Visions Voices

Visionary Voices
. Talking with Media Visionaries

Media leaders discuss the social effects of interactivity.

VISIONS CREATE MEDIA AS MEDIA CREATE VISIONS

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MEDIA
VISIONS
Journal

 Dr. Diana Gagnon Hawkins

Internet Mania
and the future of
Interactive TV.

. A conversation with.
Dr. Diana Gagnon Hawkins,
Trailblazing Media Designer.

Interviewed by
Ken Freed.


Stanford researcher and iTV pioneer argues for an interactive TV interface that's genuinely user friendly.

Diana Gagnon Hawkins represents the new breed of interactive media leaders with the vision and sensibility to appreciate the power of interactive technology to shape our lives and our world. She understands media psychology (see interview with Bernard Luskin), and applies this knowledge to designing the user interface for world class media services, the sort of empowering media services that (often unwittingly) serve to promote deeper literacy. Currently she's focusing on the personal video recorder (PVR). What makes her designs so special is that she deliberately puts human beings first, adapting the machines to people so people do have to adapt themselves to the machines.

Based in Atherton, Ca., Dr. Hawkins founded Interactive Associates in 1990 as her consultancy specializing in the intelligent design of interactive media for all forms of entertainment programming, Internet TV (Web and email on the TV screen), interactive TV, virtual reality, and video games. She's applied her knowledge to computer program design, prototype product development, business development, consumer research, and entrepreneurial company development. An abiding interest is the evolution of "personal agents" with easily programmable artificial intelligence, which she says we'll control to make using the new interactive media networks more reliable and friendly in daily life.

Hawkins cofounded Dotcast in 1999, developing their national high-speed digital network for distributing digital entertainment, interactive services and multimedia communications over local terrestrial broadcast television stations. Transmitting at 4.5 megabits per second (Mb/s) ) on a conventional analogue NTSC or PAL signal, Dotcast transmits at 10 Mb/s over digital terrestrial systems, adding interactivity to high-definition TV. As American broadcasters awaken to the potential for interactivity in their technology (as Europe has long known through Teletext), Dotcast and its competitors will gain importance.

Her clients list reads like a who's who of the digital media business: Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, Allied Entertainment UK, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Fujitsu, DEC, ACTV, ICTV, HBO, Turner Publishing, King World, Nike, Citibank, Kleiner Perkins, McKenna Group, GTE Main Street, Interactive Channel, Starwave DBS, EcoQuest VR. She joined Peter Gabriel in creating an interactive cable show, developed an interactive version of Jeopardy, joined GTE Imagitrek creating Discovery Network's hybrid iTV trial, worked with the team developing an interactive cable channel prototype for MTV during Viacom's Castro Valley trial. She subsequently designed interactive services for the Homecast Network, a joint venture between TCI, Bank of America and Intuit as a broadband financial channel for TCI digital cable systems (just before sale to AT&T). Another client, less recently, has been 3DO, owned by former husband Trip Hawkins.

Diana Gagnon prepared for her lifework in new media with a 1981 BA in psychology (Summa Cum Laude, Psychology Award) and BFA in studio art, sculpture, and video (Magna Cum Laude) from State University Of New York (SUNY) in Buffalo. She went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass, earning a 1986 Ed.D. in Human Development, Educational Media and Interactive Technology (graduating with distinction), specializing in the influence of videogames and interactive media on thinking. She served her post doctoral fellowship at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, focusing on the future of interactive entertainment technology, cofounding the Media Lab's interactive Audience Research Facility. Leaving MIT in 1989 and moving to the San Francisco Bay, she soon hung out here shingle as Interactive Associates. Building on her 1989 research for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to study the potential for an interactive TV service for children, in 1995 as a visiting scholar at Stanford University, Department of Communication, she researched interactive violence and interactive rating systems for home control of the media violence shown on screen - an alternative to the V-Chip.

