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The Interrelation between Broadcast and Network Communication 87
discussed in computer-mediated communication environments. For
example, in the mid-1990s the largest subscriber list of all on Usenet
(over 3 million users) was r.a.t.s, which stands for rec.arts.tv.soaps
(Baym, 1995: 138). Baym (1995) claims that ‘[t]he idea of soap opera
fans using computers to gossip about their favorite (and least favorite)
soap characters challenges conventional images of both soap opera
3
fans and computer users’ (138). Mathew Hills (2001) argues that on-line
fan clubs function as a community of imagination that is always
‘available’ to fans:

As an affective space in which caring for, and about, the object of fandom
constitutes the most significant communal claim, the fan newsgroup resem-
bles an ongoing and never-ending fan convention. … It is thus a ‘space’ in
which common sentiment can migrate from a fixed or ritualistic point, mov-
ing out into the fan’s practice of everyday life via the newsgroup’s constant
availability. (157)

• Equally, however, the content of broadcast media is overwhelmingly
composed of simulations of, or references to, face-to-face interaction.
Consider the soap opera, the most popular TV genre: it is made of up
of thousands upon thousands of face-to-face interactions, or images of
people on the telephone, and, more recently, the Internet. But mostly
they indulge in never-ending close-up shots of dyads and triads of
faces interacting. We watch the TV, ‘hooked’ on our programme, as if
the faces, gestures and expressions which stream past the screen give
us a simulated dose of the exact same kinds of interaction we are
avoiding ourselves – as long as we remain a viewer. Similarly, radio
genres engage all of the metaphorics of face-to-face company which
listeners are suspending as a condition of that engagement. The radio
announcer thanks us for ‘joining the programme’, or declares it is
‘good to be with you’. All of these statements are to suggest the
announcer is in the room with you. But it need not be the face-to-face
that is substituted in this way. It is not insignificant that advertisers use
telephone rings, or doorbell or alarm clock sounds, with increasing
frequency to also get the listener’s attention.

Each of these examples shows how broadcast media are a central
reference for face-to-face interaction, and extended forms of interaction,
as much as this interaction itself becomes the content of broadcast genres.
However, in the context of the second media age thesis, this co-dependent
relationship has become obscured. Instead the second media age thinkers
only emphasize one side of this relationship, that of the need for individ-
uals to renew interactive forms of communication in relation to the way
broadcast media displace geographic forms of interaction.
Broadcast and interactive communication also operate mutually
because they have central characteristics common to them, which are each