TV REVIEWS : ‘Frontline’ Visits Cyberspace to Examine What’s at Stake

Balancing a mostly justifiable “gee-whiz” attitude toward new Digital Age products with a healthy dose of skepticism about their social effects, tonight’s “Frontline” report examines who stands to gain what in the interactive revolution.

To give us a sense of what’s coming, “High Stakes in Cyberspace” visits the founders of Yahoo, an Internet directory; Zima’s World Wide Web page; a family testing Bell Atlantic’s interactive television system; and Digital Ink, the Washington Post’s electronic newspaper.

The benefit of almost all the cyber-gadgets that correspondent Robert Krulwich explores is increased convenience. With Bell Atlantic’s Stargazer, you can order movies at home. With Digital Ink, you can read a book review, check out the first chapter of a book, discuss it with others on-line and order yourself a copy.

The trade-off, in most cases, is privacy. Most of the firms selling electronic services are depending on advertising revenue to make money. And what advertisers want is information that will allow them to market their own products more effectively.

So in addition to tailoring information and entertainment to the user, the proprietors of the information superhighway are intent on collecting information about the user to an extent never before possible.

Sampling from AT&T;’s insistent “You Will” commercials and other plentiful examples of high-tech media hype, the report notes that the future these days often sounds like a command--or at least an unavoidable fact of life.

But “Frontline” sometimes falls into the same trap, with definitive statements like, “One day nearly everything we do will move through cyberspace” (will it really?) and “For the first time, communication is completely two-way” (an old-fashioned face-to-face conversation would seem to qualify under that definition too).

Given some of the disturbing questions it raises, a viewer might wish the hourlong program had delved more deeply into the question Krulwich raises near the end: “Couldn’t all this new technology be put to some better use?” But perhaps that’s the subject of another show.

* “High Stakes in Cyberspace” airs on “Frontline” at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.