Media of interactive communication, however, tend to be scarce in
advertising and rest on the time-charging of a communicative event, rent-
ing of telephone lines, renting of computer servers and storage space.
Conversely, the more broadcast media are provided ‘free-to-air’, the more
they feature advertising. Viewers are relatively tolerant of such advertis-
ing, but the same does not obtain for forms of broadcast that require pay-
per-view, such as cable TV and cinema. Consumers of pay-television and
time-charged pay-per-view media resent advertising in these contexts.
Cinema-goers arrive late at films in order to avoid lead advertisements,
whilst cable TV must promote itself as advertisement-free.^9 An example of
the indignation at receiving advertisements via a pay-per-use service
surfaced in Australia in August 2001, when the largest phone company,
Telstra, was investigated over charging customers for ‘spam’ messages.
The Australian Consumers Association demanded that all customers
should get a refund. A spokesperson for the Association, Charles Britain,
said: ‘I think it’s a bit rich. It’s a characteristic of spam and email that
people have to pay to receive what are essentially advertisements. We
don’t approve of that in the electronic mail domain and I don’t think it’s
a good idea with message bank or SMS [texting].’
However, as long as the commodity circuits of the two kinds of
medium are kept separate, consumers are generally content to participate
in both forms of commodification. In the context of the metro-nucleation
wrought by the culture industry, it is easy for Internet Service Providers
(ISP) to appeal to consumers concerning their interest in exploring an
expanded range of horizontal communication mediums. For a time-
charged fee, the ISP will electronically remove the cellular architecture
which divides individuals from others locked into the same system of
‘widely dispersed consumption points’. And of course the promise is that
it will do so more comprehensively than a telephone company can and
with much greater bandwidth. It is this feature which prompted Howard
Rheingold (1994) to speculate as to whether the Internet would be the
‘next technology commodity’ (60–1). Certainly, an inspection of those
dot.com stocks before the crash in the late 1990s would have had most of
us being readily convinced by Mr Rheingold.Understanding network communication in the context of
broadcast communication
As has been argued, the distinction between first and second media age is
a useful one to the extent that it suggests that ‘broadcast’ and ‘interactiv-
ity’ carry ontologically distinct forms of social tie, differences which are to
a limited measure clarified by the epochal distinction. Sometimes, post-
broadcast theorists glimpse the fact that this distinction need not be
historical (see Baym, 2000; Wark, 1999). McKenzie Wark (1999) suggests,The Interrelation between Broadcast and Network Communication 97Holmes-04.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 97