ABSTRACT
In this chapter we will open the question of whether the new medium of digitised information storage, transmission and broadcasting which we can designate as cyberspace, currently mediated by the hardware of the Internet and the software of the World Wide Web, will constitute or already constitutes a media revolution equivalent to the advent of printing and mass literacy. If so, this would have enormous implications for the understanding of how, in terms of Polanyi’s concepts of commitment and indwelling, probes and heuristics, new patterns of accessing and absorbing data affect our ability tacitly to integrate these elements into a coherent gestalt. We cannot escape the fact that media studies were in effect initiated by Marshall McLuhan’s claim that the advent of television was itself a media revolution comparable to the invention of writing or the spread of mass literacy due to printing. We must therefore make some effort to investigate the implications of the question of whether the cyberspace development is a continuation or a new beginning relative to the television era.
