The Internet has
become impossible to ignore in the past two years. Even people who do
not own a computer and have no opportunity to “surf the net” could not
have missed the news stories about the Internet, many of which speculate
about its effects on the ever-increasing number of people who are on
line. Why, then, have communications researchers, historically concerned
with exploring the effects of mass media, nearly ignored the Internet?
With 25 million people estimated to be communicating on the Internet,
should communication researchers now consider this network of networks[1]
a mass medium? Until recently, mass communications researchers have
overlooked not only the Internet but the entire field of
computer-mediated communication, staying instead with the traditional
forms of broadcast and print media that fit much more conveniently into
models for appropriate research topics and theories of mass
communication.
However, this paper argues
that if mass communications researchers continue to largely disregard
the research potential of the Internet, their theories about
communication will become less useful. Not only will the discipline be
left behind, it will also miss an opportunity to explore and rethink
answers to some of the central questions of mass communications
research, questions that go to the heart of the model of
source-message-receiver with which the field has struggled. This paper
proposes a conceptualization of the Internet as a mass medium, based on
revised ideas of what constitutes a mass audience and a mediating
technology. The computer as a new communication technology opens a space
for scholars to rethink assumptions and categories, and perhaps even to
find new insights into traditional communication technologies.
This
paper looks at the Internet, rather than computer-mediated
communication as a whole, in order to place the new medium within the
context of other mass media. Mass media researchers have traditionally
organized themselves around a specific communications medium. The
newspaper, for instance, is a more precisely defined area of interest
than printing-press-mediated communication, which embraces more
specialized areas, such as company brochures or wedding invitations. Of
course, there is far more than a semantic difference between
conceptualizing a new communication technology by its communicative form
than by the technology itself. The tradition of mass communication
research has accepted newspapers, radio, and television as its objects
of study for social, political, and economic reasons. As technology
changes and media converge, those research categories must become
flexible.
Constraints on Internet Research
Constraints on Internet Research
Mass communications researchers have overlooked the
potential of the Internet for several reasons. The Internet was
developed in bits and pieces by hobbyists, students, and academics (Rheingold, 1994).
It didn't fit researchers' ideas about mass media, locked, as they have
been, into models of print and broadcast media. Computer-mediated
communication (CMC) at first resembled interpersonal communication and
was relegated to the domain of other fields, such as education,
management information science, and library science. These fields, in
fact, have been doing research into CMC for nearly 20 years (Dennis & Gallupe, 1993; O'Shea & Self, 1983),
and many of their ideas about CMC have proven useful in looking at the
phenomenon as a mass medium. Both education and business researchers
have seen the computer as a technology through which communication was
mediated, and both lines of research have been concerned with the
effects of this new medium.
Disciplinary lines have long kept researchers from seeing the whole picture of the communication process. Cathcart and Gumpert (1983)
recognized this problem when they noted how speech communication
definitions “have minimized the role of media and channel in the
communication process” (p. 267), even as mass communication definitions
disregarded the ways media function in interpersonal communication: “We
are quite convinced that the traditional division of communication study
into interpersonal, group and public, and mass communication is
inadequate because it ignores the pervasiveness of media” (p. 268).
The
major constraint on doing mass communication research into the
Internet, however, has been theoretical. In searching for theories to
apply to group software systems, researchers in MIS have recognized that
communication studies needed new theoretical models: “The emergence of
new technologies such as GSS (Group Support Systems, software that
allows group decision-making), which combine aspects of both
interpersonal interaction and mass media, presents something of a
challenge to communication theory. With new technologies, the line
between the various contexts begins to blur, and it is unclear that
models based on mass media or face-to-face contexts are adequate” (Poole & Jackson, 1993, p. 282).
Not
only have theoretical models constrained research, but the most basic
assumptions behind researchers' theories of mass media effects have kept
them from being able to see the Internet as a new mass medium. DeFleur
and Ball-Rokeach's attitude toward computers in the fifth edition of
their Theories of Mass Communication (1989) is typical. They compare
computers to telephones, dismissing the idea of computer communication
as mass communication: “Even if computer literacy were to become
universal, and even if every household had a personal computer equipped
with a modem, it is difficult to see how a new system of mass
communication could develop from this base alone” (pp. 335-336). The
fact that DeFleur and Ball-Rokeach find it difficult to envision this
development may well be a result of their own constrained perspective.
