"Every Home Is Wired": 1 -- The Net in Relation to Music Subcultures

"Every Home Is Wired":
1 -- The Net in Relation to Music Subcultures

This way, the convenience of choosing one's own time for replying (known in forms of interaction like letter-writing) is combined with the delivery speed even to remote regions, and the global audience, of direct electronic communication. Thus, "when communication does not require partners' simultaneous attention, individuals take part in ... activities at time intervals of their own convenience. ... Each member is 'freed up': ... making temporal commitments becomes discretionary. ... Both task-oriented and socially oriented exchanges may take place without one constraining the time available for the other" (Walther 24).⁸	Bit 28
Even though the Internet has mass appeal and allows mass participation, then, it still makes little sense to describe it as a mass medium. First of all, it "cannot be considered to encompass a single medium, but consists of a range of media" (December, "Units" 17); it is a carrier or meta-medium in the same way that frequency wavebands are a carrier medium for radio, TV, and other media -- the media thus carried by the Internet include email, newsgroups, the World Wide Web, Internet phone, Internet radio, and other emerging technologies. Many of these may have the potential to be a mass medium, but, as we have seen, even their claims to being mass media are put in doubt by the growing fragmentation and specialisation of media such as newsgroups: there is no one, single, unified mass audience anymore, but 'only' a number of constantly shifting, fragmented, potentially overlapping groups. Only a newsgroup with an audience significantly large enough to be called a 'mass' in itself, then, would seem to warrant the term 'mass medium', then -- the same is true for other Internet-distributed media.	Bit 29

This way, the convenience of choosing one's own time for replying (known in forms of interaction like letter-writing) is combined with the delivery speed even to remote regions, and the global audience, of direct electronic communication. Thus, "when communication does not require partners' simultaneous attention, individuals take part in ... activities at time intervals of their own convenience. ... Each member is 'freed up': ... making temporal commitments becomes discretionary. ... Both task-oriented and socially oriented exchanges may take place without one constraining the time available for the other" (Walther 24).⁸

Bit 28

Even though the Internet has mass appeal and allows mass participation, then, it still makes little sense to describe it as a mass medium. First of all, it "cannot be considered to encompass a single medium, but consists of a range of media" (December, "Units" 17); it is a carrier or meta-medium in the same way that frequency wavebands are a carrier medium for radio, TV, and other media -- the media thus carried by the Internet include email, newsgroups, the World Wide Web, Internet phone, Internet radio, and other emerging technologies. Many of these may have the potential to be a mass medium, but, as we have seen, even their claims to being mass media are put in doubt by the growing fragmentation and specialisation of media such as newsgroups: there is no one, single, unified mass audience anymore, but 'only' a number of constantly shifting, fragmented, potentially overlapping groups. Only a newsgroup with an audience significantly large enough to be called a 'mass' in itself, then, would seem to warrant the term 'mass medium', then -- the same is true for other Internet-distributed media.

Bit 29

Section 1 -- Go on to Bite:

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31	32	33	34	35