I was thinking about John Allsopp’s presentation at WE04, talking about the internet as a media. I think that calling the internet a media is incorrect, and to use the example of TV and radio, is like saying the electromagnetic spectrum is the media. It isn’t: what we plug into it is.

TV and radio were just waiting to be invented. What the discovery of the electromagnetic spectrum did was give them something to plug into.

Where I see the big difference is that the internet allows information to go point-to-point. The advantage over the electromagnetic spectrum is that the point can be anywhere that is connected, not just withing listenning range.

In 100 years, what will be the internet’s equivalent of what TV and Radio is to the EM spectrum?