Taking the telephone analogy a step further, Lana Rakow (1992)
points out that the lack of research on the telephone was due in part
to researchers' inability to see it as a mass medium. The telephone also
became linked to women, who embraced the medium as a way to overcome
social isolation.[2]
Rethinking Definitions
However, a new communication technology can throw the facades of the old into sharp relief. Marshall McLuhan (1960)
recognized this when, speaking of the computer, he wrote, “The advent
of a new medium often reveals the lineaments and assumptions, as it
were, of an old medium” (p. 567). In effect, a new communication
technology may perform an almost postmodern function of making the
unpresentable perceptible, as Lyotard (1983)
might put it. In creating new configurations of sources, messages, and
receivers, new communication technologies force researchers to examine
their old definitions. What is a mass audience? What is a communication
medium? How are messages mediated?
Daniel Bell (1960)
recognized the slippery nature of the term mass society and how its
many definitions lacked a sense of reality: “What strikes one about
these varied uses of the concept of mass society is how little they
reflect or relate to the complex, richly striated social relations of
the real world” (p. 25). Similarly, the term mass media, with its roots
in ideas of mass society, has always been difficult to define. There is
much at stake in hanging on to traditional definitions of mass media, as
shown in the considerable anxiety in recent years over the loss of the
mass audience and its implications for the liberal pluralist state. The
convergence of communication technologies, as represented by the
computer, has set off this fear of demassification, as audiences become
more and more fragmented. The political and social implications of mass
audiences and mass media go beyond the scope of this paper, but the
current uneasiness and discussion over the terms themselves seem to
indicate that the old idea of the mass media has reached its limit (Schudson, 1992; Warner, 1992).
Critical
researchers have long questioned the assumptions implicit in
traditional media effects definitions, looking instead to the social,
economic, and historical contexts that gave rise to institutional
conceptions of media. Such analysis, Fejes (1984) notes, can lead to another unquestioning set of assumptions about the media's ability to affect audiences. As Ang (1991)
has pointed out, abandoning the idea of the mass media and their
audiences impedes an investigation of media institutions' power to
create messages that are consumed by real people. If the category of
mass medium becomes too fuzzy to define, traditional effects researchers
will be left without dependent variables, and critical scholars will
have no means of discussing issues of social and political power.
A
new communication technology such as the Internet allows scholars to
rethink, rather than abandon, definitions and categories. When the
Internet is conceptualized as a mass medium, what becomes clear is that
neither mass nor medium can be precisely defined for all situations, but
instead must be continually rearticulated depending on the situation.
The Internet is a multifaceted mass medium, that is, it contains many
different configurations of communication. Its varied forms show the
connection between interpersonal and mass communication that has been an
object of study since the two-step flow associated the two (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944). Chaffee and Mutz (1988)
have called for an exploration of this relationship that begins “with a
theory that spells out what effects are of interest, and what aspects
of communication might produce them” (p. 39). The Internet offers a
chance to develop and to refine that theory.
How
does it do this? Through its very nature. The Internet plays with the
source-message-receiver features of the traditional mass communication
model, sometimes putting them into traditional patterns, sometimes
putting them into entirely new configurations. Internet communication
takes many forms, from World Wide Web pages operated by major news
organizations to Usenet groups discussing folk music to E-mail messages
among colleagues and friends. The Internet's communication forms can be
understood as a continuum. Each point in the traditional model of the
communication process can, in fact, vary from one to a few to many on
the Internet. Sources of the messages can range from one person in
E-mail communication, to a social group in a Listserv or Usenet group,
to a group of professional journalists in a World Wide Web page. The
messages themselves can be traditional journalistic news stories created
by a reporter and editor, stories created over a long period of time by
many people, or simply conversations, such as in an Internet Relay Chat
group. The receivers, or audiences, of these messages can also number
from one to potentially millions, and may or may not move fluidly from
their role as audience members to producers of messages.
Applying Theories to CMC
In an overview of research on computers in education, O'Shea and Self (1983)
note that the learner-as-bucket theory had dominated. In this view,
knowledge is like a liquid that is poured into the student, a metaphor
similar to mass communication's magic-bullet theory. This brings up
another aspect to consider in looking at mass communication research
into CMC-the applicability of established theories and methodologies to
the new medium. As new communication technologies are developed,
researchers seem to use the patterns of research established for
existing technologies to explain the uses and effects of the new media.
