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CONTRIBUTORS Evelyn Ellerman, Centre for State and Legal Studies, Athabasca University, Athabasca, Alberta, Canada Jayne Gackenbach, Department of Psychology, Grant MacEwan College, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Joanie Farley Gillispie, Department of Behavioral and Biological Sciences, University of California, Berkeley Extension, Mill Valley, California Ben Goertzel, Applied Research Laboratory for National and Homeland Security,Virginia Tech, National Capital Region, Arlington,Virginia Mark Griffiths, International Gaming Research Unit, Psychology Division, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom Caroline Haythornthwaite, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois Magid Igbaria, School of Information Systems and Technology, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California Alicia Iriberri, School of Information Systems and Technology, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California Adam N. Joinson, Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom Jim Karpen, Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, Iowa Storm A. King, 21 Redstone Dr., East Longmeadow, Massachusetts Danielle Moreggi, PIR Psychology Department, University of New Haven, West Haven, Connecticut Anna L. Nielsen, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois Raymond J. Noonan, Health and Physical Education Department, Fashion Institute of Technology of the State University of New York, New York, New York Lorne Olfman, School of Information Systems and Technology, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California Joan M. Preston, Department of Psychology, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada xiii

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Conrad Shayo, Information and Decision Sciences Department, California State University, San Bernardino, San Bernardino, California Connie Varnhagen, Department of Psychology, P217 Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Heather von Stackelberg, Faculty of Arts and Science, Grant MacEwan College, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Laura Widyanto, International Gaming Research Unit, Psychology Division, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to begin by thanking Grant MacEwan College (GMC) and especially the Department of Psychology and the Grant MacEwan Faculty Scholarly Activity Fund. This fund provided a grant for a research assistant to aid in editorial duties associated with this book. The grant recipient, Heather von Stackelberg, read and edited every chapter of this book as well as worked on the permissions clearances and other administrative duties. She has also offered insights from her communications background throughout this process, for which I am very grateful. Thanks to Syracuse University graduate students Jason Pattit and Caterina Snyder Lachel for reading and commenting on part of this book. I would also like to thank my editor at Academic Press, Nikki Levy, for her support of this second edition of this book. Many others have contributed to and supported my interest in computers, the Internet, and video games, and they include colleagues (i.e., Russell Powell, Evelyn Ellerman, Brian Brookwell, Joan Preston, Storm King, David Lukoff, Steve Reiter, Harry Hunt, Richard Wilkerson, and Jill Fisher), students (i.e., Grant MacEwan College, Athabasca University, and Saybrook Graduate School), technical support staff (i.e., Grant MacEwan College, and Athabasca University), friends (i.e., Peter Thomas, Erik Schmidt, Wendy Pullin), and family (i.e., Mason Goodloe, Tony Lachel). Finally, I would like to acknowledge the eternal and special contributions of my children (Trina Snyder Lachel and Teace Snyder), mother (Agnes Gackenbach), and sister (Leslie Goodloe) without whose support and love no work could be accomplished.

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Introduction Jayne Gackenbach Department of Psychology Grant MacEwan College Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

To say the Internet has exploded onto the media scene in the eight years since the publication of the first edition of this book is a bit of an understatement. While pundits had many forecasts for the impact this new media would have in the late 1990s, many are still surprised at the rapidity and breadth of the integration of the Internet into contemporary society. Today, the Internet is no longer a unique medium, but rather the basic structure of nearly all media as they increasingly change and merge. Thus, today when we think about the Internet it is not only something we access on our desktop home computer, but also on our cell phones, pagers, PDAs, televisions, video game consoles, MP3 players, and any number of portable laptop computers. We expect to find wireless access to the Internet in airports, coffee shops, and malls and recognize that wireless access will soon become part of the invisible communication sphere which surrounds us now, much like access to TV, radio, and cell phones. But even the good old standbys of mass media, TV and radio, are changed due, in part, to the Internet. Now the late-night radio talk show we love but can not stay up for is available by podcast first thing the next morning when we turn on our laptop. Television shows are downloadable to our iPods and satellite radio can now be subscribed to and listened to in cars and online. So today when we talk about life online, the meaning of that is increasingly widespread across a variety of media vehicles. In 1998, one might have pointed out that although the Internet is exciting and offers much potential, it is a relatively “local” phenomenon.That is, it’s dominated by the United States. My, how times have changed in the eight years since the United States’ early development and domination! According to Miniwatts International (2005), as of November 21, 2005, the North American usage of the Internet is only slightly less than a quarter (23%) of the overall usage worldwide. Another 29% of the usage comes, not surprisingly, from Europe, while Asia, with the largest segment of the world’s population, also has the highest relative usage (34%). Since 2000, Miniwatts International statistics points out that although North America increased Internet use by about 100%, the rest of the world increased by almost 200%. But although usage is higher among the most populous area on the globe, penetration is 1 Psychology and the Internet: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Transpersonal Implications Copyright © 2007 by Academic Press. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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still highest in North America at 68%. That is, most households in North America have Internet access. In other words, the merging of media just described is still largely a North American phenomenon. The focus of the this book and its predecessor is psychological. We ask whether there are special psychological considerations both to using the Internet and to its effects upon the user. As before, answers to both of these questions are explored from three perspectives: intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal. The first chapter offers an overview from history, and is followed by several chapters in each of the three sections. Intrapersonal perspectives are addressed initially from a developmental perspective (Chapter 2), and then as a function of personality, gender, race, and culture (Chapter 3). The much puzzled-over phenomenon of disinhibition is revisited, followed by a chapter on online sex and Internet addiction. The interpersonal begins with an overview of the current status of computer-mediated communication research and then a look at virtual societies. The last two chapters in this section examine two online clinical concerns, self-help groups and therapy. The final section, unique to this book and rarely seen in other treatments of the psychology of the Internet, considers three transpersonal elements: virtual reality, the internet as Global Brain, and consciousness.

CONTRIBUTORS AND CHAPTER SUMMARIES With the rapid growth of research into use of the Internet in all walks of life since 1998, this original groundbreaking book on the psychology of the Internet has a new chapter added on children, with two previous chapters on self and gender combined into a single chapter. Some of the chapters have either entirely new authors or added or lost previous coauthors. However, in general, the original contributors to this seminal book have become leading lights in the area of psychology and the Internet over the eight years since it was originally published. Several have their own books out about the Internet and all continue to work online as researchers, instructors, entrepreneurs, consultants, and clinicians. What follows is a brief look at each of the chapters and authors in this volume. The first chapter, “The Internet in Context” is written by Evelyn Ellerman, chair of the Centre for State and Legal Studies and Program Director of Communication Studies at Athabasca University. She is interested in the effects of technological innovation on narrative and in the development of book culture in island nations of the South Pacific during decolonization. Ellerman offers a historical perspective for understanding the impact of the Internet in contemporary society. Relative to the first edition, Ellerman offers a more in-depth historical analysis with a cultural analysis of our relationship to machines. Not only does she draw a parallel between adoption of the Internet to the history of radio adoption as she did in the last edition, but she also examines how our society has come to understand and conceptualize the Internet by examining the metaphors used to describe it, and how they have changed over time.

