Social Network Structures and the Internet: Collective Dynamics i ...

Overlooked is the obvious fact that tons of information flowing on the Internet has become available by the efforts of people like us. Ever since the potential of the Internet as an advertising medium was recognized, it has been veiled that consumers often use computers to interact ultimately with other consumers—the social dimension of interactivity.

Not surprisingly, it has often been the case that when people study technologies, humans behind them are shadowed and forgotten—technologies are understood as self-standing entities with their own rules and wills, which is never true. As Poole and DeSanctis (1990) aptly criticized: “Objectification and decon-textualization conceal the social nature of technologies. Continually bombarded by such discourse, we forget that users constitute and give meaning to technologies” (p. 178). The actual value of a communication technology is not derived from its inherent functional characteristics, but from the ways people use it and attach meanings to it.

As Morris and Ogan (1996) appropriately put it, the Internet is “a multifaceted mass medium…[that] 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” (p. 42). In this networked environment, the boundary between mass-mediated and interpersonal dimensions of communication is blurred. In the traditional local social communities, people with whom individuals can communicate interpersonally are limited to those geographically proximate or with prior social relationships. However, the CME allows individuals to communicate even with complete strangers who are socially and geographically distant (Wellman, 2001).

The value of the Internet cannot be derived from its technological capacity itself, but from how people use the medium for their communication activities.