Jonathan Inge

Since the Spring semester is basically done, I decided to spend some time redesigning my website. I really want it to be a portfolio of my work (i.e., films, writing, 2D/3D graphics, and sound experiments). Also, I decided to dismantle my course website for ART 248 and move some of its interesting aspects here. The rest will end up in a Moodle presentation for motion graphics.

One of the major projects I plan to undertake this summer is the creation of an online television station as part of a multimedia entertainment website. I wanted to start this project at Cuesta College sometime after I developed the school’s first Internet radio station. However, due to some of the college’s technological restrictions, the idea won’t be realized any time soon. So I said to myself, “Why not do it on your own?” And why not? In April, I started researching and acquiring films I could stream and studied website designs which would be visually compelling yet still user-friendly.

I grew up in the last era that saw the expansion of broadcast television (at least in Northern California). When Channel 58 started, all it had was 1950s western and court shows. Channel 40 was basically a movie channel. Channel 31 was the sitcom rerun and morning/afternoon cartoon channel. After some time, each gained an audience, advertisers, money, and better content. By the 1990s, their growth was uncut by the rise of cable television providers and cable networks. I will fondly recall all the oddly compelling, largely forgotten films and TV shows which permeated those channels from 1987 to 1991.

Not to say cable television wasn’t interesting. It was much better in 1990s when there was more diversity of ownership. Today, there are only like five or six major companies which own most of the networks. No wonder despite thousands of channels, there’s very little good to watch. Turner Classic Movies barely hangs in there. AMC went through a bad period and now has become something like a basic-cable-HBO (or in my mind the wannabe intellectual’s Channel 40). IFC lost its soul. Cartoon Network has now become the DC Animated Universe Network. Sci-Fi Channel is dead. TechTV and G4 went MIA. Nickelodeon is a shell of its former self. The channels that were once educational (History, A&E, TLC, Science, National Geographic, Discovery) are now edutaintional. I’ll let you figure out what that word means, but their programming basically bares more resemblance to the current wave of reality shows than traditional documentaries.