Licklider Televistas Carnegie 1967

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112 PUBLIC TELEVISIONMap No. Channel106 Sacramento KVIE 6 Central California EducationalTelevision107 Redding KIXE 9 Northern California Education-al Television108 OREGON109 Corvallis KOAC-TV 7 Oregon State Board of Higher

Portland KOAP-TV 10 EducationWASHINGTON

110 Pullman KWSC-TV 10 Washington State University111 Yakima KYVE 47 Yakima County School District112 Lakewood KPEC-TV 56 Clover Park School District 400

Center Tacoma School District 10113 Tacoma KTPS 62114 Seattle KCTS-TV 9 The University of Washington

HAWAII115 Wailuku KMEB 10 University of Hawaii116 Honolulu KHET 11

PU ERTO RICO117 Hato Rey WIPR-TV 6 Department of Education of(SanJuan)

3 Puerto Rico118 Mayaguez WIPM-TV

NOTE: In addition, KBZK operates in Pago Pago, American Samoa,and connects with six relay stations.

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Supplementary Papers

The papers that follow were preparedfor the use of the Commission, and arepresented here for their general interestor reference value. * Each is signed by itsauthor. The views expressed are those ofthe authors, and not necessarily those ofthe Commission, whose own views andjudgments are expressed solely in theReport of the Carnegie Commission onEducational Television, which precedes thesepapers. In addition to these essays, thesupplement includes selected statisticalmaterial on educational television which wasprepared by or for the Commission.

Dr. Licklider's paper was completed after theCommission had formulated its own conclusions.


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20 0 TECHNOLOGY AND TELEVISIONFrequency Use and Conservat ion

At the present time we have a completely filled VHFband and a rapidly filling UHF band. However, we notethat the overwhelming majority of all man-hours of view-ing are spent with sets tuned to the VHF band. It is there-fore possible, at relatively small cost and dislocation, toreserve part of the UHF band for experimental purposesin research for better quality.Although the gross national product continues to in-crease and items which require only more dollars for im-provement can be anticipated with time, the use of thenatural frequency spectrum is another matter. There is onlyso much of it, and any waste must be carefully prevented.It istrue that there are underway applied research programsseeking to broadcast with a smaller portion of the spectrumwhile transmitting the same amount of video information.These developments are extraordinarily important but willnot come to fruition for at least ten years and probably agreat deal more.

It is to be hoped that the precious UHF spectrum canbe allocated grudgingly to insure that the best possible useof television with improved quality of picture transmissionis a firm requirement. The present standards must be tiedto the VHF band in order to protect the interests of thepublic and of industry, but a part of the UHF band shouldbe opened for experimentation and improvement.

While we may expect greater use of cables, it must beremembered that the broadcast receiver is the least expen-sive method of getting a television signal into the homeand is the only method economically possible for a largefraction of television viewers.

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Televistas: Looking Ahead Through SideWindows

by J . C . R. Licklider

Dr. Licklider is Consultant to the IBM Director of Research andVisiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Previously Lecturer in Psychology at Harvard, Associate Professorof Psychology and Communicati.ons at Massachusetts Instituteof Technology, Vice President of Bol t Beranek and Newman,Inc., and Director for Behavioral Sciences and InformationProcessing Research of the Advanced Research ProjectsAgency, Department of Defense.

In planning to improve the use of television for educa-tional purposes, most people have accepted the basic frame-work of conventional broadcast television. That frameworkdetermines the basic structure of their thinking and in theprocess delimits it. For example, a person who thinks ofeducational television as a set of educational functions sup-ported by the framework of conventional broadcast televi-sion is unlikely to think of television as a medium for two-way communication or as a way of transmitting the text ofa book or the stimulus material for a course of programmedinstruction.

The main purpose of this paper is to explore some ofthe possibilities that come to mind when one deliberatelylooks aside from the central line of thought about educa-tional television and rejects the assumption that educationalapplications have to be built upon the framework of con-ventional broadcast television. It is not part of the purposeto argue that what is to be seen out the "side windows" is

"The term "broadcast," as I use it here, is not intended to implythat signals are necessarily radiated into space from an antenna. If aprogram were sent out to the public through coaxial cables, the pro-gram would be "broadcast."


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more attractive than the view along the central path. Theintention is merely to examine briefly a collection of ideasthat seem interesting from a technical point of view and toconsider how they might fit into the future of educationsupported by technology. It seems important to do this be-cause the modern technology of information and commu-nications is opening up a wide horizon of bright prospects,most of which seem to be technically achievable. Theseprospects should be held in mind, and brought into activeinterplay with pedagogical, psychological, economic, andphilosophical factors, during this crucial period of planningand deciding the course of educational television.

"INTERACTIVE" AND "SELECTIVE" TELEVISIONThe great simplifying characteristics of conventional

broadcast television are that it is broadcast and that thebroadcast stations transmit to viewers who do not transmitback. Under past technological constraints, those charac-teristics were a sine qua non for a wide-band medium. Thatis to say, to justify the use of a medium capable of carry-ing a very large amount of information each second, onehad to reach a mass audience and therefore could not pro-vide channels through which the many individual membersof a large audience could talk back. In the future, tech-nology will constrain less severely. We should thereforethink about what educational television might do and whatit might achieve if it could afford to present a much widerrange of programs, direct its services to small and highlyselected audiences, and even engage in two-way commu-nication.

