T.V. and the Internet

I believe the Internet is very different from television. Sure, you can use your computer as a television if you wanted to, but the internet can be so much more involved than that. If you stop and think about it the only thing you can really do with a television is watch it. Yes, there are many different channels to watch, and they did make it so you can so you can stop, rewind, fast forward, and record, but there are many things that set the T.V. and the Internet apart.

The first thing would be that the internet can be considered a meta-medium, which explained by Adams and Clark, means that it is a medium for medium. It acts as a sort of channel for many different mediums like telephone, print, and broadcasting (Adams & Clark Pg. 29). The television is really only considered to be one medium. Another big aspect of this is that we can now not only receive information from the internet, but we can also send it out. This is something you cannot do right from your home on your T.V. So, now not only are everyday people the receivers of information, we can be the creators.

This leads me to the next important difference between the television and the internet. The internet is interactive. You can be in the driver’s seat. For example, you can change the channel on you T.V. but you are always going to have to watch whatever show it is you are watching the way they people who made it wanted it to be seen. You can’t interact with it and tell it you want to read an article about the show, or hear the director talk about it. With the internet you can do these things. You can start reading something and, then thanks to something called hypertext you can in one click start reading about something else that caught your attention in what you were reading before. When you are all done you can go right back to where you left off. For example, say you were reading something about the Beatles, and John Lennon’s name was in hypertext, you could click on it and start reading about his life, or see a picture of him, or even listen to his music. Then in that reading you see the man’s name who shot him in hypertext, you could click on that and start reading about him, then when you are satisfied you can go right back to where you left off with reading about the Beatles. I think this give you so much more power than just watching a T.V. Another way the internet is interactive is that Web sites can interact with you. So, for example, Amazon is a book store over the internet. It can give you suggestion on you next readings based on what books you have order and from preferences you put in to their system. As far as I know your T.V doesn’t give you suggestions on what you should watch next based on what shows you normally watch.

The Internet is also used to communicate. You can do this with E-mail, Instant Messaging, and even call people and speak to them while you are looking at them through you computer screen. It is very rare and expensive to your to use your television as a communication device. According to an article from Lancaster University It is a very complicated process that requires a large amount of equipment and money, especially for the newer video conferencing techniques (Lancaster 2008). Incorporated into the use of communication on the internet it also gives you a choice whether you want it to be synchronously or asynchronously (Adams & Clark Pg. 40). If you don’t want to speak directly to someone and have to give a comment back as so as you get one, you can use E-mail, which will give you time to answer back without it being instantaneous.

Another important aspect about the internet is that it is packet based (Adams & Clark Pg.41). This is something that the television lacks. Say if cable was running through 5 cities from one major distributor, and one of the towns in the middle was taken out, then there would be no way for the cable to reach the other cities, the internet conquered this problem by sending out information in packet based form. The information is actually sent out in packets so that in one of the points in the middle where taken out then the other locations would make up for it because they all received many other packets contain the information.








©Lancaster University. ( August 12, 2008) How The Video Conferencing System Works. Retrieved September 8, 2008 from http://www.lancs.ac.uk/iss/videoconf/how_it_works.htm

Adams & Clark The Internet as a communication medium