The technical opportunity to become friendlier, in other words, is also an opportunity to become unfriendly at a more decisive level. This is the prevailing law of technological development, underlying nearly every claim of progress. But interactivity will not redeem the television sitcom. What it will do is transform even those activities where formerly we interacted with each other directly. You see the fallacy.
Enthusiasts summon a vision of couch potatoes happily released from passivity to a new activity.
Yet the essential development turns out to be not so much the greening of the former wasteland as the the reduction of rich, adjacent territory to a kind of semiaridity. But this confusion of technical advance with human benefit is the heart of the reigning lie. It is now possible for us to exchange our customer service people for an order- taking telephone system. I hope we don't. Much of the company's success has arisen from its unusually close contact with its readers.