The Times They Are a Changing - Again.com

Firesign Theater cagily titled their 1999 release, "Boom Dot Bust" and duly noted the end of the first blush of innocence in the information age.

It happens like that you know. Slapstick silent comedies from Chaplin and Keaton crashed and were run over by smart talkies - like Frank Capra's, "It Happened One Night".

I watched Woody Allen's, "Bananas" last night; a film that ran over Capra's Hollywood and left skid marks as Woody enlisted TV sports announcer Howard Cosell to "broadcast" play by play coverage of the consummation of a marriage on ABC's Wide World of Sports. Film would never be the same...at least until now, when sameness sells.

As so often happens after the heat of the moment, the "dot-bust"was the collapse of a burning ball of gas into a few glowing coals. Without the limitless fuel of venture capitol to keep it expanding, on-line programming relaxed itself into a conservative torpor. The creep of media-ocrity, driven by the fear of failure (despite relentless models for success), left us in a landscape of virtual billboards, predatory data mining and cob-webby brochures.

But that is all so five minutes ago.

There is a new generation of programmers figuring out the tactical use of the medium itself. I don't mean like Philo Farnsworth, unsung engineer of Television, I mean like Milton Burl - in a dress on the Texaco Star Theater. Let's not forget that John Kennedy got elected because he made Nixon look like an ex-con on TV. And it was Kennedy who got us to the moon in 1969 - because he called his shot on TV in front of the whole world.

Go to NASA.gov right now and you'll find video clips and animations that spell out the future of America's manned space flight program. We're going back to the moon. We're going on out to Mars. And NASA is already creating on-line program content to explain how we're going to do it. Do you get that? The next chapter in the biggest adventure in human history is already demanding the creation of on line programming so you can see how it's going to happen. And when it does happen, you'll be watching the next moon landing on a video screen connected to the internet.

The implication in all of this is that the next media revolution is going to lead us back to the future. So let's get started.