ABSTRACT
Watching Rapture, one of the youth-oriented cable television channels available in the UK, provides one example of the convergence between technologies which has been much predicted but is now finally a reality. During part of the day Rapture shows music videos which take up only part of the screen. A section below is reserved for text messages, which can be sent in real time to an e-mail address or by mobile phone text messaging. In this way, television viewers can communicate with each other and comment on the video currently showing. In the same way, the Internet is beginning to look more and more like a television channel. During the first phase of its existence, in the 1990s, it was a textual environment with an increasing number of images. By the end of the 1990s that had changed, with the effect that the Web had become a moving, changing, noisy and often confusing place where stillness and permanence are seldom to be found.