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INTRAPERSONAL CONSIDERATIONS With this historical and cultural context, we examine the intrapersonal aspects of the Internet in the next five chapters. A developmental perspective is taken by Connie Varnhagen, who is a professor of Psychology at the University of Alberta. Her research is on how people interact with and learn from technology. Her recent work is on the search for and the critical appraisal of Web resources by children and adults. She is the author of Making Sense of Psychology on the Web,Worth Publisher, 2002, and numerous interactive Web resources and CD-ROM activities for learning about psychological principles and methods.Varnhagen examines various topics related to children being online. Following an examination of the use statistics, she considers how the Internet may be shaping children’s social development. She focuses specifically on areas of concern, such as exposure to pornography and predators, as well as how children bully and are bullied online. Finally, she offers the reader some helpful hints for helping children to navigate life online. The next chapter considers self and is written by this book’s editor, Jayne Gackenbach, and Heather von Stackelberg. Gackenbach is a professor at Grant MacEwan College in the Department of Psychology and an instructor in the Department of Communication Studies at Athabasca University. Gackenbach has written several online courses in psychology and communications, offered various workshops and presentations at professional conferences on the psychology of Internet use, and hosted and co-wrote a three-part documentary on the Psychology of the Internet for Canadian Learning Television. She is a coauthor of the forthcoming “cyber.rules” with Joanie Farley Gillispie for Norton. Her coauthor on the self chapter is Heather von Stackelberg, a writer / researcher who has recently finished a Communication Studies degree from Athabasca University, to accompany her BSc in Botany. As a freelance writer, she has written about health, natural history, and technology, and finds people’s varying reactions to change fascinating. She is currently a research assistant for the Associate Dean of Science at Grant MacEwan College. Gackenbach and von Stackelberg follow Varnhagen’s developmental chapter by considering how self online is affected by Internet use. They begin by briefly addressing how contemporary psychology thinks about self and turn then to a brief look at personality differences in online use, focusing especially on introversion and extroversion. Other personality characteristics are also considered. These Grant MacEwan College colleagues then examine self as a function of various demographics which have been shown in the developmental literature to contribute to the development of self: gender, race, culture, and socioeconomic status. Although the gaps between men and women, whites and people of color, industrialized and third-world countries, and rich and the poor are narrowing, the primary Internet use remains, to one degree or another, white men from the industrialized rich countries.

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The next two chapters in the intrapersonal section consider specific aspects of the intrapersonal domain: disinhibition and sexuality. Dr. Adam Joinson is senior lecturer at the Institute of Educational Technology, the Open University, UK. He completed a BSc (Psychology) at the University of London (1991) and a PhD (Social Psychology) at the University of Hertfordshire (1996). His research interests include self-disclosure on the Internet, survey methodology, and educational technology. He is the author of Understanding the Psychology of Internet Behavior from Palgrave, which came out in 2003, as well as articles on computer-mediated communication, online research methods, personalization techniques, privacy, and e-learning. His webpage is http://www.joinson.com. Joinson explains how disinhibition can lead to enhanced self-disclosure of both the positive and negative types. This author then considers several explanations for why disinhibition is observed so frequently online. The chapter serves as a cornerstone in understanding the psychology of Internet use, with the theme of disinhibition carried forward in many of the other chapters as well. A far-reaching discussion of sex online is undertaken by Raymond J. Noonan, Ph.D., who is an Assistant Professor of Human Sexuality and Health Education at the Fashion Institute of Technology of the State University of NewYork (FIT-SUNY) in Manhattan. He is also director of SexQuest /The Sex Institute, providing educational consulting in human sexuality and educational content for the World Wide Web (http://www.SexQuest.com/). Noonan was coeditor of the award-winning Continuum Complete International Encyclopedia of Sexuality (Francoeur & Noonan, 2004), to which he contributed the chapter “Outer Space and Antarctica: Sexuality Factors in Extreme Environments,” as well as numerous contributions to the chapters on United States, Brazil, and others. He was associate editor of volume four of the International Encyclopedia of Sexuality (Francoeur & Noonan, 2001), and contributed articles to Robert T. Francoeur’s three-volume International Encyclopedia of Sexuality (Francoeur, 1997). He was also coeditor and author of Does Anyone Still Remember When Sex Was Fun? Positive Sexuality in the Age of AIDS (3rd Ed.) (Anderson, de Mauro, & Noonan, 1996). After a rather extensive discussion from a systems approach of why sexuality is important to all levels of human activity, he focuses on its impact online. He surveys the history and diversity of sex online, followed by a consideration of online dating and blogs. The last chapter in the intrapersonal section focuses on when online use goes wrong. “Internet Addiction: Does it Really Exist?” is written by Mark Griffiths, who is a Chartered Psychologist and Europe’s only Professor of Gambling Studies (Nottingham Trent University). He specializes in technological addictions and has written extensively on Internet addiction and abuse. He has published over 155 refereed research papers in journals such as the British Journal of Psychology, British Journal of Social Psychology, British Journal of Clinical Psychology, Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Adolescence, Addictive Behaviors, British Journal

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of Addiction, Addiction Research, Journal of Psychology, and extensively in the Journal of Gambling Studies. He has also published two books, numerous book chapters, and has over 400 other nonrefereed publications to his name. In this chapter on Internet addiction, Griffiths updates his review of the research on Internet addiction. For the first edition of this book, his research had just begun. The reader will see that much has been done to identify the precursors, co-morbidity, and definitional issues. This author makes important distinctions among types of data collected and draws on case studies to distinguish between addiction and heavy use, with one being maladaptive and the other not.

INTERPERSONAL PERSPECTIVES The next four chapters consider the interpersonal perspective.What happens when we meet or work with others online? The first two chapters in this section review previous research into computer-mediated communications, both in general and, more specifically, in work teams. The last two chapters consider clinical applications: self-help groups online and online therapy. In “Revisiting Computer-Mediated Communication for Work, Community, and Learning,” authors Caroline Haythornthwaite and Anna L. Nielsen offer a comprehensive overview of research and reviews of computer-mediated communication literature. Caroline Haythornthwaite is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her major works include Learning, Culture, and Community in Online Education: Research and Practice (2004) from Peter Lang Publishers coedited with Michelle M. Kazmer, and The Internet in Everyday Life (2002) from Blackwell, coedited with Barry Wellman. Dr. Haythornthwaite is an active and much published researcher in the area of computermediated communication.Anna Nielsen is a doctoral student at GSLIS, with an interest in computer-mediated communication and online learners. Before psychologists “discovered” the Internet, communications scholars had been examining communications over computers for some years. This rich historical and contemporary overview is offered by these researchers with a focus on groups. They then consider how online and offline interactions can become better integrated, a particularly important point for online work groups. Taking a broader view of the interpersonal elements online is the chapter by Conrad Shayo, Lorne Olfman, Alicia Iriberri, and Magid Igbaria entitled “The Virtual Society: Its Driving Forces,Arrangements, Practices, and Implications.” The lead author on this chapter from 1998, Magid Igbaria, has passed away, but the coauthors agreed to update the chapter in his honor. The new first author is Conrad Shayo, who is a Professor of Information Science at California State University San Bernardino. Over the last 23 years, he has worked in various capacities as a university professor, consultant, and manager. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy

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degree and a Master of Science degree in Information Science from the Claremont Graduate University. He also holds an MBA in Management Science from the University of Nairobi, Kenya, and a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Finance from the University of Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania. His research interests are in the areas of IT assimilation, performance measurement, distributed learning, end-user computing, organizational memory, instructional design, organizational learning assessment, reusable learning objects, IT strategy, and “virtual societies.” Dr. Shayo has published research on these and other topics in various books and journals. Currently, he is involved in developing reusable learning objects and web-based learning game simulations. He is also a coeditor (with Dr. Magid Igbaria) of the book Strategies for Managing IS / IT Personnel. Lorne Olfman is the Dean of the School of Information Science and Fletcher Jones Chair in Technology Management at Claremont Graduate University. Lorne came to Claremont in 1987 after graduating with a PhD in Business (Management Information Systems) from Indiana University. Lorne also holds a Bachelors degree in Computing Science, a Masters degree in Economics (both from the University of Calgary), and a Masters of Business Administration degree from Indiana. Lorne’s extensive work experience includes computer programming, economic analysis of government airport policy, and computer model development of financial plans for a telecommunications company. Lorne’s research interests involve three main areas: how software can be learned and used in organizations, the impact of computerbased systems on knowledge management, and the design and adoption of systems used for collaboration and learning. He has published articles on these topics in journals including MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, and Information Systems Journal. Lorne has always taken an interest in using technology to support teaching and has been using the Internet to facilitate classes for more than a decade. A key component of Lorne’s teaching is his involvement with doctoral students. Lorne has supervised 35 students to completion. Lorne is an active member of the Information Science community. He regularly reviews papers for journals and conferences, and was in consecutive years the program chair and general chair of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Computer Personnel Research. He also coordinated mini-tracks of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences for 10 years. Alicia Iriberri is a Doctoral Student at the School of Information Science, Claremont Graduate University. Her research interests are User Interface Design, Computer Ethics and Virtual Communities. Currently, she is working on her dissertation and is involved in supporting various virtual communities in Claremont and Pomona. These authors take a wide-ranging view of social life online ranging from politics and economic considerations to weblogs and virtual work teams. They then consider issues that are emerging for the new virtual society. They note that “in this chapter, we examine the driving forces behind the growth of virtual societies and discuss existing arrangements and practices at the individual, group, organization,

