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Old Wednesday, June 08, 2011
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The quality and content of the sites on the Web are rated by companies such as Nielson. Ratings for a particular web site will not only consist of number of hits. Number of emails generated from the site, volume of postings at registered and related news groups and of course demographic information generated via questionnaires AND comments.

In a paper based on an in-depth Mosaic Group study of the state of the Internet in China and India (Folks,), comparison between the Internets in the two countries are based on six dimensions: pervasiveness (users, hosts), geographic dispersion(top-tier political divisions with POPs, number of cities with POPs), sectoral absorption (commercial, education, government, health), connectivity infrastructure (domestic backbone, high-speed access, exchanges, international bandwidth) organizational infrastructure (telecommunication competition, backbone competition, access provider competition, coordinating organizations) and sophistication of use. Factors such as illiteracy, language, government action and programs that encourage Internet penetration such as free-market purchase of PCs India etc are taken into account.

Marshall McLuhan (1960) wrote, "The advent of a new medium often reveals the lineaments and assumptions, as it were, of an old medium" The Internet is a multifaceted mass medium, that is, it contains many different configurations of communication. Its varied forms show the connection between interpersonal and mass communication that has been an object of study since the two-step flow associated the two (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944). Chaffee and Mutz (1988) have called for an exploration of this relationship that begins "with a theory that spells out what effects are of interest, and what aspects of communication might produce them"
The Internet plays with the source-message-receiver features of the traditional mass communication model. Internet communication takes many forms, from World Wide Web pages operated by major news organizations to Usenet groups discussing folk music to E-mail messages among colleagues and friends. Sources of the messages can range from one person in E-mail communication, to a social group in a Listserv or Usenet group, to a group of professional journalists in a World Wide Web page.

The messages themselves can be traditional journalistic news stories created by a reporter and editor, stories created over a long period of time by many people, or simply conversations, such as in an Internet Relay Chat group. The receivers, or audiences, of these messages can also number from one to potentially millions, and may or may not move fluidly from their role as audience members to producers of messages.

The various differences between the tradition communication media and the Internet as the modern medium of communication can be given as below:

Traditional Media
Print media
newspapers, books, magazines, pamphlets.
Many-to-many communcation, effortful, slow, expensive
Broadcast
television, radio
One-to-many, effortful, very expensive
Common carriers
Telephone, postal service
One-to-one, cheap, fast/slow, carriers provide communication medium not content
Internet Communication
Differences to traditional media:
Many-to-many communication ,Fast, cheap, interactive, global scale
Universal Access
Anonymity
Communication without linking personal, physical information.
Reproducibility
Communications (email, newsgroup postings) can be stored and perfectly reproduced.
Implications for notions of property and personal privacy:
Traditional notion of property associated with idea of control. Notion challenged by internet communication.
Traditional notion of privacy associated with short lifetime of our actions in restricted physical space.
Both notions challenged by internet

In their article entitles �The Internet as Mass Medium�, Merrill Morris and Christine Ogan of the Indiana University talk about the various communication theories as applicable to the e-media. In approaching the study of the Internet as a mass medium, the following established concepts seem to be useful starting points. Some of these have originated in the study of interpersonal or small group communication; others have been used to examine mass media. Some relate to the nature of the medium, while others focus on the audience for the medium.


Critical mass

This conceptual framework has been adopted from economists, physicists, and sociologists by organizational communication and diffusion of innovation scholars to better understand the size of the audience needed for a new technology to be considered successful and the nature of collective action as applied to electronic media use (Markus, 1991; Oliver et al., 1985). For any medium to be considered a mass medium, and therefore economically viable to advertisers, a critical mass of adopters must be achieved. Interactive media only become useful as more and more people adopt, or as Rogers (1986) states, "the usefulness of a new communication system increases for all adopters with each additional adopter" (p. 120). Initially, the critical mass notion works against adoption, since it takes a number of other users to be seen as advantageous to adopt.

For example, the telephone or an E-mail system was not particularly useful to the first adopters because most people were unable to receive their messages or converse with them. Valente (1995) notes that the critical mass is achieved when about 10 to 20 percent of the population has adopted the innovation. When this level has been reached, the innovation can be spread to the rest of the social system. Adoption of computers in U.S. households has well surpassed this figure, but the modem connections needed for Internet connection lag somewhat behind.

Because a collection of communication services-electronic bulletin boards, Usenet groups, E-mail, Internet Relay Chats, home pages, gophers, and so forth-comprise the Internet, the concept of critical mass on the Internet could be looked upon as a variable, rather than a fixed percentage of adopters. Fewer people are required for sustaining an Internet Relay Chat conference or a Multi-User Dungeon than may be required for an electronic bulletin board or another type of discussion group. As already pointed out, a relatively large number of E-mail users are required for any two people to engage in conversation, yet only those two people constitute the critical mass for any given conversation. For a bulletin board to be viable, its content must have depth and variety.

If the audience who also serve as the source of information for the BBS is too small, the bulletin board cannot survive for lack of content. A much larger critical mass will be needed for such a group to maintain itself-perhaps as many as 100 or more. The discretionary data base, as defined by Connolly and Thorn (1991) is a "shared pool of data to which several participants may, if they choose, separately contribute information" (p. 221). If no one contributes, the data base cannot exist. It requires a critical mass of participants to carry the free riders in the system, thus supplying this public good to all members, participants, or free riders.

Though applied to organizations, this refinement of the critical mass theory is a useful way of thinking about Listserv, electronic bulletin boards, Usenet groups, and other Internet services, where participants must hold up their end of the process through written contributions.

