I've explained this here before, but it's complicated so I'll explain it again...

Like everyone else and their freaking mother these days, I too am looking for more paying work than I currently have; and instead of the ultimately frustrating process of trying to find the few existing job openings that currently exist, then fighting with the hundreds of other people also competing for them, I'm trying more these days to simply get the word out about what I can do, and then create new jobs for myself where none existed before. And I'm doing that this time mostly through a combination of my LinkedIn account and a special freelance page here at my personal site, both of which feature nothing but my corporate skills and prior work in professional environments.

In fact, I've racked up a whole complicated host of professional skills over the decades, so for clarity's sake I now group them into four different easy-to-understand sets: I do WRITING and EDITING for all kinds of different situations; I can MANAGE groups of creatives and ORGANIZE specific complex projects; I do short-term CONSULTING assignments regarding crisis management and time management (including a special weekend workshop for people just starting the "Getting Things Done" time-management system; drop me a line for more); and I provide expert FUTURIST advice to senior executives regarding what's coming next in the world of arts and entertainment. And it's this last category where one can really hit the jackpot if one is lucky -- $100 an hour and more for your services, sometimes a flat thousand for a one-day seminar, etc. I mean, obviously the numbers just go up from there, with it reaching ridiculous heights by the time you get to the fees of someone like, say, Malcolm Gladwell; but given that the lowest rate on my freelance pay scale is actually ten bucks an hour (to do editing work on self-published manuscripts), and that I'm damn happy for even any work like that that comes in, you better believe that even a hundred dollars an hour to me is like striking gold.

But there's a trick to getting work in futurism, which is establishing yourself as someone people should actually pay for their advice concerning futurism; because if there's one thing I learned during the Great Fucking Startup Disaster of 2006 (new readers, don't ask), it's that there are officially one million people running around out there with self-made business cards calling themselves futurists and consultants and media experts and more, all of them hustling for work and none of them actually getting any. If then you actually want to be someone like Clay Shirky or Kevin Kelly or Douglas Rushkoff (you know, futurists who actually get paid), and if like me you don't have some cushy academic or corporate job that naturally builds your reputation for you and lets you afford all these cultural conferences in the first place, you instead need to go through a series of steps if you ever expect to score any of these thousand-dollar-a-day jobs yourself:

--First, come up with a theory about all this stuff that no one else has. That's step one; that has to come before everything else.

--Write a book about it. Maintain a blog about it, full of examples of your theory coming true in the everyday culture. Give the book out for free if you have to. Get as many business people as humanly possible to read it or at least have heard of it.

--This then gives conference organizers an official excuse to bring you on as an official presenter; because even if they like you, even if they have a good personal relationship with you, they still need an excuse to bring to their own people to justify signing you on as an official presenter, and a popular book is always a great excuse. And even if they can't pay you, even if you have to provide your own travel and accommodations, that at least gets your $700 registration fee for that conference dropped; and that's the key step for self-employed futurists like me.

--Actually getting into the conference, then, is what gives you the opportunity to network your ass off, make friends, make contacts, etc. And it gives you official corporate cred too, being a presenter at all these cool cultural conferences. This is how corporations justify those $700 registration fees, after all; they expect the executives they send to them to find all of that year's consultants through these conferences, making it even more important that you yourself are there too.

--And that's it: original theory plus popular book plus regular conference presentations plus corporate connections equals a growing amount of thousand-dollar days in your life. And all of a sudden you're Clay Shirky and you're making a big stink at South By Southwest and you're pissing off all the hipsters.