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and community levels. We also examine the implications of how people will live and work in societies where these arrangements and practices are widespread and mixed with face-to-face relationships.” The last two chapters in this section take a very different approach to interpersonal relationships online by examining two clinical issues, online selfhelp groups and online therapy. The authors of the first of these two chapters, “Internet Self-Help and Support Groups: The Pros and Cons,” are Storm King and Danielle Moreggi. Storm A. King recently finished his doctoral degree in clinical psychology at Pacific Graduate School of Psychology. He has been researching the value of online self-help groups and the psychology of virtual communities, specifically, the therapeutic value perceived by members of e-mail groups that function as self-help groups, since 1993. He has proposed innovative ways for psychologists to use the Internet with clients and to gain new insights into a variety of disorders. His 1996 article, “Researching Internet communities, proposed ethical guidelines for the reporting of results,” was one of the first articles to address the unique ethical dilemmas facing researchers who use Internet-archived text data to study the social impact of the Internet. He created and maintains a clearinghouse website for researchers interested in the psychology of virtual communities. Mr. King is a founding member and past president of The International Society for Mental Health Online. He has also published research on compulsivity in Internet gambling. His 1999 article, “Internet gambling and pornography: Illustrative examples of the psychological consequences of communication anarchy,” published in CyberPsychology and Behavior, is considered by many to be a seminal article in that field. He coined the term “Internet Enabled Pathology,” and introduced its use at the 2000 convention of the American Psychological Association and at the 1999 first annual convention of the Association of Internet Researchers. He is a member of the editorial board of the Mary Ann Leibert journal CyberPsychology and Behavior. He has coedited a special issue of that journal titled The Internet and Sexuality. His coauthor, Danielle Moreggi, is an Assistant Director of Counseling, PIR Psychology Department at the University of New Haven. After introducing the idea of selfhelp as actually mutual aid, they discuss its implication in a largely text-based environment. The authors then offer a list of pros and cons of both face-to-face and online self-help groups. They also consider distinctions between self-help groups and group therapy and its implications for the online environment. The final chapter in this section on interpersonal aspects of life online is by Joanie Farley Gillispie. Gillispie holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from the Fielding Graduate Institute with an emphasis in Health Psychology. Dr. Gillispie works from a systems and individual perspective. She holds a Professional Postdoctoral Training Certificate from University of California, Berkeley in Neuropsychological Assessment Screening and advanced training in Strategic Depth Psychotherapy. Dr. Gillispie is an independent practitioner, an Area Chair for the Behavioral Health

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and Social Sciences Department at the University of Phoenix, regional trainer in HIV prevention for the American Psychological Association, and forensic evaluator for the Board of Prison Terms and Juvenile Justice Systems in Marin and San Francisco counties. Her clinical work includes forensic assessment of disability in court settings and cognitive–behavioral treatment with individuals and groups. Dr. Gillispie teaches at the University of California, Berkeley Extension. Postdoctoral courses for professional licensure and continuing education in the areas of behavioral health and ethical decision making are among her areas of focus. As Area Chair for the Bachelor of Science Program at the University of Phoenix, Dr. Gillispie teaches in the Behavioral Health undergraduate department and in the Masters in Teaching Program. In October 2002, she received a “Teacher of the Year” award for excellence in teaching at the University of Phoenix, Northern California Campus. She has recently finished a book with Jayne Gackenbach for clinicians and teachers for Norton Publishers called “cyber. rules” and her website is www.drjoaniegillispie.com. In her chapter, Gillispie considers both professional and clinical issues with therapeutic online work. She points out that one does not have to do therapy online to be affected by this environment, as increasingly, clients are presenting with problems that are happening online or as a consequence of being online. Therefore, Gillispie argues that it is incumbent upon the clinician to become familiar with these issues.

TRANSPERSONAL ASPECTS The final three chapters in this book consider the transpersonal perspective on the Internet. While the intrapersonal perspective focuses on self and the interpersonal perspective considers relationship to others, the transpersonal perspective views the sorts of human experiences that transcend or go beyond the ordinary ones taken up by most of psychology. The authors of all three chapters discuss the Internet in the most general form. This includes the notion of the Internet as a Global Brain to the Internet as one form of electronically mediated virtual world and its implications for the development of consciousness. The author of the first of these three chapters is Joan M. Preston, who received her PhD from the University of Western Ontario and is a Professor of Psychology at Brock University. Her scholarly interests include visual and emotional processing in virtual reality, video games, and other media. Preston offers the reader a journey through Gibson’s theory of perception as it applies to mediated virtual worlds. She then explains how the perception of mediated worlds offers many experiences that are of the natural world with potential to offer insights and experiences into altered states of consciousness. She uses the virtual art of Char Davies to illustrate these concepts. The second of these three chapters is by Ben Goertzel, who writes of his work (personal communication, Dec. 30, 2005):

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In the time since 1998, I have mostly been working in the software industry, focusing on AI, bioinformatics, and the Internet, and I have also been pursuing research in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. An example of my practical Internet work is the ArrayGenius software released by my company Biomind, which provides online analysis of bioinformatics data and has been used extensively by the Center for Disease Control and the National Institute of Health. I have also edited a book called Artificial General Intelligence for Springer-Verlag, which was released in 2005, and have been working on three other books on AI theory that are likely to appear in 2006 and early 2007. Finally, since September 2005 I have been working on natural language processing technology at Virginia Tech in their National Capital Region Operation.

Goertzel outlines the basic ideas behind Internet as a Global Brain by drawing upon complexity theory and the online Global Brain study group. He goes on to connect these ideas to Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious. The last chapter in the book is also written by this book’s editor, Jayne Gackenbach, with Jim Karpen. Gackenbach’s background in the psychology of the Internet was noted earlier in this introduction but most of her professional life has been in studying the development of consciousness with a focus on lucid dreaming. To this end, she has edited or written four books on dreaming with two on lucid dreaming and has authored numerous chapters and articles on the subject. As well as serving as a past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and editing for 10 years a semiprofessional journal on lucid dreaming, her career hallmark was an invitation to present research into lucid dreaming to the Tibetan Dalai Lama1 at a conference in India on sleeping, dreaming, and dying. Her coauthor, Jim Karpen, is an Associate Professor of Professional Writing at Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, Iowa. His 1984 dissertation focused on the “digitized word” and anticipated some of the developments being seen today with the Internet. Over the past 12 years, he’s written hundreds of articles about the Internet that have appeared in newspapers and magazines and online. He holds an undergraduate degree from Maharishi International University, practices Transcendental Meditation, and has an ongoing interest in Maharishi Vedic Science and research on consciousness. In this chapter, Gackenbach and Karpen first explain why consciousness develops, or perhaps evolves, by drawing on both historical literature and contemporary research. They then review research on how video game play is certainly affecting attention in heavy gamers, and possibly the potential development of consciousness, with their discussions drawing on studies done on this subject by Gackenbach and colleagues. They conclude that although interactive technologies may be affecting the expansion of consciousness in this way, it is not a substitute for a fully balanced life.

1 Tibetan Buddhism considers the “lucid dream” a part of the process of the development of consciousness.

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The broad perspectives of the authors in this book add up to more than the sum of their parts. The psychology of the Internet, how it changes us both as individuals and as a society, as well as how it reflects us, is a rapidly growing and fascinating field. It is the hope of the editor and the authors that this book will expand the view of its readers, teach them something, and inspire them.

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CHAPTER 1

The Internet in Context Evelyn Ellerman Centre for State and Legal Studies Athabasca University Athabasca, Alberta, Canada

Introduction Our Collective Love Affair with the New— Inventing the Self Humans and Machines—An Ambivalent Relationship The Ambivalence Deepens And Now…the Internet Take a Lesson from Radio Studying the Net Summary References

INTRODUCTION The Internet has changed considerably from its early adoption by business and the general public as a means of locating and exchanging information. These days it is increasingly difficult to name a communication function that our email programs, web browsers, cell phones, MP3 players, and Internet games cannot perform. We are daily “wow-ed” and often “cow-ed” by the seemingly endless shapes this technology is able to assume. But whether delighted or dismayed, our individual and collective responses to the Internet fall into recognizable patterns conditioned by our historical relations to technology. This chapter examines these responses, which are grounded in events that occurred over 500 years ago, but which continue to shape our attitudes to innovation, our belief in individual freedom, and our uneasy relations with the machine. It also suggests that any critical perspective on the functions that Internet technologies have played (or might play) in the new media landscape must be informed by a clear grasp of communication history.