From an educator's point of view, the main intrinsic de-fects of broadcast television are that it offers everyone thesame thing and does not give its viewers a direct way ofparticipating in its programs or interacting with its programmaterial. It is likely that advances in technological capa-bility and changes in social perspective will multiply thechannels available to educational television, making it pos-

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sible for educational television to offer a wide variety ofprograms and services to meet diverse educational needsselectively and responsively. Indeed, it is possible that fa-cilities will become available to educational television thatwill permit people to participate directly in educationalprograms and to interact directly with subject matter. Thesepossibilities evoke concepts that I shall call "selective tele-vision" and "interactive television." Since interaction is sucha strong factor in learning, let us consider it first.

Interactive ParticipationViewers do, in a sense, participate in conventional tele-

vision programs. If the program material is dramatic andmatched to a viewer's motivations, the viewer may sit onthe edge of his chair, empathize overtly, and utter words ofencouragement. That kind of participation fails, however, toqualify as interactive participation, since the actual courseof a broadcast television program depends in no way uponthe concurrent behavior of its viewers. The criterion forwhat is here called "interaction" is that both the programand the viewer be capable of influencing each other.

From a psychologist's point of view, there is an impor-tant difference between interactive and noninteractive par-ticipation which is crucial to the development, as distin-guished from the exploitation, ofmotivation. Noninteractiveparticipation stems from previously established drives, butit does not contribute effectively to the development oraugmentation of motivation. Interactive participation, onthe other hand, is regenerative. It stems from already es-tablished motivation and may in turn strengthen and evenrestructure that motivation.

It is obvious enough how viewers can react to a tele-vision program, but how can a television program react toits viewers? If it is a set piece, it can do nothing that is notset into it. If it is a contingent program, on the other hand,it can in principle adapt itself to its audience as a lectureradapts himself to his. Indeed, if the "program" is an arrayof contingent programs - a "multiple-track" program, in the


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parlance of programmed instruction - it can adjust itselfsimultaneously in different ways to achieve and maintainresonance with each of several or many sectors of its over-all audience. The trouble, of course, is that the difficultyof selective adjustment increases with the size of the audi-ence. Obviously, there is an essential incompatibility be-tween viewer-program interaction and mass media.

Participating by SelectingFor a viewer of educational television, the next best

thing to having the program itself react to him may be toselect from an ensemble of transmitted alternatives the onethat is most appropriate to his needs or interests. The viewerof conventional television can, of course, select a channeland change his selection whenever he likes. That is goodas far as it goes, but it does not go far enough to give theviewer any sense of participation in a program. The ideaof "participating by selecting" involves the assumption thatbroader and more systematically organized sets of optionscan be offered to the viewer and that more convenient andmore sophisticated ways of selecting among the options canbe provided.On a priori grounds, to augment the selectability of pro-

gram material seems less likely to open Significant new op-portunities than does the establishment of true interactionbetween the viewer and the program itself. However, se-lectability does not suffer as severely the essential incom-patibility with mass-audience broadcasting that handicapsinteraction, since the entire process of selecting can be car-ried out at the receiver and no feedback channel from thehome to the television station is required. Let us, therefore,consider a few approaches that involve selection by theviewer - approaches that might achieve some of the sameadvantages as interaction without giving up mass audiences.

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SELECTIVE BROADCAST TELEVISIONThe approach to improving the effectiveness of educa-

tional television that requires the least modification of theframework of conventional broadcast television is one thattakes advantage of increased availability of television chan-nels to broadcast a large amount of carefully scheduled andcoordinated material, from which individual viewers canselect what meets their needs and interests. Each broadcastprogram, for example, could be an array of subprograms,from which each viewer could select one. From time to time,either at specified points in the program or at moments ofhis own choosing, the viewer could switch from one sub-program to another. A few of the ways in which this generalmethod could be applied are suggested by the followingideas:

1. Several cameras are used to cover a group discus-sion, a play, or a football game. All the signals are broad-cast and received by the television receiver. Associated witheach receiving set is a control by means of which the viewerselects the camera through which he wishes to watch.

2. The picture of a work of art or of a scene on a largestage is transmitted in such a way as to preserve very finedetail. A control on the receiver permits the viewer to selectwhatever part he likes of the overall picture for displayupon his screen. Having mastered the control arrangement,the viewer can let his eyes explore a painting almost asthough he were before it in the gallery or follow spontane-ously the action of a dynamic scene.

3. The news broadcast has two main parts. First thereisa summary in which the essence of each item is presentedvery briefly. During this presentation, the viewer presses abutton each time he sees or hears something he wants tolearn more about. Then, during the second part of thebroadcast, when fuller and more penetrating accounts aregiven of the various developments, his receiver selects for


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him and presents to him a program custom tailored to hisinterests.

4. Instead of broadcasting a "moving picture" - a suc-cession of still pictures, each minutely different from its pre-decessor - the transmitter sends out a sequence of still pic-tures in which one is quite independent of the next. Thestill pictures, coming at a rate of thirty per second, con-stitute a vast informational resource from which each re-ceiver can select. The receivers are designed to pick outcertain images and to hold each one for view until its se-lected successor arrives. Thus the viewer sees a successionof still pictures, each selected from a large set of alterna-tives.

