"flow" and the Web
One of the highlights of Monday's discussion for me was our talk about updating Williams's concept of "flow" for the Web. Our idea of a trajectory of flow may not make sense (that is, I don't think Williams thought there could be "more" or "less" flow -- for him planned flow was the defining experience of television). But if you can think of "more" or "less" flow, it seems to me that Web continues to follow the "flow" trajectory of television.
Technically, it was originally designed as a stateless communication system -- from the perspective of the Web provider (not the user) this is about the opposite of flow. But as things have evolved, more and more effort has been spent trying to add different sorts of state information to Web transactions. This continues to change the user experience. In historical Web lore, the first reason given for adding a mechanism for maintaining state was a "shopping cart" (see the first specification for cookies). You could make some of the same arguments Williams made about TV programs and commercials with Web sites and pop-ups. Now, even if YouTube is in some way the opposite of television because of the need to choose each program, multimedia applications have evolved to link programs in the UI (the way that Amazon suggests books, YouTube suggests clips). Also a variety of media (like streaming audio) on the web are already organized into channels that try to get you to listen continuously (like Digitally Imported). I think you could also consider Web "portals" and "dashboards" using Williams.
Small tangent making things more complicated: In the 1980s there was a flowering of research in communication about the "active audience" -- investigators found a variety of things going on when people were watching plain old 1980s television that suggested to them that thinking of television viewers as passive was misguided. These examples of being "active" ranged from biological processes in the brain to cultural strategies of interpretation. This is not a critique of Williams: for him I think flow was a matter of perception, not a process of specific neurons firing.
Even if it is provocative to think of the Web in terms of flow, the Web clearly isn't TV. An open question is: What is the "defining experience" (as Williams has it) of the Web?