Research in group communication, for example, has been used to examine
the group uses of E-mail networks (Sproull & Kiesler, 1991).
Researchers have studied concepts of status, decision-making quality,
social presence, social control, and group norms as they have been
affected by a technology that permitted certain changes in group
communication.
This kind of transfer of research patterns from one communication technology to another is not unusual. Wartella and Reeves (1985)
studied the history of American mass communication research in the area
of children and the media. With each new medium, the effects of content
on children were discussed as a social problem in public debate. As
Wartella and Reeves note, researchers responded to the public
controversy over the adoption of a new media technology in American
life.
In approaching the study of the
Internet as a mass medium, the following established concepts seem to be
useful starting points. Some of these have originated in the study of
interpersonal or small group communication; others have been used to
examine mass media. Some relate to the nature of the medium, while
others focus on the audience for the medium.
Critical mass
This conceptual framework has been adopted from
economists, physicists, and sociologists by organizational communication
and diffusion of innovation scholars to better understand the size of
the audience needed for a new technology to be considered successful and
the nature of collective action as applied to electronic media use (Markus, 1991; Oliver et al., 1985).
For any medium to be considered a mass medium, and therefore
economically viable to advertisers, a critical mass of adopters must be
achieved. Interactive media only become useful as more and more people
adopt, or as Rogers (1986)
states, “the usefulness of a new communication system increases for all
adopters with each additional adopter” (p. 120). Initially, the
critical mass notion works against adoption, since it takes a number of
other users to be seen as advantageous to adopt. For example, the
telephone or an E-mail system was not particularly useful to the first
adopters because most people were unable to receive their messages or
converse with them. Valente (1995) notes that the critical mass is
achieved when about 10 to 20 percent of the population has adopted the
innovation. When this level has been reached, the innovation can be
spread to the rest of the social system. Adoption of computers in U.S.
households has well surpassed this figure, but the modem connections
needed for Internet connection lag somewhat behind.
Because
a collection of communication services-electronic bulletin boards,
Usenet groups, E-mail, Internet Relay Chats, home pages, gophers, and so
forth-comprise the Internet, the concept of critical mass on the
Internet could be looked upon as a variable, rather than a fixed
percentage of adopters. Fewer people are required for sustaining an
Internet Relay Chat conference or a Multi-User Dungeon than may be
required for an electronic bulletin board or another type of discussion
group. As already pointed out, a relatively large number of E-mail users
are required for any two people to engage in conversation, yet only
those two people constitute the critical mass for any given
conversation. For a bulletin board to be viable, its content must have
depth and variety. If the audience who also serve as the source of
information for the BBS is too small, the bulletin board cannot survive
for lack of content. A much larger critical mass will be needed for such a group to maintain itself-perhaps as many as 100 or more. The discretionary data base, as defined by Connolly and Thorn (1991)
is a “shared pool of data to which several participants may, if they
choose, separately contribute information” (p. 221). If no one
contributes, the data base cannot exist. It requires a critical mass of
participants to carry the free riders in the system, thus supplying this
public good to all members, participants, or free riders. Though
applied to organizations, this refinement of the critical mass theory is
a useful way of thinking about Listservs, electronic bulletin boards,
Usenet groups, and other Internet services, where participants must hold
up their end of the process through written contributions.
Each
of these specific Internet services can be viewed as we do specific
television stations, small town newspapers, or special interest
magazines. None of these may reach a strictly mass audience, but in
conjunction with all the other stations, newspapers, and magazines
distributed in the country, they constitute mass media categories. So
the Internet itself would be considered the mass medium, while the
individual sites and services are the components of which this medium is
comprised.
Uses and Gratifications
Though research of mass media use from a
uses-and-gratifications perspective has not been prevalent in the
communication literature in recent years, it may help provide a useful
framework from which to begin the work on Internet communication. Both Walther (1992b) and Rafaeli (1986)
concur in this conclusion. The logic of the uses-and-gratifications
approach, based in functional analysis, is derived from “(1) the social
and psychological origins of (2) needs, which generate (3) expectations
of (4) the mass media and other sources, which lead to (5) differential
patterns of media exposure (or engagement in other activities),
resulting in (7) other consequences, perhaps mostly unintended ones” (Blumler and Katz, 1974).