The first two schemes would be interesting only ifmeanswere developed through which viewers could control theselection and display of received images very convenientlyand very naturally, almost as a part of the act of viewing.The third scheme does not appear to involve any problemsof adjustment by the viewer that would require the devel-opment of sophisticated means, but it does invite develop-ment of sophisticated arrangements for controlling the se-lection of program elements on the basis of the viewer'spattern of interests and preferences. The basic idea, sug-gested in terms of an augmented newscast, was to offer avariety of program elements, transmitting them in severalparallel sequences so that each viewer's receiving set couldmake its own selection. If the entire schedule of offeringswere preannounced, each viewer might of course piece to-gether his own news program by operating a simple channelselector. To make the scheme practicable, however, it wouldbe necessary to provide, for each receiver, a programmableselection controller. This notion, which tends to develop it-self into a concept that might be called the "control sub-system" of the home information system, will be pertinentalso to other ideas to be introduced later.

Assuming a sophisticated control subsystem, one can en-visage application of "custom tailoring" to other things thannews. It would be especially appropriate for announce-

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ments of forthcoming events and, indeed, for any subjectmatter that naturally divides itself into elements of whichsome are likely to be of interest to one viewer and othersto another. Inasmuch as materials and services offered forsale to the public constitute precisely such a subject matter- and the development of sophisticated control subsystemswould open new fields of advertising for commercial tele-vision - one can look forward to the actual appearance inthe home of such selective means as we have been envi-sioning.

In the fourth scheme, many sequences can be carriedby a single television channel of normal bandwidth becausethey are sequences of images separated by seconds of timerather than by milliseconds. The basic idea - not very ap-pealing on first thought - is to give up the motion-picturequality of conventional television in order to make roomfor the many alternatives demanded for certain applicationsof selective television. If for each viewer there were oneimage every ten seconds, on the average, instead of thirtyimages every second as in conventional television, the samechannel that carries a conventional moving television pic-ture could carry three hundred entirely different sequencesof images. Selecting from those three hundred sequences,each home television receiver could assemble its own uniqueprogram.

If the images had to be selected deliberately by theviewer, through some explicit control action taken each timehe wanted to see a new picture, the idea of trading thedynamic motion-picture quality of conventional televisionfor the high degree of selectability under discussion prob-ably would not seem attractive for any purpose. However,if we recall and extend the concept of a control subsystemintroduced earlier, we see that the viewer need not concernhimself with the individual selections. The procedure gov-erning the selections can be programmed into the controlsubsystem and, what is most important, the procedure canbe made contingent upon relations between the viewer'sresponses and criteria transmitted along with the sequencesof pictures. This notion of making the selection of the next


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picture contingent upon the viewer's responses to precedingpictures - responses he might make by pointing to part ofthe picture with a stylus or by pressing buttons on a port-able response unit - can, in effect, convert television into aradically different and very interesting new medium.

The new medium would be especially appropriate forprogrammed instruction. Each receiving set would beequipped with a "light pointer" (a stylus connected to thereceiver in such a way as to communicate the viewer's re-sponses to the control subsystem), and scoring criteriawould be transmitted along with the picture and sound ofeach "frame" of instruction. The result would be an ex-tremely sophisticated teaching machine capable of present-ing self-scoring multi-track instructional programs withautomatic path selection. With such a medium, and withthe aid of sophisticated programming, one should be ableto involve each individual "telestudent" in an active partici-pation that would verge upon true interaction with theprogram material.

Any scheme that requires the television receiver to holdan image for several seconds requires a receiver somewhatdifferent from conventional receivers that use short-persis-tence picture tubes and embody no other means for storingthe image than is inherent in the luminous phosphor of thedisplay screen. However, devices and techniques now underdevelopment offer hope that receivers of the kind we havebeen discussing will be technically and economically feasi-ble within a few years. Several different 'buffer storage"devices have been tested successfully, and storage tubes areavailable that will hold their images until deliberatelyerased. An early development version of a "rneshless" stor-age tube capable of displaying pictures with high resolution(i.e., the reproduction of fine detail) was demonstratedrecently.

The dynamic - or, to put it more precisely, the kine-matic - quality of moving pictures and conventional tele-vision is so obviously valuable that the thought of sacrificingit to achieve some other quality, such as the selectabilityjust discussed, is likely to require a considerable amount

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of urging, even though assurance be given that the idea isto supplement rather to replace the standard medium. Butit is important to keep the mind open to periodic reassess-ment of the values and costs of various ways of using theresources available to television. It is important to face thefact that the cost of the kinematic quality is high. Anothercostly quality is what we might call the "full-pictorial"quality of the conventional television image. Conventionaltelevision does not provide very high resolution, but it doesreproduce more or less faithfully the hue, the saturation,and the brightness of each small area of the scene beforethe camera. Typically, there is a large amount of informa-tion in a detailed picture, and it takes a wide channel totransmit such a picture in a short time. With the facilitiesrequired to transmit one image of full-pictorial quality, onecould transmit many pages of letters and numbers or manyline diagrams, graphs, and sketches. Text and line drawingscan of course be transmitted, received, and displayed eitherwith motion or without.Recorded Television