So I'm still on step one with all this, developing a unique yet general-audience-friendly theory off which to base a future book, a theory which in its essential form right now goes something like this:

"With any given medium in the arts, from the beginning of the Renaissance all the way to now, there have been certain ways the public has thought of that medium during certain parts of that medium's history: from it being considered a daring new medium for experimental artists to a tired old medium now only for hacks and academes. And although we rarely realize it, almost all artistic media go through the same relative steps of such a history, too, so much so that we can pretty accurately predict what's next for any particular one. And not only THAT, but that at any given moment in history, the public needs a certain standardized ratio of all this material -- we need a little bit of experimental projects out there, we need a little bit of stuff that's old-fashioned and fussy, and we need a lot in between -- and this too can give us many clues on what artistic media are on their way out at any given moment, and which are set to become the next big mainstream dominant ones."

And that's today's backstory! Whew! Because as today's title indicates, what I really want to talk about today is television, because there's actually something pretty major going on right this moment in regards to the history of television as an artistic medium, and I've been thinking a lot about how it can be directly compared to the publishing industry during the Early Modernist years (1920s and '30s), how under the theory described above there are actually a whole lot of similar points that start lining up, but only by turning both examples certain ways so that their complex patterns line up. And this is what I'm talking about when I talk about writing a book concerning this theory of mine; the book would basically exist of examples like the one I'm about to detail today.

Because if you haven't noticed it, there's been a sea change going on in television the last ten years; that even as the grand total number of shows on the air keeps dropping, and the quality of most of the ones left dropping right into the gutter, there are also a handful that are smarter and more complex and more rewarding than anything before in the medium's history, in fact light years better than anything before, starting you could argue with HBO's The Sopranos right around ten years ago now (and of course with lots of experimental precedents in the '80s and '90s, but more on that in a bit). And there are lots of people who are confused by this, of how television could seem to magically move completely towards the extreme edges of good and bad in a single decade, of how the giant middle of fair-to-good television could've disappeared so thoroughly and so fast. But if you believe in this little relativity theory of mine about the arts, you'll see that there's actually a logical explanation for this, one that anyone who's studied history can see for themselves.

See, I'm starting to believe more and more that what society wants from the arts at any given moment in history is always the same thing, no matter which media are providing it, and that it can be broken down into a simple pyramid shape. So at the top, there's always a small amount of people in society constantly seeking out experimental and transgressive work; then a slightly larger hunger for the high end of what we consider "mainstream" projects, the ones that can make a million people all yell, "That blew me away!;" then a slightly bigger audience than even that for the low end of the mainstream, the stuff we like but don't necessarily love; then a bigger appetite than even that for so-called "comfort projects," ones we enjoy more for the sake of continuity than for their actual quality; and then at the bottom is a big huge pile of crap, all the stuff in the arts and entertainment that no one actually wanted but that managed to get made anyway.

Combine this, then, with the fact that like I said, every medium out there goes through a series of stages unto itself, as far as how it's perceived by the public depending on its age. When it's first invented, for example, usually that medium will be used only for daring, experimental projects, and most people in society will automatically associate that medium with that kind of work in their heads; then as its catches on more and more, it will often become the chosen medium for a lot of mindless entertainment; then as its grows into a dominant mainstream medium, various high-end "quality" projects will start emerging; then suddenly there will be an explosion of astounding high-end work, as the first children raised on that medium become adults themselves; and this is what first attracts the academic community to the medium, and starts making it something to be analyzed and dissected in a classroom and hung in museums; and that suddenly takes the fun out of that medium, and begins its downfall from the mainstream; and that means the abandonment of that medium by those who were doing mainstream projects, because by now of course the medium that used to be considered experimental has grown into society's new mainstream; and so that leaves only the high-end people in the previous medium, and the crap-peddlers as well, the ones who will hang around turning a quick buck as long as humanly possible, until literally they are chased out by religious conservatives and cuckolded politicians, at which point they scurry to the next underground medium that no one is paying attention to yet. And that leaves the medium by the end an obscure, historical one, practiced now only by a handful of old-fashioned experts who have academically studied the medium their entire lives, appreciated by no one else in society anymore other than their fellow obscure academes.

