The Internet and Social Life

The Internet is the latest in a series of technological breakthroughs in interpersonal communication, following the telegraph, telephone, radio, and television. It combines innovative features of its predecessors, such as bridging great distances and reaching a mass audience. However, the Internet has novel features as well, most critically the relative anonymity afforded to users and the provision of group venues in which to meet others with similar interests and values. We place the Internet in its historical context, and then examine the effects of Internet use on the user’s psychological well-being, the formation and maintenance of personal relationships, group memberships and social identity, the workplace, and community involvement. The evidence suggests that while these effects are largely dependent on the particular goals that users bring to the interaction---such as self-expression, affiliation, or competition they also interact in important ways with the unique qualities of the Internet communication situation.

The Internet is but the latest in a series of technological advances that have changed the world in fundamental ways. In order to gauge the coming impact of the Internet on everyday life, and to help separate reality from hyperbole in that regard, it is instructive to review how people initially reacted to and then made use of those earlier technological breakthroughs. Most traditional communications media, including telephony and television, are being reshaped or redefined by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as Internet telephony and Internet television. bba colleges in Indore Newspaper, book, and other print publishing are adapting to website technology, or are reshaped into blogging and web feeds. The entertainment industry was initially the fastest growing segment on the Internet. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking. Online shopping has grown exponentially both for major retailers and small artisans and traders. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries.

It is interactive: Like the telephone and the telegraph, people can overcome great distances to communicate with others almost instantaneously. It is a mass medium: Like radio and television, content and advertising can reach millions of people at the same time. It has been vilified as a powerful new tool for the devil, awash in pornography, causing users to be addicted to hours each day of “surfing” hours during which they are away from their family and friends, resulting in depression and loneliness for the individual user, and further weakening neighborhood and Community ties.

The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own policies. Only the overreaching definitions of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the Domain Name System (DNS), are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols are an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise. 

The author of this article is Assistant Professor, Pioneer Institute, Indore