The development of low-cost video recorders and re-cordings adds important new dimensions to educational tele-vision. The impact of these components will depend uponthe quality and reliability of their performance, upon theircost, upon the merit of the programs available to andthrough them, and upon the effectiveness of the programdistribution systems. The potential seems very great, for itincludes both a marked increase in the number of programsfrom which viewers may select and freedom from the con-straint of having to synchronize the viewers' schedules withthe broadcasters'."Hard-Copy" Television

Although we are used to thinking of the output of atelevision set as ephemeral pictures ("soft copy") and sound,it is interesting to consider also some of the possibilities andproblems suggested by the phrase ' 'hard-copy television."The change of domain from soft copy to hard requires that


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we make a corresponding change in the range of functionsconsidered. Perhaps the most appropriate functions forhard-copy television overlap the functions now served bynewspapers and magazines.

The concept of the newspaper delivered by wire hasbeen discussed widely enough to need no elaboration here,but it may be worthwhile to relate it to ideas presentedearlier about selection of program material by the viewer.The essential things are to give the viewer a way of specify-ing what he wants to have put into his newspaper and toincorporate into his receiver the means for selecting andrecording, and later playing back upon demand, the ap-propriate items. Those requirements can be met by a blendof "ordering from menu" (as suggested earlier in connec-tion with the augmented newscast) and "matching to pro-file" (as used in systems for selective dissemination ofinformation). In one approach, for example, the televisednewspaper would periodically broadcast an index to forth-coming news items, on the basis of which "subscribers"would make selections and designate them to the controlsections of their receiving sets. Each control section wouldadd to the list of designated selections a list of calculatedselections, the latter being arrived at by comparing viewers'expressed interests with available news items. (The calcu-lating might be done by a multiple-access computing ser-vice and fed into the receiving set via telephone lines. In-deed, the control section of the receiving set might residemainly or even exclusively in a central computer some-where. ) The receiving set would then copy the desireditems "off the air" and present them in the form of a custom-made family newspaper or custom-made newspapers forindividual members of the family.

The basic theme of the foregoing discussion is of courseselectivity, and the basic problem is the one already en-countered and discussed: the problem of broadcastingenough alternatives to provide a basis for truly sharp selec-tion. It is important to note how much that problem is sim-plified by the switch from the moving pictures of conven-tional television to the mainly alphabetic text of the news

TELEVISTAS 211article. The amount of space in the frequency spectrum (abandwidth of about 5 million Hertz) required to transmita conventional television program will carry about a millionalphanumeric characters (letters, numbers, punctuationmarks, etc.) per second. A standard newspaper column oftext contains about four thousand characters. Thus oneconventional television channel could carry the alphanu-meric contents of a thirty-page newspaper each second.Indeed, if a recent estimate is even approximately correct,one television channel could transmit - on a continuingbasis, as it is published - every bit of text that is publishedin any newspaper, magazine, journal, or book that findsits way into any recognized library or document room inthe world. 0. W. Senders's estimate in 1963 was abouttwo million bits per second. '" ) Evidently, if we limitthe discourse to alphanumeric text, it is not lack of band-width that stands in the way of offering the world's fundof news and knowledge to every man in his own home.

All the news may fall within it, but not all the world'sfund of knowledge falls properly within the domain - evenwithin the here considerably extended domain - of broad-cast media. The categories of content that do seem worthconsidering include, in addition to news, all the schedulesand advance announcements and all the background infor-mation and evaluative commentary that pertain to situationsor events of widespread interest, for no other medium thantelevision has the potential capacity and selectivity to makeavailable to each person at the time and place of his choos-ing his own self-prescribed subset of the whole.

BalanceIn the foregoing sections, we have examined severalpossible variations of broadcast television, ranging fromhigh-resolution motion pictures, with viewer control ofthe field of view, to hard-copy alphanumeric text. Al-though we examined them separately, we should think ofthem as components that technology could make availablefor use in a coherent communication system. In communicat-

OSee Science, Vol. 141 (1963), pp. 1067-1068.


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ing the news,there is a place for live color and motion cov-erage, another place for text, and still other places for mostof the other variations. During a performance by a sym-phony orchestra, the main need is for high-quality soundand good pictures, but before and after the performancesome of the other variations would find roles to play - es-pecially if the viewer's purpose included learning as wellas enjoying.

INTERACTIVE "NARROWCAST" TELEVISIONThe ideasdiscussed in the previous section sufferedfrom

the conflictbetween the effort to select material of interestto the individual and the commitment to broadcast to amass audience. Indeed, the central concept of "interaction"had to be set aside (except insofar as interaction could besimulated through schemes based on selection) becausebroadcasting to a mass audience essentially precludes in-teraction.Networks for Narrowcasting

For educational television, a basic and important ques-tion iswhether to continue to plan in terms of broadcastingto a mass audience or to adopt a framework in which theoverall audience divides itself into many subsets and com-munication with each subset is carried through its ownchannel or channels. In the 1atter case, educational televi-sion would be pluralistic operationally and technologicallyas well as philosophically, offering a multiplicity of pro-grams, services,and techniques, and using a multiplicity ofchannels.

