The tension underlying interactive television (TV) systems stems from the clash between interactivity as a communication model and TV as an organizing platform. Conventional TV is a communication system with an information-producing-and-distributing center and an information-receiving periphery. Interactive communication, on the other hand, is a catalyst for a power shift away from the center as the media are reorganized into two-way communication systems. The telecommunications firms, however, organize interactive TV following the conventional TV model because it is a historically familiar and successful economic model and an exemplary control mechanism for the production, distribution, and consumption of information. Thereby interactivity in interactive TV is reduced to mechanical query-response/request-delivery processes. Since interactive TV does not unleash the new liberties of communicative action offered by new technologies, the supposedly new medium is not really a new medium.

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While it is quite natural for us to be drawn to the new potentialities wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) represents, we should give pause and place it within its proper context and take a long-term view of the phenomenon. One of the repeated shortcomings of the research on new technologies has been that the researchers have time and again studied them in isolation. A new technology does not strike roots and grow on a virgin ground. Instead, it encounters a terrain marked by old technologies. The new technology's growth then is shaped not only by its own potentialities but also the opportunities and restraints created by the systems based on old technologies. In order to expand the perspective beyond Wi-Fi to those that preceded it, this paper draws on the framework provided by Infrastructure Development Model (IDM), which delineates eight stages through which infrastructure networks (railroads, telegraph, telephone, and others) typically go in their development, to study its emergence.

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