It was Gerald Levin, CEO and Chairman of Time Warner, a strange hybrid of Ronald Reagan and Teilhard de Chardin. I had private thoughts subversive, probably my inner McLuhan, telling me that no this wasn't the way it was supposed to happen, that McLuhan's electric age with its challenge to specialization and rationalization and privatization and uniform visual culture was supposed to usher in new epiphanies of the digital age, that the ancient Catholic dream of communication as a blissful state of grace was right around the cyber-corner, but, with Levin's image on my eyes, I zipped McLuhan back to the utopian 60s and settled back for a TV lecture on my future of telecommunications. I could sort of see that - it was the old Hollywood formula, arts entertainment and finance rolled over into Net capital. Memory Bites Lodged in our Brains.
Networks have to stand out in a horizon of endless choice.
Now don't think that Levin was selling us a bill of goods, he wasn't. Time Warner where the buffalo roam, which is to say, disappeared. After this easy three-step program in cyberspace domination, Levin gets back down to earth, jabbing the audience with the familiar story of American cultural imperialism. In a little business aside, he confesses that Time Warner hasn't yet learned how to make money on the Net. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing our common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.