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120 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
3 Another example is the large number of people who participate in reader-to-reader
newspaper forums (see Schultz, 2000: 214–17).
4 On this count in particular, the claims of the cyber-utopians that cyberspace can restore
community and the public sphere are exaggerated. Graham and Aurigi (1998) have
argued that the claims that public space has disappeared in cities are exaggerated for
the purposes of this narrative of redemption. ‘Not all urban trends everywhere can be
generalized from Los Angeles, or other supposedly “paradigmatic” examples’ (59).
5 As Geoff Sharp (1993) argues, ‘technologically extended forms also stand on their own
feet ... they have positive characteristics of their own’ (233).
6 The scale of advertising, its budgets, the enlargement of the places in which it can occur.
The contrast I am drawing here is between the dominance of the commercial dynamics
of broadcasting in the first media age and the post-advertising world of user-pays com-
munication. The contrast does not cohere in relation to public service broadcasting insti-
tutions, which, as Williams (1974) argues, rest on a paternalistic basis ‘an authoritarian
system with a conscience ... with values and purposes beyond the maintenance of its
own power’ (131).
7 In Culture Jam Lasn (2000) provides a summary rate card for 30-second advertisements
on US TV circa 2000. On a national scale the Superbowl is priced at US $1,500,000 for
30 seconds; CBS news, $55,000; MTV, $4,100, $3,000. On local networks, late evening news
attracts $750; Saturday morning cartoons, $450; and late night movies, $100.
8 For the greater difficulty of the Internet than radio or television as an advertising
medium, see Black (2001: 402).
9 As Ien Ang (1996) documents, in early 1990 Walt Disney Studies began prohibiting
cinema theatres in the USA from showing advertisements before Disney-produced
movies were screened. ‘The decision was made because the company had received a great
number of complaints from spectators who did not want to be bothered by advertising
after having paid $7.50 for seeing a film, leading the company to conclude that com-
mercials “are an unwelcome intrusion” into the filmgoing experience’ (53).
10 Studies of television have steadily emerged into a sub-discipline since their inception.
Newcomb’s critical readers have carried five editions since the 1970s. John Fiske and
John Hartley made numerous attempts at developing a distinct television ‘theory’ in the
late 1970s and 1980s (see Fiske, 1987; Fiske and Hartley, 1978), but by the 1990s (e.g.
Hartley, 1992a) it had attained a high formalism.
11 In fact Marc argues that broadcasting as an industry, rather than a mode of integration,
is returning to whence it came: ‘... it is easy to forget that radio emerged from the
laboratory as a wholesaler’s market-specific product. First known as the wireless tele-
graph or radiotelegraph, it was primarily sold as a wholesale military-industrial tool
that extended the capabilities of telegraphy to ocean-going vessels’ (632).
12 Television forms of datacasting may include: live data mining – the consumer interacts
with the data synchronously with their transmission; off-line data mining – the con-
sumer interacts with the set-top box or receiver that stores and/or updates data which
have been previously transmitted; return path interactivity – the provision of a return
path (e.g. a modem) which allows the consumer to interact beyond the data provided,
which may include email services or on-line shopping.
13 For example, the followers of JennyCam underwent its largest growth when television
programmes reporting it began to proliferate. The same is true of all privately generated
sites which have become well known.
14 However, see Caldwell (1995) on the ‘myth of liveness’.
15 Baudrillard’s appreciation of this quality of broadcast is invaluable in pointing out the
limitations of cyberactivism and the pirates of ‘counter-information’. Anti-media that
do not have access to the dominant forms of broadcasting are generally subject to them,
and are consigned to limited expressions of ‘culture-jamming’.
16 In the case of a spectacle or a catastrophe, this awareness intensifies (see Couldry, 2003: 7).
17 The modern instantaneous quality of ‘news’ itself is, it should be pointed out, already
based on electrical technology (see Marc, 2000: 630).