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12 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
the point of eclipsing immersion in broadcast environments. There are,
however, two problems which come immediately to the fore in tying these
epochs so closely to both the innovations in technological development
and the take-up of these technologies by consumers of all kinds.
Firstly, all of the various celebrants of the second media age thesis
overlook continuities between the first and second media age which, if
recognized, would, I argue, shake up many of their social and political
claims. However, we should not throw out the distinction between broad-
cast and interactivity altogether; as we shall see in Chapters 4 and 5, this
is an indispensable distinction for a form analysis of modes of commu-
nicative integration.
Nevertheless, the second media age thesis does not acknowledge just
how much interactive CITs share some of the dynamics of broadcast that
they have supposedly transcended, and, what is more, the degree to
which they are dependent on and parasitic of broadcast. These continuities,
which are addressed in Chapters 4 and 6, involve the way in which CITs,
whether we are speaking of interactive or broadcast, operate with similar
logics as technologies of urbanization. Secondly, they both produce eco-
nomic imperatives which are mutually reinforcing, rather than distinct.
When looked at from an economic perspective, we shall be able to see
how both the Internet and television, network media and broadcast media,
‘need’ each other.
A second difficulty with the historical distinction made by second
media age theorists is the particular alignment of the two epochs with
what are seen to be monumental technological developments. It is as though
the various possibilities of communication are positively determined by the
technology itself (a tendency toward technological determinism) rather
than by the recursive relation between technical, political, social and eco-
nomic environments. Then there is the necessity to distinguish between
the structure of communication environments (decentred, centred, one-
to-many, many-to-many) and the technical forms in which this structure
is realized. Broadcast can be interactive as much as interactivity can be
facilitated within broadcast.
Television, print, radio, the Internet and the telephone provide for
elements of broadcast and interactivity; it is just that these are realized
differently, and at different levels of embodiment in different ‘techno-social’
relations.
Broadcast can be any form of public spectacle or public address either
technologically extended or not; i.e. a lecture amplified by a microphone
or not. Interactivity can be technologically extended (the Internet) or
simply face-to-face. From the point of view of technologically extended
forms themselves, we can also speak of a co-presence of different kinds of
media formation. Thus, the significance of the Internet is not that it is a
more powerful medium than other channels, but that it provides a plat-
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form whose sub-media contain both broadcast and interactivity. Tanjev
Schultz has observed that ‘on the Web some sites ... become more popular