Society online: the internet in context
Publication details: Thousand Oaks Sage Publications 2004Description: xxxiv, 350 pISBN:- 9780761927082
- 303.4833 S6
Item type | Current library | Item location | Shelving location | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
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Books | Vikram Sarabhai Library | Rack 10-A / Slot 341 (0 Floor, West Wing) | General Stacks | 303.4833 S6 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 155585 |
Internet communication began with a computer crash and unmemorable twaddle. The first attempted transfer of information packets in 1969 was not launched with the same portentous thunder as was Samuel Morse's first telegraph message in 1844 (“What hath God wrought?”). Rather, Charley Kline, an engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), froze his computer in 1969 when he began typing “L-O-G” (on his way to “L-O-G-I-N”) to start the file transfer program. Programmers fixed the glitch quickly, and the file sharing began.
E-mail did not come into being until 1971, and again there was no self-puffery in the inaugural text. Indeed, there was not even an effort to match the practical tone of Alexander Graham Bell's initial phone call in 1876 (“Mr. Watson, come here; I want you”). Instead, an engineer for a U.S. Defense Department contractor named Ray Tomlinson sent a test message from one computer to another that was sitting less than 5 feet away. He thinks the text was probably “QWERTYUIOP,” although he cannot remember for certain. It was a milestone moment that was not self-evident. Tomlinson did not think much of his lovely little hack that allowed people using computers at remote sites to write electronic notes to each other. Indeed, the one thing for which Tomlinson is remembered is that he picked “@” as the locator symbol in electronic addresses.
Soon enough, however, the extreme humility that characterized the dawn of computer network communication was replaced by an orgy of extravagant claims about the revolutionary power of the internet. The predictions from technologists, government leaders, entrepreneurs, the business press, and investment carnival barkers were voluminous and unsparing. No aspect of people's social lives, business arrangements, workplace culture, media power, civic engagement, or learning environments would be immune from the internet's radical influence. The cultural gatekeepers were fond of asserting, “The internet changes everything.”
The Pew Internet and American Life Project was born of the idea that these were testable propositions. Rebecca Rimel, president of the Pew Charitable Trusts, was struck by the fact that many of the debates about the impact of the internet were taking place without reference to data and basic social science research. She and the board of trustees of the foundation hoped that a research project could play a useful role in the disputes by providing nonpartisan facts and analysis about the social impact of people's internet use. The foundation provided generous support for a research agenda that would monitor Americans' use of the internet and focus on several aspects of internet use that were not major concerns of the many proprietary research firms that concentrated on e-commerce. Those areas of emphasis included how people's internet use affected their interactions with family, friends, and others; their involvement with various communities; their health care; their educational experiences; their civic and political lives; and their workplaces.
Much of the fruit of the Pew Internet and American Life Project's work is explored here, as are data from several other prominent research projects such as the General Social Survey (http://www.norc.uchicago.edu/projects/gensoc.asp), the HomeNet Study (http://homenet.hcii.cs.cmu.edu), the Survey2001 Project (http://survey2001.nationalgeographic.com), PoliticalWeb (http://politicalweb.info), and the UCLA Center for Communication Policy (http://www.ccp.ucla.edu). In the course of doing telephone interviews with more than 60,000 people during the past 30 months, the Pew project learned that internet use is helping Americans to share and acquire knowledge, make important health care decisions, deepen and extend their social networks, access cultural material, probe new corners of the planet, pursue their passions and hobbies, become more productive, gather up more consumer information, and entertain themselves more vividly. At the same time, we have learned that many users head in different “directions” online. Although Americans use online tools to connect to distant people and groups that share their interests, they also use those same tools to become more connected locally with the organizations and people in the places where they live. One overall message from respondents to our surveys was that the use of the internet is good for building new communities as well as for deepening existing relationships.
Of course, ties that bind can be helpful as well as harmful. For example, the same technology that helps those who suffer from rare cancers find each other and form life-enhancing support groups can just as easily be used by pedophiles to encourage each other and construct sophisticated rationales for their behavior. Not surprisingly, internet users have finessed the question of whether the internet is a good or bad thing. Their attitude can be summed up as follows: “I'm okay, they're not.” Wired Americans believe that their own use of the internet benefits them and is socially enhancing, although they worry that others may be doing ugly, criminal, perverted, or self-destructive things online. Worse, wired Americans worry that all of the temptations of the virtual world can lure the impressionable—that is, everybody else—to the dark side. This is one of the many reasons why it is so hard to make policy that addresses the wide range of internet-spawned concerns. People do not want their own access to internet information and services curtailed, but they hope that something can be done to keep others from harming the innocent or even themselves.
To a degree, those who think in these “me or them” terms are right. It is easy to spot in the Pew Internet and American Life Project's data that context matters a great deal in the way in which people use the internet and how they feel about it. Various groups of people—by gender, age, race, income bracket, educational level, locale, or experience level—use the internet in different ways. People take to the online world the things that interest and motivate them in the offline world, so the variety and meaning of their experiences on the internet reflect that diversity. Moreover, patterns of use evolve over time. The longer people are online, the more likely they are to venture into new activities, explore new relationships, and rely on the internet to help them complete crucial tasks or make major decisions. This highlights one of the major continuing lines of research by the Pew project: Internet use and the impact of going online are highly contingent on the rationale for going online and circumstances of each cyber venture. We know that for most people, internet use enhances, extends, and supplements what they do offline. However, we still have much to learn about what internet use displaces in people's lives and what it motivates them to do.
We are delighted that some of the scholars who have written for this volume have found our work at the Pew Internet and American Life Project to be useful. We hope that they are not alone. Our data and reports are available free of charge through our Web site (http://www.pewinternet.org). This seems to be the least that a project like this can do to contribute to the open source spirit of the internet's most fevered partisans. We hope that others will find new insights in our data that we ourselves have missed or will feel free to challenge our interpretations of what we have seen. Maybe the collective intelligence of this network of researchers will eventually produce a reasoned and fact-buttressed judgment about the impact of a communications era that humbly began with a computer crash and a message that read as if a monkey had been banging on a keyboard.
—Harrison “Lee”RainieWashington, D.C.
http://sk.sagepub.com/books/society-online
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