Here I should like to coin the term "narrowcasting,"using it to emphasize the rejection or dissolution of the con-straints imposed by commitment to a monolithic mass-ap-peal, broadcast approach. I do not mean to imply that ed-ucational televisionhas been wholly dedicated to such anapproach or such a philosophy; indeed, I recognize thateducational television stations have for many years carried

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programs designed for narrow sectors of the public. Nar-rowcasting, however, may suggestmore efficientproceduresthan broadcasting throughout a wide area in order to reacha small, select audience, and it is meant to imply not onlythat the subject matter is designed to appeal to selectedgroups but also that the distribution channels are so ar-ranged as to carry each program or service to its properaudience.Although broadcasting throughout an area from a trans-mitting antenna to many receiving antennas is by no meansruled out of the picture, linear channels- channels consist-ing of coaxial cables or wave guides or microwave links-seemin principle to bebetter suited to the purpose of carry-ingmessagesto selected audiences. Wide-band linear com-munications channels will be expensive, but much lessexpensive than transportation channels. For the purposesof this section,let usmake the assumptions (1) that in thenear term educational television gets a large number of ad-ditional channels of some kind# and (2) that in the longterm it has accessto such a network as one can imagine byprojecting and augmenting the development of community-antenna television. The cables of CATV will evolve intomultipurpose local networks, and the local networks willbe linked together to form regional, national, and even in-ternational networks. The linking may involve broadcasttransmission,with satellite relays playing an important role,and it may involve additional cables, wave guides, micro-wave channels, and so on.

The CATVnetworks that have recently come into thelimelight are of course unidirectionaI. Supplementary fa-cilities are required to permit communication from thehome back to the station. Fortunately, the supplementarychannels need not be wide-band channels. For some"feed-back" purposes, the existing telephone system is suitable,but it is not designed to function with a large fraction ofits terminals and peripheral lines in use at the same time.Perhaps very simple transmitters can be devised that will

#UHF channels, microwave channels, channels made feasible bysatellite relays, etc.


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make it possible to use coaxial cablesfor "feedback" aswellas "outward" signaling. If that should turn out not to betechnically practicable and no alternative capable of serv-ing the feedback function were made available, I think wecould be correctly accused of having a blind spot in Ourforesight. What more appropriate contribution could tech-nologymake to democracy than good channels of commu-nication directed from every man to the foci of the society?. In pr.esent-dayCATV, the aim (only slightly oversim-plifled) ISto connect as many homes as possible throughone cable to one antenna station. The network for narrow-casting, however, should approach as closely as is econom-ically ~ossible- w~ich for a time may not be very closely- .theIdeal of a private cable to everyhome. The compro-~Ise I have inmind is one in which the quasi-geographicalhierarchy of governmental and political organization, downto the level of neighborhoods, is reflected in a flexibleor-ganization of the network. That would provide a basis foreff~ctive selection of audiences at any local, regional, ornational level in support of society-wide functions, such asgo~ernment, education, and supply, that are organizedmamly upon a geographical framework. Special functionsnot so o:rganized,and not of wide enough interest to war-r~nt being made available to everyone at his own propertyline, are served bymain channels that extend as far as localtapping points, where connections are made to local cablesowned by or leased or charged to individual subscribers.. Consider, now, the problem of achieving high educa-tional purposes- and of being effective throughout thesocioeconomicrange aswell as acrossthe geographical spanof the nation - with the help of such transmission facilitiesas we have just assumed. What can we hope to do whenthe bandwidth constraint is loosened?

Functions and ServicesBased on a philosophy th~t appreciates the interaction

value of diversity among the personalities, attitudes, andinterest patterns of individuals aswell as the cohesionvalue

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of community in language and cultural heritage - and aphilosophy that prefers active participation to passive ob-servation- narrowcast television would endeavor notmerely to present programs of general interest but to fulfillfunctions and provide services of special interest to groupsof medium and even small size. The standard televisionfunctions would grow deeper roots: The news would in-clude neighborhood and community news as well as re-gional,national, and international. The high-schoolfootballgame and the local tennis finals aswell as the bowl gamesand national championships would be on television. Com-munity theater would have a chance to compete, if not withBroadway,with Hollywood. Extension of such functions tothe locallevel might promote not onlythe personal involve-ment of viewers in the programs but also the participationofmany people outside professional television in the prepa-ration and presentation of television programs.

In the fieldsof government and politics, the impact ofnarrowcasting might be profound. Town meetings couldbe not merely televised but held via television. Every rep-resentative at every level of government could report peri-odically to his constituency. Every administrative officialcould explain the objectives of his agency and the signifi-cance of his executiveactions. Every candidate could counton opportunities to reach the voters "live," and every votercould expect to see and hear live candidates under circum-stances that would let him see through the "images" intothe men.

