Media, networks, and content

The more distant a person is from technology, the greater that person deems it to be the engine of social action. The lay press and our own relatives constantly ask us at the MIT Media Laboratory whether the Internet will converge with television, and how television will become interactive. They tacitly assume that technology will drive applications instead of the other way around. The populace at large and the popular press seem to live in fear that we will forcibly yank away their remote controls and replace them with mice and joysticks, that we will transform the living room from a place of relaxation to a field of Doom, and that we will do so merely by inventing it. Adoption and alteration are not options.