Internet and Social Life
Examining the Internet in Everyday Life[1]
Barry Wellman, Anabel Quan-Haase, Jeffrey Boase, and Wenhong Chen Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto
wellman@chass.utoronto.ca
www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
Keynote address (given by Barry Wellman) to the Euricom Conference on e-Democracy, Nijmegen, Netherlands, October 2002
Introduction As the Internet evolves, its users and uses grow and diversify globally. Internet use dramatically increased worldwide between 1995 and 2000.Today, approximately 55 percent of the North American population is online (Howard, Rainie, & Jones, 2002; Reddick, Boucher, & Groseillers, 2000). For a large proportion of the population of Internet users, Internet access has become a daily activity (Howard et al., 2002)[2]. There is less agreement, however, about how the internet has influenced different aspects of society. It is important to understand what the consequences of the diffusion and high use of the Internet are for people’s lives. We present evidence about how people use the Internet, how it fits into their everyday lives, and how it is influencing other aspects of community. Our special concern here is the impact of the Internet on the change in society away from groups and towards individualized networking. This change is not only occurring at the interpersonal level but at the organizational, interorganizational and even the world-systems levels. It is the move from densely-knit and tightly-bounded groups to move sparsely-knit and loosely-bounded networks. This more to networked societies has profound implications for how people mobilize and how people and governments relate to each other – in all forms of societies – but especially in democracies. Our Toronto-based NetLab has been especially interested in how the Internet has influenced people’s interactions: open in browser PRO version
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Do people communicate more because the Internet
Barry Wellman, Anabel Quan-Haase, Jeffrey Boase, and Wenhong Chen Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto
wellman@chass.utoronto.ca
www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
Keynote address (given by Barry Wellman) to the Euricom Conference on e-Democracy, Nijmegen, Netherlands, October 2002
Introduction As the Internet evolves, its users and uses grow and diversify globally. Internet use dramatically increased worldwide between 1995 and 2000.Today, approximately 55 percent of the North American population is online (Howard, Rainie, & Jones, 2002; Reddick, Boucher, & Groseillers, 2000). For a large proportion of the population of Internet users, Internet access has become a daily activity (Howard et al., 2002)[2]. There is less agreement, however, about how the internet has influenced different aspects of society. It is important to understand what the consequences of the diffusion and high use of the Internet are for people’s lives. We present evidence about how people use the Internet, how it fits into their everyday lives, and how it is influencing other aspects of community. Our special concern here is the impact of the Internet on the change in society away from groups and towards individualized networking. This change is not only occurring at the interpersonal level but at the organizational, interorganizational and even the world-systems levels. It is the move from densely-knit and tightly-bounded groups to move sparsely-knit and loosely-bounded networks. This more to networked societies has profound implications for how people mobilize and how people and governments relate to each other – in all forms of societies – but especially in democracies. Our Toronto-based NetLab has been especially interested in how the Internet has influenced people’s interactions: open in browser PRO version
Are you a developer? Try out the HTML to PDF API
pdfcrowd.com
Do people communicate more because the Internet
References: pdfcrowd.com (2002), The Internet in Everyday Life pdfcrowd.com Technology that Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being?” American Psychologist, 53(9), 1017-1031 [3] For details on the survey and previous publications see (Quan-Haase, Wellman, with, Witte, & Hampton, 2002; Wellman, Quan-Haase, Witte, & Hampton, 2001)