I wouldn't so much consider the internet even a medium of communication; it certainly is not of the same class as the print and even televisual media. The internet has placed information so close that its users might as well be there. At times the only noticeable different on the internet is that we haven't in fact developed technologies for encoding and exchanging smells, yet besides that, internet users can be anywhere at once in a way that truly necessitates a new category to its own.
Internet users are of course often at the abyss of a strange paradox: although they seem to be exposed to the grandest possibilities for learning and edification, they often end up spending hazy and forgotten hours dully following link after link in a semi-catatonic state. A similar outcome came out with regards to the television where people, given so many choices for learning and entertainment, spend their time idly flipping channels or watching outright clutter as well. An Onion article once mocked this idealism in one of their retroactive articles with a subtitle saying "'Drama and Learning Box' Will Make Schools Obsolete by 1970." Not surprising the television hasn't lived up to this.
The problem of both, or at least the reason that they both failed to use the ubiquitous knowledge encoded om the internet and air-waves to actually create a learned society is simply that they are both unfortunately unlimited. Internet users have uncountable links to follow and sites to visit; even on online encyclopedias, they are constantly barraged with new, semi-relevant links and cannot help but turn their concentration into a hazy browsing of everything they run across. When talking about brute information, more is not necessarily better, in fact most might be the worst. We apply that fact to pithy lectures and organized presentations, but when it comes to the internet we seem to have forgotten the soul of wit.
Strangely enough, one of the significant advantages of using the "old media" to inform one's self was that the data contained was strictly limited by necessity. Newspapers could only get so large and TV and radio report so long. On the internet, where there certainly exists more information as well as information less tainted by the biases of the owners of the old media, users can't make heads or tails of the colossal data dump and simply end up half mentally dead letting the internet's hypnotizing hyperlinks direct them to site sites whose text goes unread save the bold portions.
The problem is of course is that internet users have a form of the Paradox of Choice, they want to find the best information on the best site with the most appealing pictures and they can do well at finding more. The end result is that the arbitrary limits on the media of traditional print seems to make it all the more easy to manage. It originally seemed strange to me why people would buy PDF-readers for a full hundred dollars when a whole netbook would not be too much more; it hit me eventually that the good of readers is that they were less capable than fully functional computers in that the distraction of the internet and its accompanying diversions was eliminated. I found myself that once having bought a tablet on which web surfing was marginally more uncomfortable, my productivity in everything online increased, and I was reading, writing and working more.
But of course the internet maintains appeal because it tickles our sense for quantity and democracy, probably the two most powerful values in our current culture. The quantity of data, text, image, video and otherwise comes from that grand democratic appeal of the fact that the executive officer and the teen blogger are just as likely and able to throw their useless drivel on the internet.