So to get a pretty sophisticated snapshot of the arts at any given moment in history, then, all you need to do is combine these vertical and horizontal charts; and to predict the future of the arts and entertainment industries, all you need to do is switch the positions of all the categories officially one step forward. So as of today, for a good example, spring 2009, we could say that the experimental arts in the US mostly consists of videogames and other online/computer projects; that the high end of the mainstream consists mostly of certain television shows, certain movies, certain recorded music, and most "general" literature; that the low end consists of the majority of TV shows, movies, albums and novels out there; that comfort projects include personal blogs, social-network feeds like at Facebook and Twitter, the dwindling number of soap operas still produced, nights out to see local "bar bands" play live, and all those endless genre novels within such fields as romance, science-fiction, crime, etc. And then when it comes to such former mainstream media like paintings, sculpture, physical photography, live theatre, poetry and more, these have all now passed their cultural primes, and are done mostly anymore only by a small collection of academically-trained artisans, of no real importance to anyone else besides their fellow academes within that hothouse academic environment they all live in. And that of course reminds us of the most important point of all, that these media are in constant flux on top of everything else, and are constantly in the process of moving either more and more into the mainstream or farther and farther away from it. So general literature may dominate the high end of the mainstream right this second, but in twenty years it too will likely have slipped mostly into academic-only, past-its-prime territory; and even though complex narrative videogames like the Grand Theft Auto series are right now a lucrative and mind-blowing (and much-mocked) anomaly, in twenty years you can likely expect such grand "storytelling" style games to dominate both that industry and the majority of society's free time, just like sitting around watching the television is what dominates it right now.

So that finally gets me to today's main point, which is that if you look at America in the 1920s and '30s, you see almost the exact same situation, but with all the media involved of course dialed back a couple of steps in their histories; how at the very beginning of that time period, it was radio, television, movies and recorded music (or what I'll just call "broadcast technology") that were the daring experiments, live theatre and poetry and photography that were providing the majority of high-end projects, the publishing industry and live-music venues providing most of the low-end stuff, and the cultural gutters of penny dreadfuls and vaudeville providing most of the comfort projects and unwanted crap. You see what I'm saying, right? Society needed the exact same blend of artistic projects even then, just that the media providing them were different than now.

But something big happened in these years, just as something big is happening in our own; that this formerly experimental broadcast technology went through a rapid stage of development, turning it by the late '30s from an expensive toy into the main medium in the US for distributing artistic content. And so this made the bottom drop out of the publishing industry, severely and profoundly, as all the people in New York who used to do dime novels and penny dreadfuls and the like all ran off to Hollywood to create radio serials and B-movies instead, because of there just being so much more money and so many more opportunities there all of a sudden. And it was all this medium-quality stuff that had been generating the vast majority of the publishing industry's collective revenue before the rise of broadcast technology, so its loss suddenly created a legitimate crisis within that industry, just exactly like what is going on in the television industry right now, as all the people who traditionally used to write and direct and produce all those great medium-quality TV shows have all started moving to videogames and self-owned internet projects and other media with much brighter futures. And when this was happening to publishing in the '30s, people were just as dire about that industry's future as they are now about television's future, and many wondered if it was going to survive at all in the face of radio and movie theatres and jukeboxes and this freaky new television thing everyone had seen that year at the New York World's Fair.

But a remarkable thing happened to publishing, the same exact thing we're seeing with TV right now; that as the lucrative middle of the industry disappeared, and as these money people got more and more desperate, more and more smart artists and administrators were able to convince these money people to take a chance on their own ideas, these so-called "Modernist novels" or "self-contained serials" or "stories for grown-ups" or however you want to define them. Because let's not forget (and this is a big part of my entire point today), before the Modernist years, most people didn't believe that anything truly amazing or mindblowing could be created out of a full-length fictional book; people still mostly thought of publishing as the home for crap, crap like adventure and horror tales, even if that was sometimes well-done crap like Bram Stoker or Jules Verne. I mean, sure, there had been a growing amount of examples over the last 50 years of what could be done with the medium under the best circumstances -- people like Gustave Flaubert and Mark Twain and Henry James -- but these were mostly considered flukes, occasional flare-ups by geniuses but not something the medium could sustain regularly, not something of interest other than to the top level of elite intellectual audience members.

