Doesn the computers interactivity make it superior to television?
It certainly allows us to do some things we couldn’t do with television. But you have to compare the right things. The computer’s interactivity should not be compared to television (it will not, for example, redeem the soap opera or sitcom), but rather to those various, more active engagements we once could not avoid, but now can replace with a more passive activity while sitting in front of a screen. There’s where the substitution occurs. And it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the local town hall meeting, for example, when shifted to the computer from the old, face-to-face format, will be nudged in the same direction that television had already nudged politics.
