| Chapter 2: | The Internet as an Object of Study |
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interpersonal communication, merging the structural differences between the two. In contrast to mass communication, there is a stronger focus on users; media consumption is replaced by active media use and one-way communication by interactivity, or two-way communication (Beck & Schweiger, 2001). And, in contrast to interpersonal communication, there is a medium-technology-network involved in the communication process that allows for all sorts of communication and information exchange, and, with the emergence of Web 2.0, integrates all other media into one common platform.
While compared to traditional mass media the Internet is still a relatively new medium and should be examined as such, it can be said to have passed the initial stages of both wishful thinking and overly critical discussion. For means of clarity, it should be noted that what is commonly referred to as the Internet is in fact the World Wide Web (WWW), accessed by means of a Web browser. The invention of Internet browsers can be seen as the turning point that made Internet use feasible for a mass audience and led to the ever increasing spread among the general public since the early 1990s (Featherly, 2003). In this context, however, not only the WWW was examined, but also email and possibly other forms of online communication between communicators and users. In this case, the term Internet was the most apt, as it includes all those different channels of communication and applications. In order to further grasp this medium, a useful metaphor has been put forth by Jones, who described the Internet as ‘a computer-mediated communication-system made up of computer-mediated communication systems’ (Jones, 1999, p. 22). Due to its vast size and inherently elusive nature, a single comprehensive definition of what the Internet encompasses is hard to establish (see Welker, 2002). However, it can certainly be constituted that the Internet offers unprecedented options of use and communication, which renders it different from other mass media.
For the overarching category of new media, however, Rice and Williams (1984) proposed a useful definition in noting that they ‘create a continuum between formerly discrete categories of interpersonal and mass-mediated communication’ (p. 62). It is exactly this merging of