Rosengren (1974)
modified the original approach in one way by noting that the “needs” in
the original model had to be perceived as problems and some potential
solution to those problems needed to be perceived by the audience. Rafaeli (1986)
regards the move away from effects research to a
uses-and-gratifications approach as essential to the study of electronic
bulletin boards (one aspect of the Internet medium). He is predisposed
to examine electronic bulletin boards in the context of play or Ludenic
theory, an extension of the uses-and-gratifications approach, which is
clearly a purpose that drives much of Internet use by a wide spectrum of
the population. Rafaeli summarizes the importance of this paradigm for
electronic communication by noting uses-and-gratifications'
comprehensive nature in a media environment where computers have not
only home and business applications, but also work and play functions.
Additionally,
the uses-and-gratifications approach presupposes a degree of audience
activity, whether instrumental or ritualized. The concept of audience
activity should be included in the study of Internet communication, and
it already has been incorporated in one examination of the Cleveland
Freenet (Swift, 1989).
Social presence and media richness theory
These approaches have been applied to CMC use by
organizational communication researchers to account for interpersonal
effects. But social presence theory stems from an attempt to determine
the differential properties of various communication media, including
mass media, in the degree of social cues inherent in the technology. In
general, CMC, with its lack of visual and other nonverbal cues, is said
to be extremely low in social presence in comparison to face-to-face
communication (Walther, 1992a).
Media
richness theory differentiates between lean and rich media by the
bandwidth or number of cue systems within each medium. This approach (Walther, 1992a)
suggests that because CMC is a lean channel, it is useful for simple or
unequivocal messages, and also that it is more efficient “because
shadow functions and coordinated interaction efforts are unnecessary.
For receivers to understand clearly more equivocal information,
information that is ambiguous, emphatic, or emotional, however, a richer
medium should be used” (p. 57).
Unfortunately,
much of the research on media richness and social presence has been
one-shot experiments or field studies. Given the ambiguous results of
such studies in business and education (Dennis & Gallupe, 1993),
it can be expected that over a longer time period, people who
communicate on Usenets and bulletin boards will restore some of those
social cues and thus make the medium richer than its technological
parameters would lead us to expect. As Walther (1992a)
argues: “It appears that the conclusion that CMC is less socioemotional
or personal than face-to-face communication is based on incomplete
measurement of the latter form, and it may not be true whatsoever, even
in restricted laboratory settings” (p. 63). Further, he notes that
though researchers recognize that nonverbal social context cues convey
formality and status inequality, “they have reached their conclusion
about CMC/face-to-face differences without actually observing the very
non-verbal cues through which these effects are most likely to be
performed” (p. 63).
Clearly, there is room
for more work on the social presence and media richness of Internet
communication. It could turn out that the Internet contains a very high
degree of media richness relative to other mass media, to which it has
insufficiently been compared and studied. Ideas about social presence
also tend to disguise the subtle kinds of social control that goes on on
the Net through language, such as flaming.
Network Approaches
Grant (1993) has suggested that researchers
approach new communication technologies through network analysis, to
better address the issues of social influence and critical mass.
Conceptualizing Internet communities as networks might be a very useful
approach. As discussed earlier, old concepts of senders and receivers
are inappropriate to the study of the Internet. Studying the network of
users of any given Internet service can incorporate the concept of
interactivity and the interchangeability of message producers and
receivers. The computer allows a more efficient analysis of network
communication, but researchers will need to address the ethical issues
related to studying people's communication without their permission.
These
are just a few of the core concepts and theoretical frameworks that
should be applied to a mass communication perspective on Internet
communication. Reconceptualizing the Internet from this perspective will
allow researchers both to continue to use the structures of traditional
media studies and to develop new ways of thinking about those
structures. It is, finally, a question of taxonomy. Thomas Kuhn (1974)
has noted the ways in which similarity and resemblance are important in
creating scientific paradigms. As Kuhn points out, scientists facing
something new “can often agree on the particular symbolic expression
appropriate to it, even though none of them has seen that particular
expression before” (p. 466). The problem becomes a taxonomic one: how to
categorize, or, more importantly, how to avoid categorizing in a rigid,
structured way so that researchers may see the slippery nature of ideas
such as mass media, audiences, and communication itself.