In the performing arts, narrowcasting would probablydo more for performers than for audiences. It would pro-vide to many more performers the opportunity to have anaudience and to profit from audience reaction. It wouldintroduce a new factor into the dynamics of communitytheater. Especially at community and regional levels, per-forming artists make excellent audiences for other perform-ing artists. Putting that fact together with the availabilityof linksconnecting local and regional networkssuggests thatnarrowcast televisionmight serve the performing arts bestby permitting the members of community groups all over


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the countr~ ~o see and hear one another in action - sym-phony mUSICIanscommunicating with symphony musiciansdancers with dancers, actors with actors, and so on. Thusfacilitated, and with local, regional, and national lay audi-e~ces potentially available to them, the performing artsmight burgeon like Australian tennis.. ~n the fine arts, narrow casting could bring all the na-~lOns, perhaps even much of the world's, great treasuresmto the home. Educational television would continue ofcourse, to present visits to the great museums under' theguidance and with the commentary of distinguished au-thorities, an.d~twould continue to present courses in historyand appreciation of art. However, it would not stop there.Every museum would have a camera, lights, and connec-tions to the network. In data bases accessible through thenetwork, the inventories of all the museums would be held.~ith the assistance of a group of its members, or perhapswith the cooperation of an art school, each museum wouldfeed into the network, according to schedules and directionsarranged with programming offices, images of its works ofart. The requests might originate either with official tele-vision agencies or with informal groups of viewers such asart clubs, or even with individual viewers. This approachwould put some of the initiative for programming into thehands of groups outside professional television.

.All the pr~fessions are concerned with continuing edu-cation of their members, in which narrowcast televisioncould play an important role, and all have responsibilitiest~ their pu?lics, to which narrowcast television could pro-vide selective channels. For science and engineering, in-deed, narrowcasting might offer the first promising ap-proach to the problem of educating the general public tocomprehend the social impact of technology.

Finally, we come to the two fields in which nonconven-tional television appears to offer the clearest promises: thefield of the library and the field of deliberate teaching andlearning. The promises are offered jointly by narrowcast tele-vision and intercommunicational television. Let us considerhere a few ideas pertinent to the former.

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Narrowcast Television and LibrariesThe community libraries suffer from a difficulty that is

very familiar to broadcast television: economic considera-tions make it impracticable to offer much that is not sure toappeal to a large audience. In the case of the libraries thetrouble stems from the fact that the distribution procedureis set up backwards, so to speak. First, many copies of eachbook are produced. Then the books are stored near wherethey may be wanted. And finally, prospective users go tonearby repositories, make requests, and, if the books re-quested are available there, borrow the books, read them,and return them. The economic disadvantages of dupli-cating, distributing, and storing books that may never beread is obvious. Some of the techniques of what is currentlyknown as the "non-Gutenberg technology" make it possibleto avoid most of that disadvantage.

Modern library science and technology deal, of course,with other problems than physical access to specified books.In the scientist 's and engineer's use of the library, and prob-ably also in most of the uses that arise in everyman's every-day life, the basic objective is not a document but the an-swer to a question or the solution to a problem. Even ifthe user is constrained (by the partly technical and partlyeconomic infeasibility of automatic question answerers andproblem solvers) from demanding direct access to his basicobjective, he needs as much help in finding out which doc-uments to ask for as he does in obtaining copies of thedocuments he requests. Fortunately, documentation expertsare making fair progress in mastering the process of findingdocuments pertinent to a given request. The techniques -which include augmented cataloguing, deep subject-matterindexing, citation indexing and ''bibliographic coupling"through citations, matching of profiles and prescriptions,and of course abstracting - require trained people, pro-grammed computers, and a steady work load. They are, asthe library system is currently organized, beyond the meansof most community (and indeed many other) libraries.

Narrowcast television fits neatly into an obvious solu-tion of the problem just posed. Master copies of documents


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are held at central repositories: a national archive for in-frequently used items, regional centers for moderately ac-tive items, and so on. All the libraries and document centersare netted together, and many of the nodes of their networkcommunicate with nodes of the educational television net-work - and of course with nodes of other networks servinggovernmental agencies, universities, and business and in-dustry. To use the library from his home, a person wouldcommunicate with a local station of the library network,through either his telephone or a feedback channel associ-ated with his home information center, and describe hisrequest to a person (perhaps eventually to a machine) atthe station. The contents of the specified documents wouldbe read automatically from the masters. The control systemof the requester's home information center would be noti-fied of the scheduled transmission time. At the designatedtime, the information would flow from the library's buffermemory through wide-band channels into the televisionnetwork and thence to the automatically readied receivingset and recorder. Finally, the requester would play therecord back through his display subsystem and study thedocuments at his leisure.

Many technical problems would arise in the develop-ment of such a system. Yet almost everyone agrees thatthey could be solved. And, as mentioned, progress on the"intellectual" problems of retrieval and dissemination ispromising enough to encourage anticipation of some kindof matching of library and television within the next twodecades. The main justifications for adopting a skepticalattitude are economic. Most of the functions envisaged re-quire sophisticated equipment at the receiving location.There is little doubt that, if it were guaranteed a massmarket, American industry would quickly develop the ca-pability of manufacturing the sophisticated equipment atlow cost. However, the economics of advanced home in-formation systems will probably suffer, as the economicsof conventional broadcast television did in its early days,from a chicken-and-egg dilemma. The needed equipment

