Tom Shales

Perhaps an apology is due Mark Fowler, who seemed like the worst chairman of the Federal Communications Commission ever-except that even worse ones would come along. But that's not the reason for the apology. Some of us scoffed and hooted when in the 1980s Fowler compared the television set to a toaster, saying it was just another appliance and needed little regulating.

Now, of course, we have to be prepared for the moment when some Einstein unveils a toaster that doubles as a TV. Nonsense, you say? Baloney, garbage, twaddle, claptrap, drivel, gibberish, you say? Or rather, Roget says? Well, my friend, you haven't been keeping up on the secret life of appliances-or rather the double lives of appliances. "A chair is just a chair, even when there's no one sitting there," wrote lyricist Hal David-but a chair isn't just a chair if it's got a screen and some dials and you can see Dr. Phil's big fleshy chrome-dome on it.

In short, no gadget is worth having anymore if it can't do something else, if it can't perform a function that may have nothing to do with the reason it was invented. There is no sharper case in point than the telephone, which having been liberated from its moorings-mainly the wire to the wall and thence to the pole outside your house-is now going through some kind of identity crisis brought on mainly by the people who sell telephones.

A cellphone is considered as old-hat as the expression "old-hat" if it doesn't do a lot more than relay information to your ear and from your mouth. My new cellphone only begins with that. It also takes blurry still pictures, in color, and can transmit them to some poor schnook on the opposite coast; it downloads tunes by the dozen, the score, even the hitload, and can play them back; and it even displays television programs-CNN news briefs, MSNBC tidbits, maps of highs and lows from the Weather Channel, and other stuff I haven't figured out how to use yet.

Maybe I missed it, but it doesn't seem that there's been the usual big uproar from this or that fat conglomerate over copyright issues and such-you know, the hullabaloo that always occurs when anybody figures out a new way to distribute material that some brilliant "artist" or other created in the sanctum sanctorum of his computer-crammed basement.

Such are the issues arising from new inventions like the dubiously marvelous iPod, which allows you to waste hour upon hour downloading ditties from the Web and cramming them into a doohickey that you can wear around your neck like a charm. It works like a charm, too, but it's creating a generation even more isolated than the Sony Walkman generation before it-kids who walk around with intravenous pop and pap being fed into their heads and creating an "invisible shield" around them not altogether unlike amazing Gardol-remember?-in a toothpaste commercial of years gone by.

Toasters with TV pictures may still be a day or two away, but you can indeed buy a fridge with a TV set built into its door-presumably just the outside of the door, or maybe the inside too, for fans who want to grab a brewski and not risk missing a single moment (a single moment, that is, of the beer commercial that is interrupting whatever game they were watching when they left the living room for the kitchen).

When machines aren't multitasking, they're being repurposed. Thus is a telephone repurposed to have multi tasks-not just the obvious, but also the peripheral, if not downright incongruous. Why, really, would you want your phone to take a picture? Is there a market for cameras that place long-distance calls? For TV sets that dispense refreshments? Clearly, the days of reading a book or a magazine in the bathroom may be over. Why read when you can watch?

The prevailing insidious influence has to be the computer, which allows you to watch a movie in one corner and play Lotto in another and get the news and weather in another and read your e-mail in another (there can be many more than four corners in this brave new world), all the while attempting to dodge advertising that is embedded in every crevice and cranny as well.

Marketing demands more nooks, more crannies, more corners, more places in which to post advertising, and so my telephone, even though its delivery of phone calls is in fact kind of spotty and not entirely reliable, takes it upon itself to be my entertainer as well.

Fans of this or that singer or band can arrange to have one or more of this or that singer's or band's hit tunes substituted for the mere prosaic "ringing" with which telephones have been signaling us for more than a century. Well it's just too darn bad that Jolson didn't live to see this. He could have had "Mammy" in his pants. What's creepy about it all isn't that the rappings of Nelly or Bow Wow are replacing the simple, minimally invasive dings and dongs of traditional ringers. What's creepy is that a culture is being built up around the telephone. The telephone! You might as well make a faucet or a microwave oven the center of your life.

If you can choose to get Oprah Winfrey on your telephone, then we're only a tiny baby step away from getting Oprah whether we want her or not. That is, the phone will ring, or maybe a commercial jingle will play (making better use of that previous dead ring time) and then, instead of a phone call, you'll get a TV show, commercials definitely included. You won't have to turn it on because it will turn itself on. Egad-it's enough to give Orwell the creeps and Huxley the heebie-jeebies!

The most precious control button on any TV set is the one that lets you turn it off. Now, as part of its unholy alliance with the telephone, TV conceivably could turn itself right back on again-and sneak back into your consciousness disguised, in its obscenely impudent way, as a call from your best friend, your sister, or even-gasp!-Mom herself.