There's a scene in The Man Who Fell To Earth where a wisdom-seeking David Bowie lounges in front of a wall of television screens, morphing his way through global culture while gulping water as desperately as does a contemporary ecstasy user.
The film is an oldie, directed in 1976 by Nicholas Roeg, which may some day become a goldie, too. If you used the same metaphor to decode the world of satellite TV this week, the image bank available also offers a weird brand of virtual reality, now multiplied to at least the power of 10. Turn on, tune in, consume.
So what wisdom can we access? Here's Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, hosting a New Age chat show about personal healing and how to keep thinking slim; X-rated Rickie ploughing the sleazy underbelly even Jerry Springer edits out; and, hey, as its presenters are prone to exclaim, take a look at the rise and rise of car crash programmes, where dangerous driving and outlandish real-life car chases are filmed by hidden surveillance cameras, this cult viewing practice happening to emerge at precisely the time when accident fatalities break all records.
That so much mass culture occupies a chat room next door to the more intimate explorations of, say, the current Dublin Theatre Festival, is a cultural conundrum whose challenges could make you want to lean heavily on the button called pause. It is not so remarkable that the two coexist, but that each can and does thrive at precisely the same time.
You might sit into a car down in Temple Bar and watch a couple arguing in the front seat, courtesy of theatre company Corn Exchange, check out racist prejudice in Donal O'Kelly's Farawayan, or be chastened by the emotional atrophy of a whole slew of people re-imagined in Brian Friel's new version of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Then, if you skip last orders, you can still catch X-rated Rickie or Oireachtas Report in the privacy of your own home.
That alternative universe does require more effort to reach than a nudge on the remote control. Still, the paradox you may spy in debates about the battle to win ratings is how arguments used to affirm the importance of making non-commercial theatre are increasingly being proposed to explain why "good" television must live at the core of the digital age. Understandably, no clear consensus has emerged so far about what such value judgments imply.
Theatre offers further parallels. We may reasonably hope, even anticipate, that the human and artistic values of a play like Uncle Vanya will endure for longer than will The Jerry Springer Show. But Jerry will always win hands down when the ratings game is played. Already Jerry Springer has doubtless been seen by more people than has Vanya in its entire existence, and Vanya is the older by 100 years.
Without other balances, ratings-only thinking may end up contributing about as much innovation to television as ambulance-chasing does to the practice of law.
Follow their game blindly, and you may find they operate as signposts turned in the wrong direction, facing towards the no-man's-land called Mass Culture: Its Lowest Common Denominator, from a quality perspective at least.
It is arguably a matter of prejudice that television is subjected to a level of scrutiny and, at times, outright mistrust that other less public media rarely have to face. Tacit assumptions promote the perception that a medium which is so much a part of mass culture carries with it a level of responsibility other forms need not.
Excavating them is the testiest challenge of the imminent digital age: finding the borderline where taste stops being a private matter and enters the public interest; fixing the distinction between what is news and what is no more than infotainment. Some programmes will shriek so loudly for custom that we may find their shock tactics too distasteful to watch; some will be unwatchable because they will be so badly made.
But when you strip off the preponderance of techno language, which makes it so hard for a non-technophile to come to terms with the concept of digital, you're left with an imaginative riddle just as revolutionary as the experience of standing beside the very first printing press at Guttenberg back in medieval times.
The digital age is a type of new medievalism, with parallels to trends in other areas such as global economics. No centre, no overall programming monopoly, a shift in the balance of power away from makers and towards distributors. Freedom to graze in many different pastures, to the point where viewers mediate programming for themselves.
The end of peak times, and thus of mass audiences as we now know them, simply because individual viewers will edit their personal TV schedules in any way they wish. Within that arena, whether it takes a generation or more to evolve, catering to the tastes of minority audiences may become the rule, instead of the exception.
That sort of radical shift will stand existing commercial patterns on their heads. Gay Byrne may be correct in predicting that sponsored programmes could make a comeback: even if you do choose to surf more than six or seven channels, only the advertising community will want to edit in commercial breaks.
The tendency to worry about mass culture's sometimes pernicious demands is age-old. Mass culture was the bumpkin with the alcoholic's reddened nose daring to eavesdrop on polite society. Now it's pictured as the crude tabloid editor who will stop at nothing to grudge or gush in the name of market share.
That need not mean it is irresistible. As society starts to sketch the outline of what going digital may mean, the prospect is that unless viewers start to speak their say, multiple choice will bring not much more than an aggregate of multiple trash. Must Jerry be the front man of the digital future? It can seem as if there is no other option. Combine that potential with the techno power of the digital era and you could be facing 300 channels of humanity-stifling outright sleaze.
To get to know the world, you only have to watch its television, according to the Bowie oracle with his unquenchable thirst. Certainly, the Roeg film's sense of fatedness about the cultural futures of mid-1970s middle America was in ways prophetic.
But despite a notable prescience about the way that soap opera would become a social glue of the future, this Bowie character's mistake was to forget he was emotionally blind. In his own retro language, he was quite literally out of sight.