to see the
internet entirely shut down. It was, in fact, the US government,
concerned about the spread of pornography to minors and encryption
technology to rogue nations, that took more direct actions against the
early internet's new model of open collaboration.

Although many of the leaders and top shareholders of global media
conglomerates felt quite threatened by the rise of new media, their
conscious efforts to quell the unchecked spread of interactive
technology were not the primary obstacles to the internet's natural
development. A review of articles quoting the chiefs at TimeWarner,
Newscorp, and Bertelsman reveals an industry either underestimating or
simply misunderstanding the true promise of interactive media.

The real attacks on the emerging new media culture were not
orchestrated by old men from high up in glass office towers but arose
almost as systemic responses from an old media culture responding to
the birth of its successor. It was both through the specific, if
misguided, actions of some media executives, as well as the much more
unilateral response of an entire media culture responding to a threat
to the status quo, that mainstream media began to reverse the effects
of the remote, the joystick and the mouse.

Borrowing a term from 1970s social science, media business advocates
declared that we were now living in an 'attention economy'. True
enough, the mediaspace might be infinite but there are only so many
hours in a day during which potential audience members might be
viewing a program. These units of human time became known as
eyeball-hours, and pains were taken to create TV shows and web sites
'sticky' enough to engage those eyeballs long enough to show them an
advertisement.

Perhaps coincidentally, the growth of the attention economy was
accompanied by an increase of concern over the attention spans of
young people. Channel surfing and similar behaviour became equated
with a very real but variously diagnosed childhood illness called
Attention Deficit Disorder. Children who refused to pay attention were
(much too quickly) drugged with addictive amphetamines before the real
reasons for their adaptation to the onslaught of commercial messages
were even considered.

The demystification of media, enabled by the joystick and other early
interactive technologies, was quickly reversed through the development
of increasingly opaque computer interfaces. While early DOS computer
users tended to