Television's next Generation: Technology /interface Culture / Flow In, Television after Tv: Essays on a Medium in Transition Eds.: Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, Duke University Press (2005)

Like many in my profession, I spend a lot of time traveling and thus in hotels, and for me, at any rate, one of the pleasures of this nomadic life is television. Besides a sense of amazement at the clever disguising of the television set into furniture forms of uncertain stylistic reference, I am fascinated by the many capacities of hotel television systems. During a stay at the Marriott in Cambridge, my television offered such features as interactive messaging, account updates, nearly 40 films on demand, and Sony Playstation, in addition to cable television and both closed circuit and cable teletext systems. Simply turning on the television provoked a staggering array of decisions regarding language, services, and menu options, all of which had to be dealt with if one wanted to watch television in any of its forms. The conception of television involved here rubs against the grain of the work I've been doing on early conceptions of the televisual, conceptions that in their nineteenth-century embodiments rendered the appearance of the film medium as something of a disappointment. 1 Simultaneity, I argued, was one of the long anticipated but ultimately suppressed or bypassed defining characteristics of a medium of " far seeing " , a medium more dependant than photography or film on the camera obscura (a metaphor, it should be recalled, with temporal as well as spatial dimensions). This notion of simultaneity was bound up with the idea of connectivity, with extending the boundaries of event and the direct access of the