11 Psychology and the Internet: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Transpersonal Implications Copyright © 2007 by Academic Press. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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OUR COLLECTIVE LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE NEW Communication technology’s well-known ability to focus our attention on the present actually relies on a very old motif in western society. Neil Postman (1985) alerts us to the prevalence of this motif in his critique of television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman claims that the two most insidious words of the twentieth century are “Now … this.” Among other things, he warns us about the way modern media emphasize the present in order to deny history, connectedness, and cause and effect. He feels this insistence on the present dangerously short-circuits our ability to evaluate both the media and the information they convey. In other words, in a technologically induced “dumbing-down,” the mass media encourage us to absorb and react, but not to think. Whether or not we agree with Postman’s assessment of television as the cause and intellectual and social decay as the effect, most scholars in the field of communication would agree that the “now-ness” of the telegraph, the newspaper, the telephone, radio, television, and the Internet has indeed affected the way we think about and use them. Nobody, it seems, is interested in last night’s news or yesterday’s war. In fact, few can even remember last night’s news. And we all want (or feel obliged) to keep current. Postman blames this psychology of the contemporary on television, but historians of communication technology recognize that, far from being the purview of technology, now-ness is a common cultural motif that predates television by at least 500 years. Seeing “now” as a positive value and “then” as irrelevant is an important theme of European society that can be traced back to the close of the Middle Ages. It has its roots in medieval humanism, a rejection of the model for living that was developed by the Roman Catholic Church over a period of ten centuries. Humanists refused to live as though today were of no importance, as though the only goal of man should be the afterlife. In doing so, they opened the door to the study of contemporary society. The Renaissance, or cultural “rebirth,” that followed the Middle Ages fundamentally altered the way Europeans saw the world: their gaze changed. And when they focused on the world around them, the world of the now, they chose to see it as a break with the immediate past. They began to value not only the now, but the new. They thought of innovation as progress. This revolutionary emphasis on the life we know, rather than on the life we aspire to after death is the touchstone of the modern age. Like many new ideas about the world and man’s role in it, these ideas generated chaos. For the next two centuries, Europe suffered a devastating series of wars. People in Protestant and Catholic towns laid siege to one another; soldiers and mobs terrorized the countryside, blowing up and pulling down the symbols of power and belief belonging to the rival faith. Indeed, during this period, one can be excused for observing that it did not pay to own either a church or a castle; sooner or later, they were likely to be reduced to rubble.

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The pyrotechnics of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation eventually generated an intense desire for law and order. Many people were obsessed with taking this desire for peace, order, and decorum with them to a “new” place. By the mid-seventeenth century, the notion of “pure and undefiled” places and peoples was gaining prominence as a social and cultural ideal. Some people fled religious warfare and persecution to the so-called New World, where they established ideal communities. Indeed, they frequently inscribed their settlements with the word “new,” as if to ward off the excesses of the “old” world. Nova Scotia, New England, New France, New Orleans, New Norway, New Glasgow, New York … it is a long and idealistic list. Far from representing an historical anachronism, this proclivity of the inhabitants of the new world to seek for and, indeed, to mythologize the “new” is crucial to understanding the development and reception of the Internet and all its technological progeny. When first made available to the public, it was presented as a new way to store and retrieve information, then as a “pure and undefiled” place for the expression of free thought and, more recently, as the purview of the young. While thousands of people braved the vicissitudes of emigration to the clean and peaceful shores of the New World, thousands more stayed behind in the smelly, contentious “old” world, trying to improve it by rising above factional fighting. Taking part in the transnational exchange of “new” ideas was one way of doing this. The new sciences tried to find universal laws that would explain the natural phenomena of the observable world. New and more logical systems of thinking were developed. New and more natural ways of educating children were proposed. On the eve of the Industrial Revolution, then, notions of a better world had come to be associated with innovation and with knowledge.

INVENTING THE SELF When medieval humanists argued for the value of lived experience, they were really arguing for the value of the human. Rather than concentrating on abstract theological discussions, they preferred to study humans as part of the natural world, because they believed that “man is the measure of all things.” Their argument was given substance by the creation of the Protestant church, which formalized and gave authority to the concept of the individual. In effect, the Lutheran Church had eliminated a 1000-year-old function: the office of the priest. Individual believers could now communicate directly with God, without the intervention, or mediation, of a third party. However, with individual freedom came individual responsibility. At first, this was understood as a spiritual task. Without the mediation of a priest, the individual needed to develop a personal relationship with the divine. The starting point was learning to read the Bible oneself. Humanism encouraged each person to seek truth everywhere, not just in sacred texts. Sophisticated methods were developed

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for recording observations of both the external world and humankind. Eventually, this way of knowing the natural world, and humans as part of that world, came to be called the scientific method. It reified nature as constructed (and therefore knowable) and the individual as part of that construction. For example, medical discoveries about the circulation of the blood, especially about the heart as a kind of pump, led philosophers and scientists to describe the human body as just another kind of machine. Then, as now, people felt it necessary to define how humans differ from animals, indeed how humans differ from machines.Were humans just an assemblage of parts? Surely, animals lack a soul. Surely, machines lack the spark that makes humankind self-aware. When René Descartes proclaimed, “I think, therefore I am,” he was addressing this very question. For Descartes and many others since, it was this ability to be self-aware that defines the human. Indeed, it is a question that has persisted, as evidenced by the many fantasy and science fiction books, movies, and Internet games that continue to explore the interplay between the animal, the mechanical, and the human. We still worry, for example, about how much time we spend with certain machines—especially those that appear to think or communicate. Will the machine become self-aware as well? Will the human take on machine-like attributes and therefore become less human? Theories of the Internet as a global brain serve as catalysts for this centuries-old fear. Ever since the Renaissance, western society has explored the notion that awareness of self is, somehow, a human trait. Furthermore, it is a trait that must be tempered by some sort of self-control: conscience, for example. The eighteenth-century response to this question was that individuals could voluntarily impose moral obligations on themselves in the form of duty. In so doing, they demonstrated both their individual freedom from the mechanical laws of nature and their worthiness to partake in society. In other words, through self-awareness and self-control, humankind could transcend Nature. By the late eighteenth century, the dialectic between individual freedom and personal self-control would resonate throughout European society and the New World. The notion that humankind could have freedom of thought generated the notion that freedom itself was a human right which political states ought to respect and support. Laws were considered morally defensible if they represented the will of the people. The good citizen was therefore the person who accepted a moral responsibility to obey the laws formed by the majority. In the best of all possible worlds, this balance between freedom and responsibility at the level of both the individual and the state would sustain an enlightened society. These were the ideals that sustained both the American and French revolutions. But nowhere were they more finely tuned to the political than in the United States, where the coprinciples of individual freedom and collective responsibility were enshrined in a constitution. These ideals were associated with the printing press, the technology that helped to spread them throughout the American

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populace. A free and independent press became as much an ideal as that of the free individual. Today in the United States, this association between the technologies of thought and information and the intellectual and political freedom of the people is one of the most enduring conceptual links in the relations between humans and machines. When it works, it works very well indeed. The mythology of the Internet, for instance, echoes much of the mythology of America. Internet technologies are said to assist their users in maintaining personal and political freedoms, in seeking truth despite the obstruction of the powerful, in establishing and regulating their own democratic communities, and so on.