Diana Hawkins was among the media visionaries I was privileged to interview for my "TV Visions" column, written monthly from 1995 into 1997 for the weekly faxletter of the late and lamented Interactive Television Association (ITA), a sad casualty when the hype balloon popped on the iTV market, as it did for many dot coms recently when the Internet hype bubble burst. When we spoke in 1996, the the iTV industry was declining just as the Internet was exploding into public view. Her insights into Internet mania and the future of interactive television are as timely and telling now as then.


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Freed: I want to play time traveler with you, asking you first to jump ten years into the past and then jump ahead ten years before we look at the choices we face today. Sound like fun?

Hawkins: Yes, but I'm really bad with years. Five or six years ago, I was doing the talk circuit with overheads saying that by 1995 we would have interactive TV in our homes. So I was way off.

Freed: According the April ITA report on trials and rollouts, plus my own research, I've counted 125 past, present and announced interactive TV projects in 88 different markets.

Hawkins: But a lot of those are not really interactive TV. My definition of real interactive TV would include the Full Service Network in Orlando, or the US West and the Cox Cable trials in Omaha, the ones with movies-on-demand, games-on-demand, interactive shopping, interactive information services. In my view, interactive TV is not any one of those above services. It's a package, a combination of services. One of the things nobody's done is put all the different types of services into one package.

Freed: Do you think it's possible that there might be any particular "killer app" or category of content that could be catalytic for popular success?

Hawkins: Ah, catalytic? I think there's different markets for different things, and you can measure them by how much money you make or by how many people use it. But it's hard to judge. We put together a chart a number of years ago to project what the potential market would be. We looked at the existing market for movies, the existing market for games, the existing market for catalog shopping and then extrapolated where those markets might be in the future.

Freed: You mean your 1985 report, which is a good starting point for us. What did our interactive future looked like back then, more than a decade ago?

Hawkins: Back in 1985, interactive TV consisted of two options. There was branching video like the ACTV system, or else play-along systems like Interactive Network and TV Answer. There were earlier trials, too, like Warner's Qube, and J.C. Penny's interactive shopping service.

But even before that, in the early 1980's, or maybe earlier, was a trial in Japan where they wired a little town with fiber optics and had full interactive TV. Their interface wasn't as aesthetically pleasing as what we're doing now, but they had all the exact same kinds of services we're talking about doing now, and more, like two-way video town meetings.

A group of social psychologists, did a two-year study of the network's impact. No surprises. They found it was very positive for the Japanese town, that it sponsored a greater sense of community. But the project was too expensive and too technologically advanced, so it went away. And only now, after being way ahead of us, is Japan looking at interactive TV again.

Freed: Well, is there anything going on today that looked impossible back then?

Hawkins: Nobody in 1985 thought we'd compress video the way we're doing now. We thought it would be much farther in the future.

Freed: Okay, so now let's look into the future, ten years down the road. What might happen tomorrow that looks impossible today?

Hawkins: With the Internet craze and the online mania in the press, a lot of people actually are starting to think interactive TV isn't going to happen, that it's all going to happen online on our computers, and I don't agree with that at all.

I do agree that the Internet is a good way to prime the pump and get content providers started, but I think the bandwidth of online services is still too narrow, still too slow, too difficult. These services may be fine for technophiles, but you have to remember that the online community is not the mass audience.

The vision of interactive TV as a mass media product for the whole population, the whole family, is not the same as the vision for the online services. Even with colorful browsers, you're starting from an environment created for a computer in your office, which isn't the same as a product going into your living room where the whole family sits around.

Freed: Could interactive TV companies counter Internet mania by touting the findings from their trials? Time Warner will put those lessons in Orlando to use elsewhere.

Hawkins: Perhaps, but the bad news is that most data from the interactive TV trials is being kept proprietary. I still want to do side-by side comparisons of the interfaces, for example, distill what's known in the interactive TV community to date so that we all can design our next set of studies based on what we've already found out. But the companies I've asked are amazingly reluctant to share any information, even from tests that were over and done with years ago [still true].

Freed: Yet we keep hearing interactive media execs talking about how a rising tide raises all boats.

