- It is also possible to use broadband Internet for interactive datacasting
of televisual content, but as its only proven value is in delivering
video-on-demand, this value is limited by much smaller screens. - Other categories of Internet datacast, such as a simple broadcast email,
webcasting or bulletin board posting, are asynchronous as they are
mediated by the storage of media which are retrieved at indeterminate
and undirected times by the eventual audience. Nor do social expecta-
tions about Internet datacasting conform to any kind of appointed
regulation, unlike broadcast events.
Only when an Internet datacast is parasitic on already existing broad-
cast events does it have this quality. For example, when the Olympics
are being beamed around the world, mirror-sites on the World Wide Web
will assume a high visibility also. However, where Internet datacasts are
not paralleling media events, they will only ever have an irregular visibil-
ity. It is only when a datacast is itself reported in a broadcast that it will
acquire a visibility comparable to the form of media in which it becomes
known.^13
For example, as remarked above, it is impossible to become famous
on the Internet in any of its sub-media. The only persons who have
become famous were ones reported by the mass media as being popular
Net personalities. In truth, however, the reason why their web-pages have
received such attention is precisely the exposure they have had in broad-
cast. Fame on the Internet can only be ‘second-order’ fame which parallels
an audience that has already been constituted by a synchronous, highly
visible media event of some kind.
Gauntlett (2000) draws on an argument from Michael Goldhaber
that visibility on the Internet is reduced to an ‘attention economy’.
Attentionis a scarce resource (Gauntlett, 2000: 9). If a website does not
have ‘interesting content’, other websites will not link to it. However,
Gauntlett fails to explore what determines a site’s content as ‘interesting’.
He correctly points out that the amount of money backing a site is irrele-
vant to its popularity, but ignores the power of broadcast media in making
this determination. Thus he gives examples of ‘penniless’, ‘ordinary’ people
who are supposed to have accumulated large amounts of attention on the
Internet:To take a real-life example, Harr y Knowles – an ordinar y, hair y, twenty-some-
thing guy from Austin, Texas – has received much attention with his Aint it
Cool News (www.aint-it-cool-news.com), a website providing daily Hollywood
gossip and movie previews from a network of ‘spies’ (industr y insiders and
people who infiltrate test screenings). ... Knowles is now ver y well known
and much in demand. (11)There are numerous layers of Gauntlett’s discourse that can be unpacked
here to show that Knowles’ fame has nothing to do with the medium of
the Internet, but everything to do with broadcast.104 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-04.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 104