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More than anything else, the showmen are worried that the pumped-up glamour and hype on which their businesses depend will leach away if audiences can pick and choose and consume in electronic solitude. "We are standing on a revolutionary threshold," says MCA's Teller of on-line delivery. "But I don't believe the highest form of human existence is sitting at home in a cocoon downloading digital bits."
Which is, in the end, the only compelling case against the new gadgetry. When it was just a matter of spending too much time watching CNN and Who's the Boss? reruns, American couch-potato-ism was more amusing than depressing. But if the last remaining rich, secular public rituals -- shopping, moviegoing, browsing in the company of human strangers -- become reduced to solitary, freeze-dried experiences, we will have impoverished ourselves. The future, as it happens, will feel futuristic after all. But at least the Jetsons occasionally went out and mingled.