Hawkins: Then let them share their information so that we all can go forward. Now that broadband networks are coming closer to being in place in all markets, network providers need to get the content providers into mass production. But the content providers are faced with a real problem, how to make something that runs on all the platforms, and that means getting ahold of research data. Without that data, we're constantly reinventing the wheel.

That said, let me make clear, I do think interactive TV is going to happen, The first round will have a graphical interface, and that will give way to voice activation, intelligent filters and interactive rating systems with smart personal agents.

Freed: Which raises the issue of viewer control over content. Until we have 'agents' with artificial intelligence filtering out unwanted content to match our personal preferences, what, if anything, can be done about media violence?

Hawkins: We have 20 to 30 years of research that links exposure to media violence with increased aggression, and at this point there's very few people who will dispute it, other than those paid to dispute it.

Freed: The central issue may be presenting violence as the first or the preferred solution to problems rather than as the final last resort.

Hawkins: That's true, and even worse, on a simplistic level, after a while, when we see violence in real life, we are desensitized to people's pain. The scarier part is that a lot of people enjoy that adrenaline rush, kind of like going on a roller coaster ride. Of course, it's infinitely harder to create something that makes us cry, that makes us laugh, that makes us think, than it is to make something that makes our adrenaline rush.

Freed: And you have to keep raising the threshold to keep stimulated.

Hawkins: Right, and that's why the violence gets more and more graphic. And now comes interactive violence. As it gets more realistic, instead of just watching violence, you're actually carrying it out, shooting and cutting real characters with digital audio screams of pain. It becomes a training ground for aggressive behaviors. You're upping the ante.

Freed: What's the solution?

Hawkins: I think content providers have to take more personal responsibility for what they make. Nobody want's to deny anyone their constitutional right to create their content, but somewhere along the line, someone has to be responsible for what they're producing and the effect it's having.

Freed: What about the so-called V Chip?

Hawkins: I don't know if that's a long term solution. I think it's a good idea for now, such as with kiddie porn on the Internet, but I think a better approach is interactive ratings systems with real-time editing so I can control for myself the level of violence in a show. That overwhelmingly was rated as number one in all of our MIT focus groups on the kind of interactive services people want. People want that kind of control.

Freed: Let me explore one other area before you go. I believe interactivity itself induces in us an awareness that seems conducive to us thinking in more responsible ways. Do you agree?

Hawkins: I definitely agree. I also think interactivity teaches people to take control over their lives. If you look at global issues, like the environment, those problems are too big for our culture to address right now because individuals feel there's nothing they can do to change things. The good news about interactivity is that it means taking more control over your life. As people feel more in control, it might move our culture toward taking more responsibility for ourselves and each other. end
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"The bad news is that most data from the interactive TV trials is being kept proprietary. Without that data, we're constantly reinventing the wheel."

Diana
Hawkins

VISIONARY
VOICES

JOHN
HENDRICKS

ESTHER
DYSON
BERNARD
LUSKIN
DIANA
HAWKINS
DAVID
WEINBERGER

STEVE
ALLEN

VOICES HOME

 

"We have 20 to 30 years of research that links exposure to media violence with increased aggression, and at this point there's very few people who will dispute it, other than those paid to dispute it."

Diana
Hawkins

JOURNAL
FEATURES

GLOBAL
SENSE

DEEP
LITERACY

COPING WITH
FUTURE SHOCK

QUESTIONS
OF POWER
SECTIONS
VISIONARY
VOICES

MEDIA
ESSAYS

INTERACTIVE
TELEVISION

MEDIA &
EDUCATION

NETWORK
DEMOCRACY

COLORADO
STORIES

SPEECHES
& RADIO

WORLD
HEADINES

VisionWare
Bookshop

E-Letter
& Forums
Media Links
Guestbook
Site Awards
Site Search
Site Menu
Home Page

Subscribe

Contact Me

 

"Nobody want's to deny anyone their constitutional right to create their content, but somewhere along the line, someone has to be responsible for what they're producing and the effect it's having."

Diana
Hawkins

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