, then the real test will begin -- the battle for people's time.

Science fiction author Neal Stephenson ("Snow Crash," "The Diamond Age") kicked off the conference -- on a surprisingly pessimistic panel that also featured futurist-pundit Paul Saffo, author-trendmeister Doug Rushkoff and computer-interface pioneer Alan Kay -- with a crash course in the nature of the "attention economy": "There are only a few subgroups in society that have time on their hands: students, prisoners, retirees and Kenneth Starr." Interactive media, Stephenson said, are coming into "a brutally competitive time marketplace."

The theory of the "attention economy" holds that there's an infinite amount of information but only 24 hours in the day, so our time will increasingly be our most valuable, and scarcest, commodity. If that's true, then mass-market entertainers may be in for trouble. Of course, they aren't the only ones. The Web, too, functions according to its own attention-economy dynamic, punishing those whose sites download too slowly and rewarding those who are able to get their URLs widely distributed.

This very process could be observed in full swing only a hundred yards outside the conference's hotel, the Beverly Hills Hilton, at the busy intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards -- where a duo of women dressed in pink hot pants and tall black boots smiled, blew whistles, waved at the traffic and held up a six-foot banner. Their Valentine's Day message? "WWW.AMORE.COM."

That Web address turns out to have nothing to do with suave Italian romance; it's an alias for a site called Sexual Advantage, purveyors of sex-tips videos. Cheesy and crass as the come-on was, its instigators understood something about the attention economy that the Hollywood-Silicon Valley entente has yet to learn: Before you can sell a product, you have to assemble an audience.
SALON | Feb. 18, 1998