Each of these specific Internet services can be viewed as we do specific television stations, small town newspapers, or special interest magazines. None of these may reach a strictly mass audience, but in conjunction with all the other stations, newspapers, and magazines distributed in the country, they constitute mass media categories. So the Internet itself would be considered the mass medium, while the individual sites and services are the components of which this medium is comprised.

Interactivity

This concept has been assumed to be a natural attribute of interpersonal communication, but, as explicated by Rafaeli (1988), it is more recently applied to all new media, from two-way cable to the Internet. From Rafaeli's perspective, the most useful basis of inquiry for interactivity would be one grounded in responsiveness. Rafaeli's definition of interactivity "recognizes three pertinent levels: two-way (noninteractive) communication, reactive (or quasi-interactive) communication, and fully interactive communication" (1988, p. 119). Anyone working to conceptualize Internet communication would do well to draw on this variable and follow Rafaeli's lead when he notes that the value of a focus on interactivity is that the concept cuts across the mass versus interpersonal distinctions usually made in the fields of inquiry. It is also helpful to consider interactivity to be variable in nature, increasing or decreasing with the particular Internet service in question.

Uses and Gratifications

Though research of mass media use from a uses-and-gratifications perspective has not been prevalent in the communication literature in recent years, it may help provide a useful framework from which to begin the work on Internet communication. Both Walther (1992b) and Rafaeli (1986) concur in this conclusion. The logic of the uses-and-gratifications approach, based in functional analysis, is derived from "

(1) the social and psychological origins of
(2) needs, which generate
(3) expectations of
(4) the mass media and other sources, which lead to
(5) differential patterns of media exposure (or engagement in other activities), resulting in
(6) other consequences, perhaps mostly unintended ones" (Blumler and Katz, 1974).

Rosengren (1974) modified the original approach in one way by noting that the "needs" in the original model had to be perceived as problems and some potential solution to those problems needed to be perceived by the audience. Rafaeli (1986) regards the move away from effects research to a uses-and-gratifications approach as essential to the study of electronic bulletin boards (one aspect of the Internet medium). He is predisposed to examine electronic bulletin boards in the context of play or Ludenic theory, an extension of the uses-and-gratifications approach, which is clearly a purpose that drives much of Internet use by a wide spectrum of the population. Rafaeli summarizes the importance of this paradigm for electronic communication by noting uses-and-gratifications' comprehensive nature in a media environment where computers have not only home and business applications, but also work and play functions.

Additionally, the uses-and-gratifications approach presupposes a degree of audience activity, whether instrumental or ritualized. The concept of audience activity should be included in the study of Internet communication, and it already has been incorporated in one examination of the Cleveland Freenet (Swift, 1989).


Social presence and media richness theory

These approaches have been applied to CMC use by organizational communication researchers to account for interpersonal effects. But social presence theory stems from an attempt to determine the differential properties of various communication media, including mass media, in the degree of social cues inherent in the technology. In general, CMC, with its lack of visual and other nonverbal cues, is said to be extremely low in social presence in comparison to face-to-face communication (Walther, 1992a).

Media richness theory differentiates between lean and rich media by the bandwidth or number of cue systems within each medium. This approach (Walther, 1992a) suggests that because CMC is a lean channel, it is useful for simple or unequivocal messages, and also that it is more efficient "because shadow functions and coordinated interaction efforts are unnecessary. For receivers to understand clearly more equivocal information, information that is ambiguous, emphatic, or emotional, however, a richer medium should be used" (p. 57).

Unfortunately, much of the research on media richness and social presence has been one-shot experiments or field studies. Given the ambiguous results of such studies in business and education (Dennis & Gallupe, 1993), it can be expected that over a longer time period, people who communicate on Usenets and bulletin boards will restore some of those social cues and thus make the medium richer than its technological parameters would lead us to expect. As Walther (1992a) argues: "It appears that the conclusion that CMC is less socioemotional or personal than face-to-face communication is based on incomplete measurement of the latter form, and it may not be true whatsoever, even in restricted laboratory settings" (p. 63). Further, he notes that though researchers recognize that nonverbal social context cues convey formality and status inequality, "they have reached their conclusion about CMC/face-to-face differences without actually observing the very non-verbal cues through which these effects are most likely to be performed" (p. 63).

Clearly, there is room for more work on the social presence and media richness of Internet communication. It could turn out that the Internet contains a very high degree of media richness relative to other mass media, to which it has insufficiently been compared and studied. Ideas about social presence also tend to disguise the subtle kinds of social control that goes on the Net through language, such as flaming.


Network Approaches

Grant (1993) has suggested that researchers approach new communication technologies through network analysis, to better address the issues of social influence and critical mass. Conceptualizing Internet communities as networks might be a very useful approach. As discussed earlier, old concepts of senders and receivers are inappropriate to the study of the Internet. Studying the network of users of any given Internet service can incorporate the concept of interactivity and the interchangeability of message producers and receivers. The computer allows a more efficient analysis of network communication, but researchers will need to address the ethical issues related to studying people's communication without their permission.

These are just a few of the core concepts and theoretical frameworks that should be applied to a mass communication perspective on Internet communication. Reconceptualizing the Internet from this perspective will allow researchers both to continue to use the structures of traditional media studies and to develop new ways of thinking about those structures. It is, finally, a question of taxonomy. Thomas Kuhn (1974) has noted the ways in which similarity and resemblance are important in creating scientific paradigms. As Kuhn points out, scientists facing something new "can often agree on the particular symbolic expression appropriate to it, even though none of them has seen that particular expression before" (p. 466). The problem becomes a taxonomic one: how to categorize, or, more importantly, how to avoid categorizing in a rigid, structured way so that researchers may see the slippery nature of ideas such as mass media, audiences, and communication itself.
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