TELEVISTAS 219would be inexpensive if there were a mass market, and therewould be a mass market if the needed equipment were in-expensive, but since neither antecedent prevails, neitherconsequence follows. To anyone who thinks he sees intechnology's potential armamentarium the weapons that canwin the war against poverty - or even battles against de-linquency or unskilledness - the inhibitory effect of thatmodest mixture of logic and economics is likely to be mostfrustrating.Instructional Television

The concept of narrow casting makes room for - and in-deed calls for - great extension and augmentation of in-structional television. The thing that, in my assessment,offers the most credible promise of making deliberate in-struction and deliberate study attractive to almost everyoneis a combination of inspiration through exposure to greatminds and reinforcement through interaction with a richand well-programmed base of information under the aegisof a skilled tutor. (I use the term "reinforcement" in thesense developed by Skinnerian psychologists, and I have inmind an awareness, derived from experience with com-puter-assisted instruction, that motivation is strengthenedand learning fostered almost magically by close interactionwith a partner that presents precisely appropriate answers,acknowledgments, rewards, and even punishments at pre-cisely the right times. Indeed, a large part of the skilledtutoring will doubtless be done, in future educational sys-tems, by programmed digital computers.)

The central idea to be developed under the heading ofinstructional television, then, is the idea of using augmentedtelevision facilities in an all-out effort to provide a self-motivating, self-rewarding kind of educational opportunityon a wide scale. The effort would of course have to becoordinated with schools and colleges. Indeed, it wouldhave to involve a considerable fraction of the intellectualresources of the country.

Most of the ideas about devices and techniques that


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have been mentioned are pertinent to the development ofcoherent systems to facilitate instruction and learning. Colormotion pictures will be vital because they can convey intothe home the personalities of distinguished men and thedynamic performances of skilled lecturers, and becausethey can show how intricate things work. The televisedlibrary will play an important role because it will be re-sponsive to, and will foster, initiative on the part of thestudent. However, the basic task of instructing - of build-ing structures of knowledge within the minds of studentsand training into their nervous systems the skills requiredin adjustment to modern life - will fall upon instructionalprograms with which students can interact.

The major technical question, I think, is how much in-teraction between students and contingently adapting andresponding instructional programs can be accomplishedthrough narrowcast television. Such programs will relyheavily upon transmission schemes of the kind describedearlier as offering to each viewer a wide selection of lantern-slide sequences with audio accompaniment. It may turnout that sufficiently dynamic interaction with each one ofmany students can be achieved within the framework ofthe scheme in which the selection of the next picture to-gether with its accompanying sound is carried out by thecontrol subsystem of the student's receiving set. If so, thenit will be possible to serve an audience of a few thousandwith a single program. On the other hand, it might turnout to be necessary, in order to make the program trulyadaptive and responsive to the students, to use "feedback"channels from the students' homes to the narrowcasting sta-tions. That would make it possible to transmit programmaterial selected from a large store on a moment-to-momentbasis and thereby to give each student a truly custom-madecourse, but it would limit the number of students that couldbe handled by a single transmission to a few hundred.When so few participants are to be accommodated, andwhen they all reside in the same area, it becomes likelythat the best solution throughout the foreseeable future

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will be to bring the students together in one placeand thereby simplify the communication problem. How-ever, many technically competent people are unwilling toturn that statement of likelihood into a conclusion at thistime, and more than a few think that, in fields that dealprimarily with information, a modern version of "cottageindustry" will prevail within a decade or two.

In any event, my hope is that enough channels will indue course become available to carryall the interactivepower of computer-assisted teaching and learning into thehome. Given enough channels, televised instructional sys-tems - balanced systems in which the most highly interac-tive and the most dramatically dynamic techniques supportand complement each other - will markedly improve thestandard of education, the level of skill, and the qualityof intellectual life in America.

INTERCOMMUNICATIONAL TELEVISION

From a point of view that is being taken by an increas-ing number of educators, "educational television" is per-ceived as the set of all the informational and communica-tional tools that can be fabricated out of wide-band chan-nels. The prefix of "television" is taken literally, and theroot is interpreted as meaning a large amount of communi-cation channel capacity that should be put to the best pos-sible use.

The applications of television envisaged from the view-point just described have to do more with communicationwithin and among educational institutions than with com-munication between television stations and homes. It seemslikely, therefore, that these applications will be developedsooner than applications based on similar techniques butrequiring channels to receivers that are distributed through-out broad areas. Nevertheless, in the long term, there areclearly two parts to the idea of intercommunicational tele-vision. One of them focuses upon educational institutions- schools, colleges, universities, student bodies, faculties,


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laboratories, libraries, and so on. The other focuses uponcommunity information centers and home information sys-tems. In concept, the community information center is aprojection and augmentation of the educational televisionstation, and the home information system is a projection andaugmentation of the television-radio-phonograph-tape_re_corder console.

At the present time, intercommunicational television ishardly an actuality at all. It is a collection of rich and at-tractive images that form part of a concept that is develop-ing in the minds of a growing number of people. Closed-circuit television is an important part of the concept, but byno means the essence of it. The essence is a comprehensive,flexible, interactive, multipurpose information network thatincludes large collections of information and advanced fa-cilities for storing, processing, transmitting, and displayingit. The media are diverse but coordinated, television play-ing its role in concert with speech communication, fac-simile communication, and communication with and amongdigital computers. Indeed, computer-processible data basesloom large in the overall concept of the information net-work of the future. It is appropriate that educational tele-vision is studying (e.g., in the EDUCOM Summer Studyon Information Networks'") its place within the overall pic-ture and its interrelations with the other media.