HUMANS AND MACHINES—AN AMBIVALENT RELATIONSHIP The Renaissance invention of the “self ” and the “new” supplies two components of the conceptual map for understanding society’s contemporary responses to the Internet. Over the last five centuries, in the New World, novelty and individual freedom have become deeply ingrained social values which, despite their desirability, must be balanced against society’s need for stability and control. Too much social change, too much individual freedom, can threaten social order. A consistent catalyst for tipping the balance between what society can accommodate and what it cannot is technological innovation. The third component, then, of this conceptual map for understanding our relations with the Internet is the relationship of humans to the machine. Jessica Wolfe (2004) describes the deeply ambivalent attitude of western society to its machines.We believe that machines can improve many facets of our daily lives. The signature machine of the Middle Ages, the mechanical clock, is a good case in point. Like the computer, the clock at first seemed to offer many useful services to society. Gimpel (1977) describes the effects of the clock on medieval society. Astronomical clocks provided accurate measurements of the movement of the planets, the sun, and the moon. They allowed scientists and technicians (or mechanics) to collaborate in predicting the movements of tides. They served as complex calendars for saints’ days and for movable feasts, such as Easter. As a secondary and somewhat revolutionary function, these clocks also told the time accurately and reliably. Mounted in towers situated in town squares, mechanical clocks ordered and dominated public and private lives just as the Church once had. The clock was a significant factor in facilitating the changed gaze of the Renaissance away from eternity toward the here and now. However, over the next two centuries, the mechanical clock assumed an unprecedented control over the human body. La Mettrie’s 1744 publication L’Homme-Machine compares the human body to an intricate machine that can be studied, controlled, and used as an instrument of power. In Discipline and Punish

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(1977), Michel Foucault writes that, in eighteenth-century France, a new concept of discipline developed. It was modeled on monastic life, which was organized by the clock into seven offices or times of worship. This new mechanical model of social control manifested itself in the reorganization of armies into many ranks and subranks, using clockwork-like drills, in new methods of prison surveillance, and in new forms of keeping records on human activity. Ordering and controlling soldiers and prisoners is one thing. But simulating God’s creative power is another. Our own contemporary concerns about computer simulation of human intelligence and the real world mirror those of eighteenthcentury Europe during the craze for automata, clockwork toys that simulated real human beings. Gaby Wood (2002) writes that these were no mere dolls, but lifesized humanoid machines mounted on stands and displayed to the general public in elegant showrooms. They were, in fact, precursors to the robot. The early dolls, such as the two “boys” created by Pierre Jaquet-Droz in Switzerland in 1774, played musical instruments, smoked pipes, sketched pictures, and wrote with quill pens. They rolled their eyes and appeared to breathe. The Droz dolls still perform once a month in Switzerland. At the end of each performance, their bodies are opened to reveal the mystery of life within—clockwork. Makers of such automata were often obsessed with making their dolls as lifelike as possible. De Vaucanson’s chess player, for instance, challenged human beings to beat him at chess; the machine rarely lost. But while its maker was alive, he experimented in covering his mechanical creations with real skin, and in trying to construct automata that could bleed (that is, containing real veins and arteries). Naturally, these machines generated awe for the wonders that mankind could create, but they also created anxiety. When Droz exhibited his dolls in Spain, he was imprisoned by the Inquisition for heresy. What would the Inquisition make of computers that can talk or that beat humans at chess? Of internet servants that “remember” your preferences in order to search for the best insurance prices for you? Never quite alive and yet never dead, eighteenth-century automata, or imitations of life, raised fundamental questions about what life was and about how it could be created. Could humans really create life from inanimate objects? And if they could, did they dare? Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, 2003) was written in the early nineteenth century while she was visiting Switzerland. Whether she saw the Droz automata or not, her novel about the creation of artificial life must be understood within the context of popular concern about the nexus between the human, the mechanical, and the divine. It is a concern that has never left us. Movies such as Terminator and Blade Runner and many other science-gonewrong movies of the twentieth century are the direct inheritors of this latent mistrust of technologies that approximate the human. In the twenty-first century, we have been inundated by such movies. Increasingly, inspiration for such movies comes from Internet games, especially those that “learn” the players’ moves in each

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round, so that the players “die” if they do not constantly learn how to “outwit” the game. Some movies, such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, simply make the game “come alive” by using flesh-and-blood actors to replace the computer-generated images of the game. Other movies ask complex questions about what is real and what is constructed. Will the virtual simulation become self-aware (Virtualocity)? Does the game really run through the bio-plug in a human’s back (Existenz)? Are humans really the creation of the Internet, merely supplying it with energy (The Matrix)? Such cultural products are a good barometer for social concerns. We may embrace Internet technologies, but we worry about how close we get to them and express our fears in cultural forms ranging from music to print to film. Nowhere is our ambivalence stronger than in the workplace. Ursula Franklin (1990) writes that the eighteenth-century fascination with regulating and controlling human bodies developed into “the factory system [which], with its mechanical devices and machines, only augmented the patterns of control. The machinery did not create them. The new patterns, with their minute description of detail, their divisions of labor, and their breakdown of processes into small prescriptive steps, extended quickly from manufacturing into commercial, administrative, and political areas.” (p. 60) The new division of labor in industrial society meant that people had less control over the product of their work and less control over their own bodies. The sense of individual power that had been generated by the notions of humanism had changed to one of powerlessness. It is common to lay the blame for this changing relationship between humans, progress, and technology on the Industrial Revolution. But, as Franklin points out, these changes were part of social patterns that had existed for centuries in Europe. She writes that, although “the eighteenth century exercised control and domination by regarding human bodies as machines, the nineteenth century began to use machines alone as instruments of control” (p. 62). To factory owners, machines seemed more predictable and controllable than people. They were therefore more than willing to eliminate those workers who could be replaced by machines and equally willing to force the remaining workers to work like machines.

THE AMBIVALENCE DEEPENS From the nineteenth century onward, the relationship between progress, technology, and the individual has become increasingly problematic. Despite the speed of technological innovation in the twentieth century, western society is still in love with the idea of now-ness; our vocabulary is fairly littered with terms such as breakthrough, groundbreaking, and cutting edge. As a society, we still treat the new as a break from the past; we still equate it with progress, and we still act as though

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progress will bring us a better world. We feel both a financial and moral imperative to embrace the new. But we are also haunted by the effects of the technology on the individual and society as a whole. We feel it divorces us from nature, that it prevents us from knowing ourselves, that it controls our lives. In The Spirit of the Web: The Age of Information from Telegraph to Internet, Wade Rowland (1997) writes that the more complex society becomes, the more necessary it is to develop methods of maintaining control. Communication and broadcast technologies are designed to do just that: they control people within a context of compliance. In all technologies of mass communication except the telephone, the Internet, and some forms of radio, the communication is organized in one direction, with only the illusion of contribution and control by the audience. Franklin agrees that technology in general and communication technologies in particular are not neutral, but catalysts for control. She claims that technology is usually introduced to the general public in two stages. In the first stage, the technology is an option for the wealthy, the specialist, or the enthusiast. It often appears to be liberating; its promoters claim that it will free users in some way or make their jobs/lives easier. There is frequently an attempt to make the technology appear “user-friendly” in order to calm fear of the new. User communities such as clubs and specialist magazines are established. In this early phase, the users who have chosen the technology feel a strong degree of control. Franklin uses the introduction of a range of technologies as examples of this process: the automobile, TV dinners, the sewing machine, baby formula, and the computer. The next phase in the introduction of new technologies is the introduction of infrastructure. As the new technology becomes more broadly accepted, its use becomes more necessary, if not mandatory. She points to the development of the sewing machine. In 1861, the sewing machine was advertised as a great liberator for women. No longer would they have to ruin their eyes handsewing their family’s clothing. Once employers realized the speed at which these new machines could accomplish the task, a factory system was organized, operating a sewing machine became a requirement for the seamstress, and the slavelike conditions of the garment trade were the result. In the second stage, people become “captive supporters of both the technology and the infrastructures” (p. 97). The infrastructures themselves, she writes, are developed so that the technologies are easier to use and so that people will “develop a dependency on them” (p. 102). Freeways are an example of infrastructures that support a dependency on the automobile. Franklin and Rowland remind us that the introduction of communication technologies has followed the general technological pattern outlined previously. From the telegraph to the radio to the Internet and CD-ROM, most communication technologies were developed first for military and then for commercial use. In most cases, governments have enabled, constructed, or maintained the distribution networks for these technologies in concert with a commercial monopoly (or at

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least a very restricted competitive field). They are therefore deeply implicated in the effects those technologies have on society, even though they may take pains to assume a neutral, or regulatory, distance from the technologies.

