In media theory circles it's axiomatic that a new communications technology is less significant for what it advertises as innovations than for what it effaces. To take the TV case, the earliest critics argued back and forth on the tension between television's educational and entertainment potential, but over time saw it as less important for the range of its individual offerings (among networks, among genres) than for its reorganization of social habits of attention. TV as a way of spending time (vs. the other possible ways) became the medium's defining characteristic. Not that this was necessarily bad -- critics bemoaned the loss of family "interactivity" occasioned by regular viewing, but it's not hard to discover occasional benefits to this displacement. Likewise the net, by adding to the reasons for sitting at a terminal, displaces other activities, whether or not these involve reading or the hunting and gathering of information.