Article Summary: 'The Age of Permenant Net Revolution' By John Naughton

The key points of this article (published on Sunday 5th March 2006, The Observer) are:

• 1993 was when the world wide web took off.
• The Internet is a publication medium that contains more than 3,000 billion pages, which have been created in less than a decade.
• It is expected to be growing by 25,000+ pages an hour.
• Computer scientist John Seely calls new technologies as replacing new ones, "endism."
• Cultural critic Neil Postman proposed the notion of media ecology due to the interactions between new and old media being complex.
• The dominant organism is this system - grabbing most of the resources, revenue and attention - was broadcast TV.
• This transmitted content to billions of essentially passive viewers and listeners.
• However, the audience was fragmented, which led to broadcast TV being eaten away from within, by narrowcast digital television.
• The next stage is Internet Protocol TV (IPtv). This is television on demand, delivered via the Internet.
• However, broadcast TV will continue to exist for the simple reason that some things are best covered using a few-to-many technology, eg. a World Cup Final.
• The net and the web are NOT synonymous - the web is part of the net - the web is enormous, but is only one kind of traffic that runs on the Internet's tracks and signalling.
• Peer-to-peer network traffic now exceeds web traffic by a factor of between two and ten.
• Broadcast TV is a 'push' medium: it is created and then pushed down analogue or digital channels at audiences which are assumed to consist of essentially passive recipients.
• The web is a 'pull' medium: nothing comes to you unless you click on it and pull it down on to your computer.
• The switch from push to pull is a radical increase in consumer sovereignty.
• The emergence of a truly sovereign, informed consumer is thus one of the implications of an Internet-centric world.
• The underlying assumption of the old broadcast model was that audiences were passive and uncreative.
• This passivity may have been more due to the absence of tools and publication opportunities than to intrinsic defects in human nature.
• Many web pages (especially blogs) are merely vanity publishing with no discernible literary or intellectual merit.
• Blogging software gives every thoughtful, articulate and well-informed person the platform they need to express themselves.
• Flickr.com allows people to upload their photographs on to the Internet and allow the whole world to see them, allowing beautiful pictures that would have previously just ended up in a photo album or shoebox to be published.
• A recent report from the media regulator 'Ofcom' revealed that the number of people watching television has fallen recently - the first decline in popularity for almost a century.
• Ofcom also found that broadband connections rose to more than 10 million at the end of 2005.
• The prize for a company to have market dominance over on-demand Internet television will be huge, therefore many companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Sony are all fighting it out to develop the best product.