| Chapter 2: | The Internet as an Object of Study |
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formerly distinct categories which makes new media such as the Internet harder to define and examine than traditional media. However, Welker (2002) developed a constructive differentiation of Internet communication options, relating to users, medium, and communicators, which may aid in further understanding of this continuum. Regarding the communication options, on the user side, he referred to form; for the medium, application and for the communicator side, content. Table 1 presents this differentiation in more detail and provides examples.
While the levels Welker distinguished are not always consistent—for example, using verbs for the user, technical differentiations for the medium, and specific content categories for the communicator—it is nevertheless useful to have a clearer picture of the communication options on the Internet. To formulate these options in a more coherent way, one could say that a distinction needs to be made between data use, data transmission, and data provision.
Coming back to the initial assertion that the Internet should be examined as the relatively new medium it still is, many researchers have argued that the exclusive focus on the uniqueness of the medium in a media environment as diverse, multifaceted, and convergent as the one we face today does not help to advance research in the field of communication (Huhtamo, 1999; Kim & Weaver, 2002; Sawhney & Sandvig,
Table 1. Data use, transmission, and provision on the Internet.
| Communication options | Examples |
| User side—form | Ways of use: surfing, chatting, online-shopping, information seeking, and so forth. |
| Medium side—application | Service, configuration, mode, based on software protocols: WWW, FTP, information transmission, and so forth. |
| Communicator side—content | Content that can be communicated: daily news, weather and travel information, information provision, and so forth. |
Source. Adopted from Welker (2002, p. 51).