Intelligent Media "ITV will let you massage the medium AND the message." - Mike Saenz & Michael Synergy The medium of the media has been universally installed and has successfully completed its stage of acceptation. The final reaches of satellite orbits are being colonized, and intramedial growth occurs exclusively within the channel package. But on reaching their adult phase, the media already face a mid-life crisis. From the beginning, the couch potato's passive indifference has been acknowledged and radically reversed through the acceleration of images and the generation of participation, the sense of oneness with the medium. The media fear that this indifference will spread like an epidemic and lead to inscrutable situations in tomorrow's boundless world. In accordance with the old-fashioned notion of marketing, the answer consists of maximum product differentiation to keep every niche in the market involved: the Stalinist channel for elderly communists, Toddler TV, pet television for free-range pigs, etc., and all of them twenty-four hours a day, of course. But this offers no solution to the far greater threat of a massive defection to reality. The increasing urge to make a little history of your own on a hobbyist/touristic level other than work represents a conscious effort to place the media in the shadow of the event. For an instant, people have no time for the media. The generators of experience skillfully refer the media to the worn-out historical symbols that belong to the visual repertory of the mediatists and tend to suggest that something is about to happen. Through these media traps, the busy daytrippers clear their own field to instigate the right thing somewhere else. In the museological cities of the West, this has produced a company of handiworkers: the antimedial movement, which puts an end to all connections inspired by the slogan, "Smash up a medium for breakfast." Through actions of disappearance it creates local and temporary media-free spaces, to the point of terrorism with its own harmless anti-satellite laserguns. It represents the ultimate secret movement, because it is carefully kept out of the news and only makes itself heard as interference and sabotage. It claims every event that does not make the media as a victory and leaks them to the whole extramedial circuit it identifies with. Stirred up by this violence, along with the alarming increase of public indifference and fragmentation of the ratings, the attitude police will have no option but to initiate a broad public debate on the future of the media. Meanwhile the media lobby, impatient of the final outcome, has already begun R&D of the inevitable answer: The intelligent media. Whereas interactive media take the point of view of the subject and render reality obsolete, intelligent media (IM) take the point of view of the object and would like to determine what happens in front of the screen. The fragmentation of viewing behavior during the previous, rigid media age was a result of remote control. Television producers either ignored the practice of zapping altogether, or tried to prevent it by compiling even catchier programs or simultaneously broadcasting different versions of the same story on various channels. Moreover, the media spread out the diversified package during the day, a relic from the juvenile phase when the nation still used to watch a single channel all through the evening. Now that the ratings lose their commercial value due to endless switching, attention shifts to the registration of channel time - the number of minutes the user spends on a given channel. This is accomplished by introducing an extra chip into the remote control. Digital IM go one step further. They receive permanent viewing behavior feedback and establish certain threshold values above which the product reaches the screen unaltered. If average channel time threatens to drop below such levels, the IM conduct subliminal testing to find out what programmatic elements need to be introduced or altered (news, sex, personalities, setting, dialogue, music, colour). Producers merely deliver potential programs; the chances of integrated screenings of old blockbusters are minimal. Competing channels are constantly scanned for more attractive bits. The classic sequential edit of sound and image has been replaced by the central computer's synchronized mix. Contributions are judged according to the discreetness of the applied manipulations. If, in spite of it all, attention drops to a minimum, we imperceptibly slip to a completely different program segment. Fragmentation will remain, if only because public taste is an erratic affair, and there are early adopters and followers. But from being a threat, it has become a first condition of existence. Still, IM cannot remove the disaffection for the media. Intelligent media lead to a universal relativity of information. Uninteresting news items gradually take on a different content. The fellowship of true democrats freaks out and demands an alternative to save information from its destruction, strengthened by the outcome of its broad media debate. Since the TV image of the last of the politicians is increasingly dependent on the media, they are out for revenge. Because with their state-monopoly broadcasting systems they are in no position to compete with the dynamic media, they come up with reasonable proposals. They suggest showing a logo as a warranty of reality in the upper left corner of the screen. IM, who will never agree to this, compensate by releasing specified zones where the community can set up its own media-passive reality districts. At the same time, these are meant to split the antimedial movement into a radical wing and a faction willing to negotiate. The democrats proceed by saying that healthy social conduct depends on a media diet. Some patients will have to decrease their intake, others increase it. IM are required to build in an ecological principle: if the number of viewers drops below an absolute minimum, the channel must switch off; if it rises too high, the information level must be increased to establish the proper infotainment balance. At first, channels may be cancelled for a day or a week, but for the IM tycoons it is far more attractive to shut them down for good, because this makes viewing far more exciting and thus increases the channel time of the worst stations. Besides, media politics demands that the excess of redundant information be controlled so that the essential may be brought back to the historical surface. Again, IM can make no promises because, after all, information is just noise. The proposal to sidetrack politics to a channel of its own is rejected because it wouldn't last for a week. Democrats will always remain an intolerant minority in an utterly democratized media order. But these ecological restrictions will in turn be used by IM to legitimize their permanent control of media use, and consequently of every movement that takes place within range of the sensors. The common denominator remains that there has to be media participation at all costs. The intelligent response to IM is given by the IM themselves: PTV. Personal television does not depend exclusively on material offered by IM for its visual intake, but uses sovereign images to produce its own samples and remixes. PTV lifts the video game from its infant stage and offers a central visual pool to the interactivist. Besides file footage and latest reports, one gains unlimited access to scenes from security cameras, satellites, camcorder clubs and survival treks. Naturally, participants immediately relay their personal versions of events to the pool for further processing by others. Thus, these do-it-yourself media are to save the ideology of creativity. The only viable media survival strategy is to stay more interesting than reality at all times. PTV is an attempt to replace the individual bid for history with a final techno fix. With PTV, the media enter their third life stage. But reality cannot be locked away in a park as a tourist attraction forever: it will always lurk around, ready to jump any media maker sooner or later. The extramedial circuit is already among us, but stays out of reach of touristic experience because it refuses to give the game away. It quietly awaits the death of the media. ??