The Internet—the newest in a series of major information breakthroughs—is of interest for sociologists in various ways: as a tool for research, for example, in using online questionnaires instead of paper ones, as a discussion platform, and as a research topic. The sociology of the Internet in the stricter sense concerns the analysis of online communities (e.g. as found in newsgroups), virtual communities and virtual worlds, organizational change catalyzed through new media like the Internet, and social change at-large in the transformation from industrial to informational society (or to information society). Online communities can be studied statistically through network analysis and at the same time interpreted qualitatively, such as through virtual ethnography. Social change can be studied through statistical demographics or through the interpretation of changing messages and symbols in online media studies.
Emergence of the discipline
All about: History of the Internet
The Internet is a relatively new phenomenon. As Robert Darnton wrote, it is a revolutionary change that however "took place yesterday, or the day before, depending on how you measure it." The Internet developed from the ARPANET, dating back to 1969; as a term it was coined in 1974. The World Wide Web as we know it was shaped in the mid 1990s, when graphical interface and services like email became popular and reached wider (non-scientific and non-military) audiences and commerce. Internet Explorer was first released in 1995; Netscape a year earlier. Google was founded in 1998. Wikipedia was founded in 2001. Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube in the mid-2000s. Web 2.0 is still emerging. Steadily, the amount of information available on the net and the number of Internet users worldwide has continued to grow quickly.
Research trends
According to DiMaggio et al. (2001), research tends to focus on the Internet's implications in five domains:
inequality (the issues of digital divide)
community and social capital (the issues of time displacement)
political participation (the issues of public sphere, deliberative democracy and civil society)
organizations and other economic institutions
cultural participation and cultural diversity
Early on there were predictions that the Internet will change everything (or nothing); in time however a consensus has emerged that the Internet, at least in the current phase of development, complements rather than displaces previously implemented media. This has meant a rethinking of the 1990s ideas of "convergence of new and old media". Further, the Internet offers a rare opportunity to study changes caused by the newly emerged - and likely, still evolving - information and communication technology (ICT).
Social impact
The Internet has created new forums of social interaction and social relations including social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace and sites such as meetup.com and Couchsurfing which facilitate offline interaction.
Though virtual communities were once thought to be composed of strictly virtual social ties, researchers often find that even those social ties formed in virtual spaces are often maintained both online and offline
There are ongoing debates about the impact of the Internet on strong and weak ties, whether the internet is creating more or less social capital, the internet's role in trends towards social isolation, and whether it creates a more or less diverse social environment.
Political organization and censorship
The Internet has achieved new relevance as a political tool. The presidential campaign of Howard Dean in 2004 in the United States became famous for its ability to generate donations via the Internet, and the 2008 campaign of Barack Obama became even more so. Increasingly, social movements and other organizations use the Internet to carry out both traditional and the new Internet activism.
Governments are also getting on-line. Some countries, such as those of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Myanmar, the People's Republic of China, and Saudi Arabia, use filtering and censoring software restrict what people in their countries can access on the Internet. With United Kingdom, they also use software to locate and arrest various individuals they perceive as a threat. Other countries, including the United States, have enacted laws making the possession or distribution of certain material, such as child pornography, illegal, but do not use filtering software. In some countries Internet service providers have agreed to restrict access to sites listed by police.
Leisure
The Internet has been a major source of leisure since before the World Wide Web, with entertaining social experiments such as MUDs and MOOs being conducted on university servers, and humor-related Usenet groups receiving much of the main traffic. Today, many Internet forums have sections devoted to games and funny videos; short cartoons in the form of Flash movies are also popular. Over 6 million people use blogs or message boards as a means of communication and for the sharing of ideas.
The pornography and gambling industries have both taken full advantage of the World Wide Web, and often provide a significant source of advertising revenue for other websites. Although many governments have attempted to put restrictions on both industries' use of the Internet, this has generally failed to stop their widespread popularity.
One main area of leisure on the Internet is multiplayer gaming. This form of leisure creates communities, bringing people of all ages and origins to enjoy the fast-paced world of multiplayer games. These range from MMORPG to first-person shooters, from role-playing games to online gambling. This has revolutionized the way many people interact and spend their free time on the Internet.
While online gaming has been around since the 1970s, modern modes of online gaming began with services such as GameSpy and MPlayer, to which players of games would typically subscribe. Non-subscribers were limited to certain types of gameplay or certain games.
Many use the Internet to access and download music, movies and other works for their enjoyment and relaxation. As discussed above, there are paid and unpaid sources for all of these, using centralized servers and distributed peer-to-peer technologies. Discretion is needed as some of these sources take more care over the original artists' rights and over copyright laws than others.
Many use the World Wide Web to access news, weather and sports reports, to plan and book holidays and to find out more about their random ideas and casual interests.
People use chat, messaging and e-mail to make and stay in touch with friends worldwide, sometimes in the same way as some previously had pen pals. Social networking websites like MySpace, Facebook and many others like them also put and keep people in contact for their enjoyment.
The Internet has seen a growing number of Web desktops, where users can access their files, folders, and settings via the Internet.
Cyberslacking has become a serious drain on corporate resources; the average UK employee spends 57 minutes a day surfing the Web at work, according to a study by Peninsula Business Services.
All about: Ajax (programming), ARPANET, Austpac, Berners-Lee, Bulletin board system, CYCLADES, Data communication, DCN, Digital divide, Dot-com bubble, E-mail, FidoNet, History of the Internet, History of the World Wide Web, Internet, Internet2, IBM Systems Network Architecture, ICANN, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, Internet capitalization conventions, Internet Engineering Task Force, Internet governance, InterNIC, Internet Protocol Suite, IPSANET, Len Kleinrock, Leonard Kleinrock, Mobile Web, National Physical Laboratory UK, NSFNet, Packet switching, Packet-switched network, PARC Universal Packet, RAND, Search engine (computing), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, Telenet, Tymnet, Usenet, UUCP, Web standards, World Wide Web, X.25, Xerox Network Systems
No comments:
Post a Comment