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90 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
If the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of ‘mass media’ which are its
most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to invade society as mere
equipment, this equipment is in no way neutral but is the very means suited
to its total self-movement. If the social needs of the epoch in which such
techniques are developed can only be satisfied by their mediation, if the
administration of this society and all contact among men can no longer take
place except through the intermediary of this power of instantaneous com-
munication, it is because this communication is essentially unilateral.
(Debord, 1977: 24)

To the extent that the Internet can be considered a medium that is at
once instantaneous and an invocation of the gaze (the World Wide Wait),
it signals little change in the ‘individuating’ aspect of the technological
mediation of embodied presence. In other words, if an ‘audience’ is con-
stituted only in an atomized form by mass media, then the difference
between the phenomenological world of a broadcast audience member
and that of an individual immersed in a so-called ‘interactive technology’
begins to flatten out.
Some empirically driven research on Internet use confirms the accel-
eration of individualization which typifies CMC. The Stanford ‘Internet
and Society Study’ conducted by the Institute for the Quantitative Study
of Society (Nie and Erdring, 2000) found that Internet users spend more
hours at the office and keep working when they get home, and the longer
people have used the Internet, the more hours they spend on it per week.
As the director of the Stanford study, Norman Nie, explains:

We’re moving from a world in which you know all your neighbors, see all your
friends, interact with lots of different people every day, to a functional
world, where interaction takes place at a distance … the more hours people
use the Internet, the less time they spend with real human beings. (Nie and
Erding, 2000: 1)

The use of Internet sub-media brings individuals together at the level
of electronic assembly but it also renews the physical atomization of
media operators. In doing so it materially creates the very conditions
which ideologically it proposes to overcome.
To this degree, network communication is actually parasitic of one of
the conditions that have been produced by broadcast whilst continuing
this condition. The need for extended network communication is propor-
tionately related to the degree of geographic atomization which exists
within a communicative field.
Broadcast can be considered a first media age in relation to the fact
that its atomistic qualities seem to be more tangibly overcome by the
Internet. But in truth, they are also ‘virtually’ overcome by the medium of
broadcast also. The concept of a first media age begins, therefore, to look
more like a theoretical invention integral to the postulation of a second
media age.