AND NOW . . . THE INTERNET The introduction of the Internet seems to follow the two-phase pattern outlined by Ursula Franklin. It was developed in response to a strategic problem posed to an American think-tank, the Rand Corporation, during the 1960s. How could government keep informed and maintain order in the United States after a nuclear war if conventional communication technologies were destroyed? The answer was to create a networked system with no central control, which was so redundant that it would not matter if part of it were destroyed. As a military response to the Cold War, Internet technology was the purview first of the army and then of the universities. In 1969, four universities with Defense Department contracts were connected to the network. By 1972, there were 37 nodes on the network. As the number of users multiplied, the network began to change. Originally designed as a computer-sharing network, the Advance Research Projects Agency, or ARPANET, had become a post office for personal messages and a conferencing center for researchers to discuss their work and collaborate on projects. The enthusiasm for this new system of long-distance communication was catching. People worked in their spare time to devise software that would make the Internet easier and faster to use. Since the early users were academics, their goal was to develop a free network with publicly shared information. Eventually, the network became so clogged with this university traffic that the military moved to a new network of its own. Despite the enthusiasm of gifted “amateurs,” the Internet remained a hobby of the philosopher-technicians of the universities until the 1990s, when its information-sharing and communicative functions attracted the interest of corporations and then of the general public. Now, most employees no longer have a choice in whether or not they use the Internet—it is a condition of work that they use e-mail and share files. As citizens, students, and customers seeking services from governments, schools, and corporations, they are increasingly directed first to online forms and resources. Paper alternatives are gradually being withdrawn. In short, if people do not participate in online activities, they feel excluded or powerless or, at the very least, out of date. Somehow, the revolution has passed them by. How do we understand what has happened to us personally and culturally since the introduction of the Internet in the 1990s? How do we balance our culturally conditioned attraction to the novelty of the Internet against the seemingly never-ending newness of the thing? There’s no rest from it: it continues to change. How do we measure the purported individual freedoms of the Internet against

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increasing external requirements to use it? Do we willingly embrace a technology that offers endless access to unorganized information, intimate psychological contact with millions of strangers, or health advice to technology addicts? One way to gain perspective on technological innovation is to examine its cultural context. Another is to review the documented ways in which governments and corporations introduce and legitimate new technologies. A third way is to discover how the innovation has been incorporated into language and consciousness. Just as the mechanical clock became the principal metaphor for the modern age, the Internet seems to exhibit a powerful hold on the language and imagination of the postmodern age. The degree to which a technology has affected the public imagination is evident in the kinds and numbers of stories that are told about it. They are an indication of its cultural strength. Legendary tales about early technicians and entrepreneurs are common to all technological innovation, but those about the “heroes” of the Internet are everywhere. Will they last? It is difficult to say. Among the many people involved in developing the printing press, we still remember Guttenberg; for the radio, Marconi; for the telephone, Bell. But who remembers the originators of television? We are all familiar, for example, with the success story of Bill Gates, who parlayed technical wizardry and ambition into a digital empire. Will his name be the one that remains? Perhaps. Because the history of the Internet is so recent, we can still retrieve endearing lore about the nameless male graduate students, for whom the early Internet was full of limitless opportunity for exercising individual freedom. By 1986, Usenet (Unix User Network) was so large and unorganized that network administrators tried to restructure it, separating serious academic discussions from casual chat. Administrators proposed seven functional categories: computers; miscellaneous; news; recreation; science; society; and talk. “The last of the groups, ‘talk,’ was designed as a repository for all the unsavory, salacious, politically incorrect, and socially psychotic newsgroups that has appeared like banana slugs among the Usenet flora” (Rowland, 1997, p. 303). Gathering this activity into one spot on the Internet was an indirect attempt to manage or censor the Internet. It didn’t work. Rowland writes that the result of the “Great Renaming” was a flame war. Users felt that any attempt to organize and control the medium violated its democratic and nonjudgmental character. Their response was to subvert the attempted reorganization by proposing two new groups under the rec category: “rec.sex” and “rec.drugs.” Although most users voted by e-mail to accept these two new groups, the Internet’s volunteer administrators refused to create them. In answer to this refusal, the dissenting users created “alt.sex” and “alt.drugs” themselves and, just to round things off, “alt.rock-n-roll.” It had become clear that no one had any real content control over this new medium. It’s a wonderful story with a “Wild West” tone reminiscent of New World passions for the “new” and uncontaminated.

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Will such stories survive in the popular imagination? How tied to American cultural ideals such as individual freedom and democracy are they? As the Internet loses its newness, as it matures into a regulated and somewhat tarnished vehicle for any number of private and public interests, will these narratives seem irrelevant? Will utility overcome idealism? There is no doubt that the Internet has produced its own heroic culture. But most of its users are not part of the privileged inner circle. How does the multiplicity of the Internet’s users understand the new technology in their midst? Language often holds the clue. New technologies borrow words and phrases from other aspects of daily life in order to describe their own character and function. When airplanes were invented, for instance, they were first understood as “airships.” This is the reason that planes are flown by “pilots” and “co-pilots.” It is why they have “captains,” “pursers,” “steward-esses,” and “navigators.” And it is why, when a plane rolls to a stop at an airport gate, it has “docked.” The Internet began by appropriating existing terms from other paradigms. Until the Internet, for instance, a word association game might have yielded the results contained in Table I. As a technology becomes more widely used and more culturally entrenched, it can become its own paradigm. Had we added the word “google” to our preInternet word association game, the audience response would likely have been “What?” Had we added “connectivity,” the response might have been, “Do you mean ‘connection’? ‘Connectivity’ isn’t a word.” Such lexical indicators can point the way to more general, guiding ideas about what a technology is and what it does. Once more, metaphor points the way. TABLE I Pre-Internet Word Association

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Word

Word Association

net browser navigate web Jeeves yahoo mail link server virus provider site worm crash

fishing shopper ship spider butler hooray letter chain waiter disease husband place earth plane

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The Internet is too new to have had the clear metaphorical impact on society that the mechanical clock had in Renaissance Europe. But we can discover how society has been trying to understand the Internet by analyzing the metaphorical hats proposed for it during its introduction to the general public. The first of these, and probably the most widely remembered, is that the Internet is a kind of highway that carries information. The life of this initial metaphor can be quickly and informally followed by employing the search term “Information Highway” AND “Internet.” For the purposes of this essay, the academic database, Expanded Academic ASAP was used. This particular database contains articles and chapters from newspapers and popular magazines as well as from scholarly journals and books across many disciplines, so it provides a broad range of public and professional perceptions of the new technology. The first published article addressing the Internet as an information highway appeared in this database in 1992. The following year there were 6 articles; in 1994, 114 articles; in 1995, 73 articles; then 40, in 1996. By 1999 (only seven years after its first appearance), the articles had dwindled to fewer than 6 per year, which remained the trend into 2004. Clearly, an initial use that had been envisioned for the technology was almost immediately rejected as inadequate. Nevertheless, “highway” was a metaphor that was easily understood. Titles from these articles play artfully on what a highway is: open road, busy signal, access, exits, gutter, trip, online lane, bypass, way station, maps, lights dim, fast lane, cyber-route. Articles located using this metaphor also muse on what the human experience of a highway might be: lurking danger, hitchhiking, roadblocks, death en route, potholes, new frontier, roadkill, blazing trails, stay off the highway, student drivers. Evidently, the information highway was perceived as an adventurous, yet likely dangerous, place to be. Most of the articles from 1994 address issues of capacity-building. They ask whether governments could raise the necessary money to build infrastructure and whether schools could keep up with the technology. In other words, the information highway metaphor seems to have been of most interest to institutions. It fit the parameters of their concerns over policy and program. It seems that, once the logistical problem of actually building the information highway had been solved, the term died. A second metaphor, that of “cyberspace,” coexisted with and outstripped “information highway” in its frequency of use. But it suffered an equally meteoric rise and fall in popularity. Beginning in 1993 with 13 articles and rising quickly to 97 in 1994, “cyberspace” balloons in popularity for the next 3 years, with 246 articles in 1995, 260 in 1996, and 183 in 1997. By 2004, the use of this metaphor had dwindled to 28 articles. Unlike “information highway,” which had its genesis in the administration of American president, Bill Clinton, the term “cyberspace” was the invention of novelist William Gibson. The term first appeared in The Neuromancer (1984, 1995). Heir to MIT experiments of the 1940s in cybernetics, the term “cyberspace” is evocative of an early reaction to the potential dangers of

