The face of your clock reads 3:30 AM. You are sitting on your couch wide awake with insomnia. Aiming your trusty remote control at the television, you flip past channel after channel in hopes that one will hold promise. After passing each channel several times, you decide to keep the TV set on the one channel whose sole job is to tell you, the viewer, what is playing on other channels. It too fails you. In a final act of desperation you change the channel to the 24 hour news station, but after half of an hour it begins to repeat itself with only subtle variations. It appears that the world does not change as fast as some people would like you to believe, at least not the world according to the television. And after all, what other world is available to you in the middle of the night? You finally give up and turn the damnable appliance off.
Which
Situation
Offers
You
the
Most
Control?
The face of your clock reads 3:30 AM. You are sitting on your desk chair wide awake with insomnia. Using your trusty mouse, you begin to run the web browser you have installed in your computer. You decide to visit the site of the well known 24 hour news station, to see what is happening in the world. Nothing worth in depth analysis at this time of the night, you think to yourself, and direct your browser to a search engine. You visit various sites, leaving traces of yourself wherever you go. With no real set agenda you begin by typing in your full name in the space allowed for key words. "Lets see how many me's are out there" you say to no one in particular. You may keep playing this game for a few minutes or until drowsiness returns, it doesn't really matter. If you tire of it, there are always other keywords to try, other games to play, and other sites to visit. You could even use the time to try to make sure you are never up this late again.

It is clearly evident that the you spending time with the television has much less control over her experience that the you using her computer. While a "well equipped and outfitted" television offers its viewer over one hundred (and possibly more) choices, the WWWeb offers its "surfer" hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of options. Undoubtedly, anyone who owns a television has said at one time or another "There isn't anything on." With the WWWeb however, there is always "something on."

However, the division between television and hypertext is becomming blurred. The development of Push technology has brought the WWWeb closer to the realm of television. Who knows what they future may bring.

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