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Life like it was never before
The changing face of fame
Alvin Toffler: In the next century, I think there will be fewer masscelebrities, but they will be bigger, if that's even possible to imagine.What we're doing by creating more niches in this society, and morediversity, is creating more niche celebrities.Being a celebrity is going to be harder, if for no other reason than thatyour privacy is more invadable. Moreover, the kinds of celebrities are goingto change. I think we're moving toward the end of the age of theSchwarzenegger/Willis celebrity. I say that because of the way they're goingto work in the future, given the application of these new technologies toHollywood. So instead of saying, "Arnold, we're going to shoot a movie andit's going to take six months, and we want you to go to lower Slobovia anddo the following things," they're going to say, "Arnold, come in on Saturdaymorning, and we're going to need about three hours of your time. We want youto sit in the chair, stand up, extend a leg, make a smile, raise your fist,and go home." The computer will interpolate all the other motions, and itwill look exactly like Schwarzenegger.We'll also have virtual celebrities. Remember our old friend Max Headroom? Ithink Max Headroom was a primitive incipient version of characters who will,in fact, be crafted by computer but will look like people and will take onthe role that actors and actresses do in soap operas and in other dramaticforms. They will not look jerky and cartoonlike as Max Headroom did. They'lllook terrific. In fact, they'll look so terrific that their faces will beexactly what you think is beautiful and not necessarily what your neighbourthinks, because they'll be customised for each home.The other thing about them is they will be sponsored by Nike, or somebodylike that. Given the full potential of broadband, why can't you do that? Whycan't you create a face or a character? I think the leading soap operas willbe made up of casts of virtual actors and actresses. I suggest there will bea lot of jobs for people who design.Games: The play's the thingPaul Matteucci: There are two basic groups of game players, we call themavid players, or "gamers", and casual game players. In the gamer category,Mplayer.com has a variety of games like action games and simulations, suchas US Navy Fighters, and strategy games, which are not very action-oriented,such as Risk or Panzer General. Sports is a huge category for online games;games like basketball, hockey, and golf are the most popular sports gamesbecause they're the easiest to play online.Then there are the classic games for the more casual game player.Mplayer.com offers games like free poker, spades, bingo, checkers, chess;board games like Scrabble and Battleship; and crossword puzzles and triva.Other sites offer game shows like Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. Some ofthe most popular games in our service are the classic games, primarilypoker, spades, checkers.There are many more casual game players on the Internet than gamers, andabout 43 per cent of that audience is female. On some sites, likeGamesville, where bingo's the biggest game, there is an even higherpercentage of women. This audience is generally older than the gameraudience, averaging in their upper forties to early fifties. The sweet spotfor the gamer audience is really twenty- to thirty-five-year-old males, butthe market's getting older all the time.Peter Friedman: People go nuts for word games with text chat. We have onecalled Silly Sentences where the moderator, who has special technologytools, will type a word like lazy and you have to make a sentence out of it.Everybody in the room, which could be twenty or thirty people, very quicklytype out a sentence with the word, and whoever makes the funniest one wins.The audience does the scoring and people can win prizes.How many people like to do that? Well, thousands of people play at a time.We've had to hold game marathon weekends to satisfy the demand. It's asubstitute for parlour games like Trivial Pursuit.All the hits, all the timeKen Auletta: It's wonderfully liberating to suddenly have a distributionsystem that makes it easy for consumers to get good music. You get to dowhat I used to do when I was a boy. We had listening booths and you couldlisten to music before you decided to buy a record.Now you can go on the Web and listen to cuts from a CD before you decide tobuy it. Music has changed; broadcast.com's got 400 radio stations that youcan access.Partly what's happening is the middleman is being eradicated. I can samplemusic on my computer, then click and order. I don't have to go to a store, Idon't have to get in a car, I don't have to move. God, that's heaven. I canhave friends over, we can sample music together. That's a mall experiencewithout going to the mall, and it's close to your refrigerator.Mark Cuban The conventional wisdom says people are just going to downloadthe music they want from the Internet. I don't think that's going to be thepreferred model because there will be too many choices. When you've got amillion songs, and you can download any one of them, it's too much work. Ithink we'll have packages and products that are made available todownload-for example, the Barry Manilow collection.In a digital world music doesn't need to be separated from video, so Ibelieve the more likely scenario is that they'll be packaged together andoffered like a subscription. So I could order the lifestyle package thatappeals to me with the Billboard Top Ten for Baltimore delivered over mycable modem each night, along with my favourite TV shows that I'vesubscribed to, all coming over my HDTV signal and the DTV card in my PC for$29.99 a month. That subscription could also travel with me.There will be different devices that are plugged into your PC that you canunplug and take with you, along with your subscription package that youdownload onto a 3.5-inch, 20-gig hard drive in your car radio that can showvideo, play music, or provide information. That's how all things digital aregoing to be distributed; you'll start to see it happening in the next two tothree years.What's on? EverythingMark Cuban: Broadcast.com enables people to receive traditional media thatthey don't normally have access to, anywhere there is a computer. Forexample, if you want to see all the latest fashions from France twenty-fourhours a day you can get them. If you're from Baltimore living in Dallas andyou want to listen to WBAL, your hometown station, you can hear it.Previously, if the game wasn't on national TV, you were out of luck. You hadto wait for the newspaper to come out in the morning or you could go to aWeb page and get the latest scores.I grew up in Pittsburgh, I live in California, but now I can listen to myfavorite announcer call the Pirates' games and, when I close my eyes, it'sno different from sitting in Pittsburgh in 1970 listening to the Pirates.The only thing that's changed are the names of the players. That's anexperience you couldn't have five years ago. If you want to go back andwatch the first episode of I Love Lucy or the first episode of Dragnet or ifyou want to see crazy drag-racing accidents or see the rivers of Russia orlearn about Shakespeare or watch the Alfred Hitchcock movie 39 Steps, it'sall available, and more. We're really creating the history of the world; wewant to archive everything that we possibly can.In the future, anybody and everybody are broadcasters, the only differenceis whether it's a business or a labour of love. If it's a labour of love,little Johnny's first soccer game goes on the Internet so Grandma can watch.If she's got a cable modem and little Johnny or one of his buddies recordsthe game with a digital videocamera, then it can be plugged into the PC,posted to the family website, and sent to Grandma as an e-mail with a linkto the video. Grandma clicks and watches little JohNny's soccer. When youhave all these choices, what do you think Grandma's going to watch? ER orlittle Johnny for the fifteenth time? Grandma's going to watch little Johnny.Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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