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the Internet. In Greek, cyber means “control” and “space” provided a description of where the Internet might be found. In fact, the term “cyberspace” makes the highway metaphor look positively antiquated. Controlling this new space, where many unforeseen things were occurring, was a new concept. After the heady Wild West show of the early Internet, control seemed like a good idea. And control could be exercised across the full range of its users. Unlike “information highway,” the “cyber-” adjective is applied to almost every aspect of online activity: education, business, personal relationships, citizenship. On a grammatical level, the term can be widely applied because it is an adjective. However, it works as a metaphor because of widespread contemporary fear about the effects of the new technology. Every society needs to establish its level of comfort with individual freedoms, and early on in the history of the Internet, concerns were being voiced about how wild and free society could allow the Internet to be. The titles of the cyberspace articles indicate strong concerns with impending social and moral chaos: dissent, kiddie porn, losing souls, computer gambling, hack attacks, exposure. And they are redolent with phrases that indicate what to do about that chaos: crack down on dissent, First Amendment in cyberspace, disinfect computer bugs, self-appointed cops, intelligent decisions, regulating cyberspace. A preponderance of the titles contain the words “law,” “control,” “order,” and “regulation.” The third early metaphor for the Internet is “virtual.” The notion of the Internet as a technology that imitates reality seems to have occurred later than the first two. The number of articles on the “information highway” peaks in 1994–1995; and those on “cyberspace” in 1995–1996. Articles found using “virtual” AND “Internet” reach their peak in 1997–1998, although they surface in the early 1990s as do the other two. Even so, by 2004 the number of articles employing the “virtual” metaphor dwindles to 72. “Virtual” seems to have appealed to yet another need in the community of Internet users and with differing intensity. A total of 187 articles appears at the height of interest in the “information highway”; slightly more than twice that amount, 506, appear at the height of popularity for “cyberspace.” But, nearly double that number, 964, can be found at the apex of popularity for “virtual.” Which seems odd, since “virtual” is an unlikely candidate for a borrowed metaphor. By definition, it does not call up any associations at all. It may be that, with “virtual,” writers were beginning to find a metaphor that more cleanly described what the technology was actually like. This seems a reasonable assumption, since the overwhelming use of the metaphor in the database articles was for communication. That is, “virtual” connoted the ability of the Internet to provide “real-seeming” communication. Most of these articles concern themselves with the need for safe, effective communication and focus on such technical aspects of Internet communication as bandwidth and encryption. Prior to 2002, an interesting subset of these articles employs “virtual” to simulate the visual. Art galleries, museums, libraries, publishers, and schools use “virtual” in order to represent cultural artifacts or to guide students through visual

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experiences. After 2002, a number of education- and health-related articles appear but, by then, the metaphor was on the wane. Clearly, these three Internet metaphors had run their course by 2004 and no others seem to have taken their place. This is significant for the history of the Internet. Metaphors for technical innovation come and go. Their use indicates a need to understand a new and dynamic event. They remain in use until they feel outdated or inappropriate, or until the technology has become so familiar that it no longer requires perceptual aids to understanding. The history of communication technologies suggests that this “new” technology has taken its place in the long chain of innovation that stretches from the Renaissance to the present day.

TAKE A LESSON FROM RADIO The speed at which the Internet has developed has taken us by surprise. But it shouldn’t have; it has all happened before, with radio. We have forgotten, because we were too focused on the now-ness of computer technology. So, although Wade Rowland writes that the Internet is a “technology without precedent,” he actually devotes six chapters each to the radio and the Internet, making clear allusions to the parallel ways they have affected us as individuals and as social beings. By drawing our attention to the historical connections between radio and the Internet, Rowland tries to remedy the effects of now-ness. He argues that when we study the mass media, we must pay attention to the past, or seriously risk misunderstanding the social role of each new medium that comes along. If we look at the Internet, then, as a two-way, long-distance communication technology that is readily available to the general public, radio provides the first model of how such technology affects society.1 But when we study the early history of radio (when it was actually a two-way interactive medium), we discover an interesting fact: within 20 years of the invention of radio, infrastructures had been set in place to take control out of the hands of the average person. It had become the one-way technology that we know today. Although it is the boast of Internet users that they have so far resisted such attempts by government and industry and that, technologically, such control is impossible, the history of communication technology argues otherwise. Like the Internet, radio began as a communication tool for military use that soon attracted the interest of both commerce and highly trained enthusiastic amateurs. In Europe and North America, radio was used by the navy and the shipping industry for long-distance maritime communication. As with the Internet, the first users of this new 1 We will not consider the telephone here because long-distance telephone use was, for many years, both difficult and expensive for the average person. In addition, after the first few years of its existence, the telephone carried only personal and business messages, a much more restricted range than those carried by radio and by the Internet.

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technology were highly skilled young men working in privileged positions. And, also as with the Internet, the new technology soon developed a cachet. By 1908, it had become a subculture for boys and young men, complete with its own legends and heroes, its own jargon and conventions. Unlike the Internet, two-way radios were cheap to buy and easy to build for any young man with a little expertise and a few dollars. But otherwise, the parallels are remarkably similar. Radio clubs and magazines sprang up. Radio was seen as an adventure. In 1909, when the S. S. Republic was making its way along the American Atlantic coastline, it hit the S. S. Florida and began to sink; it was the ship’s wireless operator, Jack Binns, whose emergency signal saved the day. Jack Binns became an instant hero. The virtual nature of both media is important to note. At the turn of the twentieth century, the airwaves offered young boys and men an unlimited virtual land for exploration and adventure. When they tuned in, they never knew where they would be, what exciting discovery they would make, who they would meet, what strange events they would witness. They never knew when their turn would come to save lives. As with the Internet, the use of pseudonyms and the mode of delivery was a great leveler. Radio reduced age, race, and class (but not gender)2 to the one important qualification: enthusiasm. A community of worldwide radio users developed very quickly. But, almost as quickly, the airwaves became chaotic and crowded, even dangerous. It was difficult to ask anyone monopolizing the ether to give way to others. Each user felt he had the right to speak out as a citizen of the radio world. Whereas the Internet was originally meant to maintain government control after the disaster of nuclear war, radio was originally meant as a life-saving device after disaster at sea. But the irresponsible and uncontrolled use of it was often blamed for disasters like the sinking of the Titanic. Navies and shipping companies demanded that the airwaves be regulated and that the technology be forbidden to the general public. Bit by bit, regulations were imposed. Interestingly enough, the first blow to the independence of radio was struck with the declaration of war. During World War I, governments in Europe and North America reasserted their power over long-distance communication technology by forcing all civilian users to turn in their equipment as a security measure. After World War I, governments began to realize the commercial gain and political control that could be achieved by using radio. They worried about who could use the powerful medium and to what purpose, because radio also had considerable subversive potential. Then, as now, attempts to censor radio through government control varied. In Britain, private radio was outlawed and the responsibility for radio was passed to the post office, which regulated the telegraph and telephone systems. In Canada, private radio stations and networks were operated by newspapers, universities, railroads, and other commercial companies. The distribution system generally followed that developed by the telegraph companies and was therefore largely controlled by American firms. After the War, the Canadian 2 As with most technological innovation in communication, early development and use was a male pursuit.

