Editor’s Corner:
What Message on What Medium??

We’ve been hearing all these reports on how Web surfing and e-mail have been cutting into the average person’s TV viewing time when there is a computer at home. As encouraging as it sounds, computers have only made it into 44% of US homes, while TV is in 99%. I remember this statistic because for many years I didn’t own a TV and a recent NY Times article pointed out this stark tiny number of TV-less people.

Recently a woman on my aisle in the locker room at the gym was commending herself for tossing out a great deal of stuff. "But my books," she said, "they take up so much room."

"Why don’t you donate them to a college," I said remembering the 3,000 books I’d given to Columbia University.

"I couldn’t!" she protested. "Give away my Oxford Dictionary of the English Language?"

"You can get all that on CD," I told her.

"CD?? I don’t want a computer in my tiny apartment. I’m getting one of those things you put on top of the TV to get on the Net, they’re only $99!"

"You mean WebTV?"

"Yes," she said, "finally they’ve found a way to reach me! It took a while, but now they’ve got something for people like me."

Recalling that discussion while I pulled together the material on spam for this month’s issue made me think that we - Congress, web sites, end users, TV viewers - hardly know what we’re dealing with. Spam is the scourge of the Internet but may turn out to be the delight of the WebTV audience. Computers have always been able to transmit highly individualized communications and TV’s have not. When a computer user gets a commercial message in his e-mailbox, he views it as an intrusion; more so for those who have been online the longest. The TV viewer, on the other hand, has been enduring advertising mixed into this medium for years. It goes with the territory. But a TV viewer never received anything personal on his screen and knew what he was watching was a mass broadcast.

In the years to come will the non-computer user dominate the online world? Or will there be a separation of the ways? Appliance people hanging out online with other appliance people and PC-centric crowds also keeping to themselves. Will a caste system evolve whereby the PC users will claim superiority over the appliance crew? Or will we build Internet 3 and 4 to accommodate cultural and technological differences that are separate and not equal?