Our Regularly Scheduled Paradigm Shift‪.‬

SETH FELDMAN is Dean of Fine Arts at York University. He is also a regular contributor to the CBC radio program Ideas. The year 2006 will be a watershed for humanity, perhaps more of a jolt than the lunar landing or the dawn of the nuclear age; in less than a decade, we will enter the world of HDTV -- High Definition Television. And nothing -- not a ballgame, not a war, not I Love Lucy -- will ever be the same. But the dazzling images and sound of this new technology will challenge many of the axioms of the Information Age, and may well take us back to the days of mind-numbing network programming, albeit in a lovely package.