Net Effect

The posting of The Starr Report was the Net's Big Event,

This was supposed to be a column about the interactive advertising innovations that might arise out of last month's advertising summit sponsored by Procter & Gamble. But Kenneth Starr has gotten in the way of those plans.

As this went to press, it suddenly seemed inappropriate to be talking about mere ad models when the posting of The Starr Report on the Internet had quickly become the most significant moment in the Net's existence. (I know Another week, another major Net event.) Unwittingly Starr, Lewinsky, Tripp, President Clinton and the rest of the cast of characters in this sordid mess, had helped create a true made-for-the- Internet event, a perfect way to dramatize that it has a power unduplicated by other media.

In 1998, where else could one publish such a major document immediately; one that involved reams of hotly-anticipated text-replete with footnotes-but had none of the visual thrills of, say, man landing on the moon? As America Online's Bob Pittman asserts elsewhere in this issue, online is difficult to compare to other media, and thus attempts to cram it into an existing media box inevitably fall flat. For all any of us know, the sudden ubiquity of the Report changed the very nature of the public's response to the testimony itself.

One only had to observe what their associates were doing on the Friday afternoon the Report was published to see how true this was. There they were, dozens of people, backs hunched, in their cubicles, furtively scrolling through pages of text. It didn't matter that the pages weren't much prettier than what early users of the Internet routinely saw 10 years ago. The Net was where the action was.

While that image may conjure up thoughts of sad, futuristic isolation, and the demise of the communal "Where were you when . . . ?" of other national media events, this was something new, a communal mouse-clicking, if you will. After scrolling, in amazement, at the neat set of HTML links collapsing months' worth of scandal into an easily clickable database, my colleagues and I mused about what to click on first: "Section III, Part C-February 4 Sexual Encounter and Subsequent Phone Calls"? Or "Section V, Part E- Ms. Lewinsky's Frustrations"?

A colleague who called in from the sluggish provinces of 28.8K urged me to click on "Role of Betty Currie" and read him its contents. How relieved he was when I called him later to relay that the best way to get the document, late on this Friday afternoon, was to access it through the BBC Web site.

Would it really have been the same experience had the Internet not existed, and if instead, all of us had been able to read the Report in full, in the next day's New York Times? For one, the very convenience of accessing it with a few mouse clicks, through T1-speed Net access available in offices everywhere, probably increased its readership, resulting in a more vocal response from the millions who read it.

No, newspapers-even those who chose to print the Report in its entirety-couldn't compete. The print version that landed on my sofa, courtesy of the Times, less than 24 hours after its Internet release, bad taken on the role of a kinky commemorative edition rather than a must-read.

And newspapers weren't equipped to keep pace with ongoing developments in the story. How could they respond adequately to the 70-odd page rebuttal to the Report that came from the White House? Should they keep printing special sections, filling them with house ads because no advertiser wanted to get close to the content? On the Internet, the challenge posed by the rebuttal was all made simple-it was easily posted in its entirety, on most sites only one click away from the Report itself. A perfect pairing of point and counterpoint.

Of course, the Net even proved - that it can be a better place to publish salacious content despite its sometimes reputation as an online porn shop. While Net users had a number of parental controls at their disposal, print readers may have had to stuff the dreaded document under their mattress until the children were asleep.

But all these thoughts about the impact the posting of The Starr Report had on the Internet, and on us, are only observations. We can only observe Congress pouring the document onto the Internet, and watch what the act unleashes on computer monitors all over the world. As with TV, the Internet may prove to be another medium with a vast, yet ultimately unknowable, influence.

COPYRIGHT 1998 BPI Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group