The computer’s plasticity let it displace television in ways broadcasting never faced

Evidence

From the 1970s through the 1990s, despite various challenges and adaptations, television and its associated rituals would remain the primary, indisputably dominant harvester of human attention in the Western world. Few but a handful of futurists could see that a new claimant to attention was looming, all the while quietly gathering strength; fewer still could have imagined this force challenging the most powerful attention combine ever invented. For a long while, the third screen would not really even be in the game. It idled as one of those hobbyist novelties that had yet to find its commercial application, rather as radio did in its early days. But once it had developed its own ways of capturing our attention, the computer would hook us for good. As one might expect of a truly disruptive technology, those methods would be nothing one expected, and quite a different proposition from those of broadcasting or other media. The ambiguity of what the computer was for would remain a disadvantage for years longer than broadcasting had taken to prove itself. But that was perhaps because it could, potentially, do just about anything. That very plasticity would let it take audiences from television in ways other technologies could not. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 638

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Television’s dominance forced all later media to define themselves as alternatives to it — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 471