"Overall process" is more descriptive than "overall pic-ture," for an educational information network would bean active, dynamic, ever-changing thing. It would dealwith many different kinds of information, stored in manydifferent places and flowing among many different kindsof communicators through many different media and chan-nels. Education uses printed documents, video records,computer programs, data, drawings, graphs, diagrams, stil1pictures, moving pictures, sound recordings, and live per-son-to-person, person-to-group, and group-to-group commu-nications. The communicators are students, teachers,

~EDUCOM is the Interuniversity Communications Council. Thereport of the Summer Study (1966) will be published by John Wileyand Sons, New York.

TELEVISTAS 22 3research workers, librarians, documentalists, computer pro-grammers, programmed computers, administrators, andmanagers. The functional tools used in teaching and re-search include lectures, demonstrations, documentaries,computer-assisted instruction, computer-facilitated learning,computer-mediated research, information retrieval, selec-tive dissemination of information, computer-aided design,computer-assisted experimentation, "reactive mathematics,"and "teleconferences." "Reactive mathematics" is mathe-matical thinking "at the console" - the computer reacts bycarrying out whatever operation one writes down just assoon as he has written it. "Teleconferences" are conferencesin which the participants remain in their homes or officesyet, with the aid of teletype, telephone, and television, worktogether in close interaction.

Not all of the foregoing require wide-band communica-tion, but all can take advantage of it. All are seen as com-ponents of a comprehensive information network that wouldserve the classroom, the study, the library, the laboratory,the conference room, and the convention hall in an inte-grated way, each component supporting others and beingsupported by them. The planning and design of such a net-work (or networks) are currently of great interest, and oneof the main questions concerns the role to be played by tel-evision. For the long term, it seems clear that television andthe narrower-band media should operate in synergy as com-plementary channels in a coherent system. For the shortterm, however, it is difficult to see how to bring togetherin a meaningful way the narrow-band facilities availablefrom the telephone and telegraph companies, the wide-bandfacilities owned or leased by educational television organi-zations, and other wide-band channels (including satellitechannels) available from common carriers. A small butimportant part of the overall problem is whether all theso-called "television satellite" channels will be reserved forbroadcast television or whether some of them will be as-signed for use in multi-media educational networks.

Looking up again at the broad horizons, we may sensethat, although the resolution of problems such as those just


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mentioned may have very significant near-term conse-quences, they are unlikely to determine the basic structureof educational communication in the long term. The amountof communication will increase. The faster media and themedia of higher capacity will grow in importance, both inrelative measure and in absolute measure. The variousmedia will be used in more coordinated ways. Informationwill, more and more, be encoded for processing by com-puters. Computers will enter into more and more phasesof educational communication (and, indeed, into more andmore phases of everyday life). When people communicatewith each other, in teaching and learning or in dealing withcomplex problems of almost any kind, they will not merelytransmit information back and forth; they will employ com-puters to transform and test the information and to relatetheir present ideas and facts to those already recorded.Communications between men and machines will constitutean increasing fraction of the total. Many people will havepersonal computer programs, "alter egos in the machine,"to serve them as representatives and secretaries, and someof the communications that now involve people will betaken care of by those programs. Indeed, a large fractionof all communications will be communications betweencomputers.

Most of the foregoing "prediction" is simply projectioninto the future of what now exists and is familiar to many.Nothing in the list of statements is beyond the range oftechnical feasibility. The uncertainties are mainly uncer-tainties of time scale, and they stem mainly from difficultiesin predicting the interactions among economic, social, andpsychological factors. On the one hand are those who seein modern informational technology a firm promise of mak-ing education not only universally available but universallyachievable and universally attractive. On the other handare those who hold that our rate of progress toward anysuch goals is limited essentially not by any lack of materialresources or facilities, but by lack of basic understandingof the educational process. The position of wisdom no doubtlies somewhere between the polar extremes, but wherever

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it lies, it calls for continual examination of the full range ofpossibilities offered by technology and periodic reassess-ment of our plans and courses of action in the light ofthose possibilities.

As a conclusion to this paper, let me presume to offer atentative assessment. The main trend of educational tele-vision is somewhat too conservative in its estimation of thefeasibility of selective, interactive, and intercommunica-tional television systems and of the achievability, with theaid of such systems, of a significant breakthrough in educa-tion. The main factor that is not sufficiently appreciated,I believe, is the effectiveness of interactive participation ina well-designed, strongly reinforcing educational process.Advances in technology are making it possible for the firsttime to set up such a process without depending upon lav-ish use of scarce human resources. Other advances aremaking it at least conceivable that we may be able to setup such processes on a broad enough scale to reach almostevery educable member of the society. My conclusion,therefore, is that the situation calls for intensive researchin two complementary fields: the exploitability of infor-mational technology in support of education, and educationwithin the new context offered by informational technology.

Licklider Televistas Carnegie 1967

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