Submitted to USA Today Interactive TV column Denise Caruso At some point during the smokescreen of hype around interactive TV and information superhighways, it became clear that the term "interactive" had become synonymous with "better." Perhaps it's time to clear the air a little. Two of the most commonly mentioned applications of an interactive TV network -- video on demand (renting movies from your living room) and interactive games -- are pretty straightforward. Though video rental and electronics stores aren't likely happy about either application, both will probably be embraced by consumers when they're deployed. But interactive home shopping and customized advertising are becoming part of a mythology about interactive services that is in need of serious examination. The mythology about home shopping starts with the existing catalog business, which according to one estimate, racks up a whopping $60 billion in annual sales. This, say promoters, proves there is a vast market for the convenience provided by not going to a store to shop. Interactive TV just makes a good situation better, they say -- you don't even have to get up from the couch to dial the phone. You just point at the screen and in a couple days, merchandise appears. But one factor that may slow this evolution from catalogs to interactive home shopping is simply that the stuff looks so bad on our TV screens. One of the oddest stories about the crisp pictures delivered by high-definition TV -- yet most obvious when you think about it -- is that people love it for nature programs, but hate it for game shows and sitcoms. Because the picture quality is so good, you can really see the cheesy materials and poor set construction. How does this play out in the shopping environment? Well, because today's upscale catalog shoppers can examine a luscious, high quality photograph, they feel safer spending $300 for a linen suit they can't touch or try on. If the item doesn't look like the picture, they send it back. On today's TV sets, though, it's virtually impossible to tell the difference between linen and burlap. And we've all experienced the surreal quality of color reproduction with today's North American TV broadcast standard. (The standard, known as NTSC, is also jokingly referred to in TV circles as "Never Twice the Same Color.") Until something is done about the bad quality of TV pictures, serious catalog buyers aren't likely make the leap to interactive home shopping. Even more than good picture quality, though, we need something better to buy. There are people like me, driven to the wall with work and family pressures, who would kill to find something useful to buy on TV, interactive or otherwise. Staple products like toilet paper or a box of Tide Unscented just aren't available. And even if they were, when would the goods be delivered? While we're at work, so we have to figure out how or when to pick them up? We need to have purchases delivered to our homes when we ask them to be, maybe after dinner and before bedtime. If we need to return them, we want someone to pick them up at no charge. If shopping channels are going to continue to make millions off our need for convenience, then we should make them provide it by our definition, not theirs. Then there's the myth of interactive advertising. One of the most popular pitches for interactive TV is that it can deliver to advertisers, on a silver platter, you: you who will then be thrilled to be barraged with product pitches that appear to know everything from when you bought your last pregnancy test kit to your preferred flavor of Crystal Light. "The privacy of your home?" A relic of the past. With a two-way TV network, it's technically possible (and a great boon) for advertisers to make note of every movie you select, every game you play and everything you buy. They'll know when you've been sleeping. They know when you're awake. They'll be able to insert luxury car ads specifically targeted to you, because they'll know from your credit report that you just got a whopping raise. Combined with the rest of information they can get about you from other sources, they've pretty much got you covered. Advertisers believe is that this is a Good Thing. But it is a bonafide nightmare for consumers, who have said time and again that they will not stand for their personal information sold and used by marketeers. They say they'll demand that service providers keep their buying habits and personal information private and safe. And, they say, such tactics fly in the face of the whole reason for interactive TV: if we truly do want to control what we watch and when, we're hardly likely to appreciate a phalanx of advertisers doling out commercials to us based on what our "profiles" tell them we might want to buy. But we can't blame the advertisers for trying. Like many other mass media today, TV advertising as we know it is dying. People surf right past commercials even when there's only 20 or 30 channels to click through. How on earth will advertisers get us to pay attention when there's 500 channels of stuff, and when we can decide exactly what we want to see? (A cable executive at a recent conference was hissed by the audience when he said we wouldn't be able to "surf" past commercials in his company's interactive TV system. He quickly reneged.) That's a big problem for them, but it leads to a bigger problem for us -- as interactive TV leads us to a world of total choice, advertising no longer foots the bill for the creation of TV programming . And if advertising isn't footing the bill, what's going to fill those 500, or five million channels? Today, the partial solution is what's called narrowcasting -- i.e., channels with specific subjects or target audiences, such as the Cartoon Network, Black Entertainment Television, etc. Because they're thought to deliver a specific demographic, advertisers gravitate toward the channels that attract their kinds of customers. You could probably expect a fairly high rate of response to flannel shirts and army boot ads on the Grunge Channel, for example. But despite its utility for advertisers, narrowcasting raises a much larger issue -- the social implications of the death of serendipity in mass media. How many people would have sought out the Clarence Thomas hearings, for example, to hear Anita Hill's testimony? How many people, in a nation where less than half the population votes, would have included "Supreme Court Justice" or "sexual harassment cases" in their interactive TV viewer profile? Despite how you feel about the issue, the Thomas hearings -- which at the time we couldn't get away from no matter how many times we changed the channel -- galvanized the nation. We need to ask ourselves, if the medium is the message, what message is delivered by interactive TV's world of niche programming and special interests. In a society seething with tensions around race, gender and sexual orientation, how do we learn to care about people unlike ourselves if we won't change our own channel? If "interactive" is indeed to be "better," these are just the kinds of sticky questions that must be answered. While we've still got mass media as a forum, let's use it to raise the level of discussion. Bio: Denise Caruso is editorial director of information services for Friday Holdings, L.P. in New York. A longer version of this article appeared in "Digital Media," a newsletter based in Media, PA.