The Internet as Mass Medium

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 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.
It 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.

Viewing the Internet as Mass Medium

Producers and audiences on the Internet can be grouped generally into four categories: (a) one-to-one asynchronous communication, such as E-mail; (b) many-to-many asynchronous communication, such as Usenet, electronic bulletin boards, and Listservers that require the receiver to sign up for a service or log on to a program to access messages around a particular topic or topics; (c) synchronous communication that can be one-to-one, one-to-few, or one-to-many and can be organized around a topic, the construction of an object, or role playing, such as MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons and their various transformations as MOOs, MUCKs and MUSHs), Internet Relay Chat and chat rooms on commercial services; and (d) asynchronous communication generally characterized by the receiver's need to seek out the site in order to access information, which may involve many-to-one, one-to-one, or one-to-many source-receiver relationships (e.g., Web sites, gophers, and FTP sites).

Reconceptualizing the audience for the communication that takes place on the Internet is a major problem, one that becomes increasingly important as commercial information providers enter the Internet in greater numbers. To date, thousands of commercial sources have created home pages or gopher sites for people to access their services or information about those services. As of September 1995, search tools on the Internet turned up as many as 123 different U.S. newspaper services and more than 1,300 magazine services with distinct web sites. Some newspapers seem to be creating home pages to mark their place in cyberspace until their managers determine how to make them commercially viable. Others may be moving to the Internet out of fear of the electronic competition. Thus, it remains difficult to envision the future of traditional mass media on the Internet-who will be the audience, how will that audience access the information and entertainment services, and what profit might be made from the services?

A parallel question investigates the impact of Internet communication on the audience. Mass communications researchers will want to examine information-seeking and knowledge gaps as well as a range of uses-and-gratifications-based questions concerning the audience. Since the Internet is also being used for entertainment as well as information, effects researchers will want to know whether the Internet is a functional equivalent of other entertainment media and whether there are negative effects in the distribution of pornography and verbal attacks (e.g., flaming and virtual rapes) on members of the audience. There are also questions of audience addiction to certain types of Internet communication and entertainment.

When the uses of the Internet as a mass medium are explored, questions arise about the nature of its communicative content. As commercial providers increase on the Internet, and more political information is provided, the problem of who sets the agenda for the new medium also becomes a concern.

Credibility is another issue with mass media. Traditional mass media make certain claims about the veracity of their information. The Internet makes few such claims at the moment, and it is possible that the concept of credibility will also change as a result. Recently, on a feminist newsnet group, an individual began to post what appeared to be off-base comments to a serious discussion of feminist issues. Several days later it was determined that "Mike" was a computer-generated personage and not a real contributor to the discussion at all. At present there is no way to know when the Mikes on the Internet are even real, let alone credible. Consequently, we wish to underscore the fundamental importance of this issue.

Traditional mass media have addressed the issue within their organizations, hiring editors and fact checkers to determine what information is accurate. Source credibility will vary on the Internet, with commercial media sites carrying relatively more credibility and unknown sources carrying less. A much greater burden will be placed on the user to determine how much faith to place in any given source.

Another question relates to the interchangeability of producers and receivers of content. One of the Internet's most widely touted advantages is that an audience member may also be a message producer. To what extent is that really the case? We may discover a fair amount about the producers of messages from the content of their electronic messages, but what about the lurkers? Who are they and how big is this group? To what extent do lurkers resemble the more passive audience of television sitcoms? And why do they remain lurkers and not also become information providers? Is there something about the nature of the medium that prevents their participation?

Other questions concern production of culture, social control, and political communication. Will the Internet ultimately be accessible to all? How are groups excluded from participation? Computers were originally created to wage war and have been developed in an extremely specific, exclusive culture. Can we trace those cultural influences in the way messages are produced on the Internet?

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.

Media richness theory differentiates between lean and rich media by the bandwidth or number of cue systems within each medium. This approach 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.

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, 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.

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

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. 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". 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.