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It does feel different, but I don't think it's the bandwidth, or even the availability. A newspaper is high bandwidth and fairly inexpensive and ubiquitous but also fairly high latency. The evening TV news was only once a day until the 80s. One big change I noticed was 24-hour news. Suddenly, it felt important to know about things immediately. The web was different because it was interactive--both in the sense that you could swiftly switch between information sources and then in the social media sense that everybody could participate, even if participation meant flame wars.

And historically, TV news isn't that old, especially the 24-hour variety. The Apollo landings and Vietnam War are often cited as landmarks in TV news, where for the first time large numbers of people watched things as they occurred. But it's only about 25 years from those events to Netscape Navigator, where the web became widely available (at least in the developed world). That's a long time in most people's lives, but I wouldn't be surprised if future historians will see TV as something like an early, one-way Internet.



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