So what a surprise, then, that what at the time was considered a doom-and-gloom crisis within publishing would produce what many now consider the finest period in the history of novels; the explosive growth in mainstream popularity of such extraordinary Modernist scribes as James Joyce, Henry Miller, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and on and on and on and on. It's so easy to forget now, but this group of writers and the editors who believed in them literally transformed the publishing industry in just a few short decades, literally proved to the academic community for the first time that a novel could be a legitimate work of art too. It sounds ludicrous now, I know, because now anymore the novel is our standard-bearer for "work of art" as society defines it, with our artistic judgement of other media usually based off of it as a sort of litmus test ("Was it as good as the book?"); but this was not a foregone conclusion for a long time, and in fact it was the writers of Early Modernism who first even made the argument in a way that actually convinced a lot of people. (And surprise, surprise, these happen to be the first generation of artists to have had novels around them as an everyday part of their lives since birth.) How extraordinary that this would happen right in the middle of a giant financial crisis for that industry, with most of the money and most of the help packing up at the same exact moment; how astounding that we don't remember that aspect of it at all, only the great things for that medium those times produced.

And so it exactly is with the television industry right now, exactly; that as so much of the talent and money involved quickly shifts to the emerging worlds of videogames, internet series, massively multiplayer online (MMO) environments and more, and as the TV executives left behind get more and more desperate, they've been more and more willing to put complex, experimental, daring stuff on the air, so-called "self-contained series" or "television novels" that are just so much exponentially more sophisticated than anything the industry has ever seen before (and once again the result of the first generation of artists to have grown up with that medium being the mainstream since birth). And sure, like I said, this has its precedents, just like the Early Modernists had their Flauberts and Twains and Jameses; we wouldn't have The Wire without Homicide: Life On the Streets, wouldn't have Mad Men without St. Elsewhere, wouldn't have 24 without Murder One, wouldn't have Heroes without Babylon 5. But that said, the stuff coming out these days far and away outshines any of these antecedents, and I argue that you can easily call such people as JJ Abrams, Matthew Winer and Ronald Moore the Hemingways and Millers and Joyces of television, and see their projects at the medium's equivalents to Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer, The Sound and the Fury and more.

In fact, there was even more that I had been planning to go into today regarding all this -- I was even going to dissect two of these shows specifically, Abrams' Lost and Moore's recently completed Battlestar Galactica, to show exactly why they're so special and ground-breaking to begin with -- but sheesh, I've already gone on just so long today, so I think I'll wrap up instead. But you see my point, hopefully; and like I said, when it comes time to write my book on it all, there will eventually be an entire chapter on just this subject alone, and a chapter on the coming "smart videogame" revolution (think "Second Life" meets "i heart bees" meets first-person-shooters -- this day is coming, and it's coming sooner than you think), and a chapter on the near-complete collapse now in cultural relevancy of the old traditional gallery system for visual artists, as well as all kinds of other cool little specific chapters like this, appropriate for non-profit people and corporate people and fellow futurists and just everyone, please freaking read it, please freaking read it. And then I'll be asked to speak at freaking TED, and I'll get hired as a special new-ideas consultant at freaking Capcom for a thousand freaking dollars a day. Take that, Raph Freaking Kostner!

Anyway, just something that's been on my mind recently, because of the ultra-phenomenal year Lost is having this season, and of course because of Battlestar Galactica ending just so damn spectacularly last month, and it as a result officially now becoming the greatest filmed science-fiction serial of all time; and who knows, maybe soon I actually will sit down and explain why exactly I feel this way, which like I said had been the original point of today's entry to begin with. Another time, dear reader; another time.