People have a nasty habit of missing the point when they stumble across new technologies. After all, new ideas are often confusing to those who never had the chance to try them before. If the confusion goes on too long the technology falters and can sometimes pass away. Television, telephones and computers are suffering from just such an identity crisis and have been seeking to help resolve it.

Media futurist George Gilder's 1990 book, Life After Television, put them all on the analyst's couch and predicted the success of bottom-up communications with smart personal computers over top-down broadcast television and "dumb" telephones. His diagnosis was that television and telephones are "dying", if not already dead, and a brave new two-way smart media is coming. He wants to rename the new device a "teleputer" to help improve their self-image. Maybe he's a little premature. And the patients aren't feeling any better.

When Thomas Edison invented the record and the record player, he thought he'd found the ideal dictation machine for the office. When Alexander Bell invented the telephone in 1886, some clever marketing people decided it would make a great device to play electronic organ music over the wires from a central office downtown. Neither of these one-way, "broadcast" models sold well. Later, it was found a two-way system worked better and it proved so popular that by 1930 over 20 million Americans were getting their first phone bills.

In a similar way, radio began as a one-way medium, broadcasting from a central station to its audience. Sadly, it never had a chance to undergo therapy and become two-way in its early days because, unlike telephone over wires, radio signals get in the road of one another. It took lots of patents and government regulations to keep individual radio users away from the main commercial and government frequencies. Radio turned out to be a goldmine for the stations that got their rare slot on the dial.

When television started in the 1940's in the US it followed a similar pattern. What we ended up with is a one-way media that has mixed results coping with the special needs of groups and individuals. Today, we can own a two-way radio station. It's called a mobile phone. Now those many signals can be "packaged" into manageable chunks - like operating a model train set with hundreds of trains running at once and nary a crash.

What about television today? Do we really want to talk back to our TV set, our neighbours or our tele-friends overseas? There's still a few technical bugs before television is truly two-way so we have to look at the example of another kind of television: computers.

Computing began in the forties and fifties with the idea of a few big computers owned by a few powerful companies "broadcasting" their information to "dumb" terminals throughout the land. Just like telephones, electricity, telegraph, radio and television. A big, central computer, a "Univac" (the one big vacuum tube computer), would be the one-way central repository of all knowledge and processing power.

Companies that followed this centralised idea are feeling sickly and disorientated and are rapidly losing ground to the more confident, decentralised power of the personal computer. The most popular aspect of computers today is their ability to help us talk intelligently with one another across the building or across the globe. They can only accomplish this became intelligence is "distributed", or spread around, in a non-hierachical way. Computers that can "telepute" in this way through the phone lines on the internet and bulletin boards or interact with a CD ROM and database have recently boosted sales of computers above that of televisions for the first time.

Dr. Gilder's couch is crowded with one-way patients, all worried about their identities. He's prescribed a tech-tonic for their health that is bitter draught to swallow for patients used to talking down to the audience: a course on empathy and conversational skills.