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government became increasingly concerned about the threat to Canadian culture from predominantly American programming; so it instituted the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (the CBC), a public broadcasting system similar to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), but in competition with private radio. By the late 1920s, the twin forces of commercial greed and politics had turned radio into a one-way, heavily regulated voice of authority where the former users/ operators had become listeners/customers (for private radio) and listeners/citizens (for public radio). Time will tell whether the users of the Internet will suffer the same fate. But the social tensions between individual and corporate and governmental interests are already apparent. The now famous shutdown of Napster and the subsequent (re)negotiation of music rights on the Internet is a case in point. The exponential growth of the Internet amazes us, as though it were a single event in social history. But such rapid growth also has happened before. Despite governmental control over the use of two-way radio, ordinary people remained profoundly optimistic about the new medium. In the United States alone, 100,000 sets were sold in 1922; the next year, a half million (Babe, 1989, pp. 69–70). Like the Internet, radio was felt to represent the voice of the people. Radio became the main way that most people received their news. It was simply the fastest method of transmitting the news to the greatest number of people. (It probably still is.) What is more, people believed the news they heard on the radio. Radio news reports were often read right off the telegraph wire service, without the interpretation or editorializing that was common to newspapers. The medium began with small local stations employing young reporters, whose voices radiated enthusiasm and sincerity. When the airship Hindenburg crashed in 1937, the sobbing reporter cried, “Oh, the humanity!” as he broadcast live from the scene, and this had the immediacy of lived experience with which no newspaper could compete. Radio gave people in urban and rural areas equal access to information. Women could listen to it without leaving the home. Children could tune in after supper. People felt they had power in their ability to “surf ” the airwaves, changing from one channel to the next. Radio felt like the “people’s medium” long after local stations had been gobbled up into national networks and long after the invention of television. The strong attachment that many people now feel toward their involvement in Instant Messaging and MSN communities is a latter-day incarnation of this vox populi. The personal connection that people felt with radio was generated partly from the nature of the medium itself. The invisible “waves” were magical and frightening at the same time. Our reactions to the Internet today are not dissimilar. There is about the Internet, as there was about radio, an aura of the unknown and the forbidden. The virtual connections made between people and ideas impart an almost spiritual quality to both media. The many sites on the Internet devoted to religious and spiritual concerns are a testament to how strong this aspect of the Internet experience is. With both the Internet and radio, our imaginations are seduced by

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the notion of the intangible; we can reach out into the “ether” and construct any reality we want. Churches recognized this aspect of radio from the outset and were quick to broadcast sermons, educational shows, children’s hours, and choral music. To this day, churches have extensive radio networks around the world and are now equally active on the Internet. But, although radio might provide spiritual comfort to some, it was profoundly disturbing, even thrilling, to others. In the 1920s and ’30s, the virtual nature of radio complemented a strong parochial interest in spiritualism and the otherworldly. So, radio became a natural companion to the ouija board, the séance, and the substantial book trade in science fiction. Popular magazines in the 1920s are filled with articles about the frightening possibilities of radio. The comments sound remarkably contemporary. When we ask ourselves whether the Internet has become some sort of “global brain,” we participate in an intellectual paradigm that is nearly a century old. “We are playing on the shores of the infinite,” wrote Joseph K. Hart in 1922. “Man has his fingers on the triggers of the universe. He doesn’t understand all he is doing. He can turn strange energies loose. He may turn loose more than he figured on; more than he can control” (p. 949). Waldemar Kaempffert was equally in awe of the possibilities of radio: “You look at the cold stars overhead, at the infinite void around you. It is almost incredible that all this emptiness is vibrant with human thought and emotion” (1924, p. 772). Radio was connecting humankind to the cosmos. What if there were other voices out there besides our own? In 1919, Marconi himself had announced that his operators were picking up signals that did not originate on earth. Nicola Tesla and other scientists thought that signals might be coming from Mars. Articles such as “That Prospective Communication with Another Planet” (Tesla, 1919) in Current Opinion, “Those Martian Radio Signals” in Scientific American (1920), and “Can We Radio a Message to Mars?” in Illustrated World (Walker, 1920) give some indication of how radio was changing perceptions of the relationship between humans and the cosmos. The panic caused in the eastern United States by the 1938 Orson Welles’ broadcast of the “War of the Worlds,” a dramatized invasion of earth by Martians, was the culmination of radio’s two-decade flirtation with the ineffable. But this broadcast was also a turning point in the credibility of radio as a medium of truth. Welles had deliberately misrepresented science fiction as though it were a news report. Americans had been conditioned to listen to “news flashes” about invasions in Europe; some of them, therefore, believed the news flash about a Martian invasion. Welles had broken a truth convention and the ensuing public outcry revealed how betrayed the public felt. Today, we are ambivalent about the new people’s medium, the “Net.” When someone tells us, “I found it on the Net,” we are still powerfully compelled to accept and believe. On the other hand, we know that there are no guarantors of truth value for anything on the Net. In both cases, this diminution of truth value has affected the power of the medium to stand against “official” truths.

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But we can define “people’s medium” in other ways. When we link mass media with notions of democracy, we link the people with the notion of official truth. In Britain and Canada, and in the early days of state-supported RCA (Radio Corporation of America) in the United States, radio was welcomed as a tool for educating citizens in the liberal arts, in matters of health and hygiene, in history and politics. Radio presented its listeners with opera, folk music, popular music, and symphonies; documentaries, readings from history; short stories, poetry, and children’s literature; forums, speeches, sermons, and debates; fine drama and comedy; helpful hints and advice. In short, governments saw public radio as a cheap, effective tool for educating its citizens; in many remote locations, children and adults took their schooling over the airwaves. For governments, radio was also an excellent tool for strengthening both nationalism and acceptance of regional diversity; at home, radio could create a sense of solidarity against the foreign; abroad, it could bolster an empire. In Britain and in Canada, the BBC and CBC, respectively, were used for exactly those purposes from the 1930s onward. Today, governments share the Internet with individual citizens in providing useful information about its programs and services, in promoting national ideals, and so on. But there is no way of really knowing who has created any of the sites we encounter. In the U. S., where commercial radio quickly outmaneuvered public radio, the educational function of the technology was soon lost. Radio became little more than a medium of entertainment. This shift worried educators and government officials alike. Radio, after all, was in every home and no one could actually control what came over the airwaves. Now that more and more homes are connected to the Internet, similar concerns are being voiced about this new technology, especially about violent, pornographic, and hate sites that might affect young children. Educators then and now were worried that communication technology was producing an illiterate public who would rather give themselves over to mindless enjoyment than read a good book. In a 1924 article that could have been written yesterday about the Internet, an enthusiastic parent wrote “It’s Great to Be a Radio Maniac.” In it, he claimed that radio had made his son more informed and more manually dexterous. Radio “gave everyone the chance and the impulse to learn to use his brains.” Eventually, it would “level the class distinctions, which depend so largely on the opportunity for information and culture” (O’Brien, p. 16). In our own times, we are daily presented with the notion that the Internet will eliminate the traditional classroom and the need for teachers. Like so much in the history of communication technology, this prediction has a familiar ring. In Radiating Culture, Joseph Hart (1922) envisioned students galvanized “by a single inspiring teacher who speaks to the thousands of revived students through a central radio-phone. A whole nation of students might thus come under the stimulating touch of some great teacher” (p. 949). But the uncritical enthusiasm with which society first greeted radio soon gave way to grave doubts about its negative effects. After the rise of private radio in

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the United States, dozens of scholarly books were written, from the late 1920s into the 1940s, studying the ways in which the new technology was reshaping personal relationships, the structure of the family, the literacy of children, and the ability of people to think critically and express themselves clearly. We have only to pass by the shelves of any bookstore to see this whole process repeating itself with respect to the Internet. Belief in the ability of radio to improve political life was also short-lived. At first, people thought that a better informed public would demand that its politicians be sensible and accountable. In How Radio is Remaking Our World, Bruce Bliven (1924) argued that it was easy for a politician to take advantage of a crowd by appealing to its emotions instead of its intellect. But, the new medium of radio would prevent that, since people listened to radio as individuals. Listeners would therefore take the time to reflect. And since radio had so many channels, it was possible for people to hear many more politicians than they would in person; this would give them the chance to compare and contrast the messages before deciding with which they agreed. This opportunity to encounter information individually (and asynchronously) from multiple sites is also an argument for the democratic power of the Internet, if the medium remains as a free forum for all ideas. Even with these assurances, governments in the 1940s were nervous about the power radio seemed to have in swaying people’s voting patterns and about the access radio gave to unprincipled politicians and foreign powers. Could radio reshape its audience into an uncultured, unthinking mob that could be easily manipulated? In his book, Radio and the Printed Page (1940), Paul Lazarsfeld, one of the leading communication scholars of the day, outlines the real fear for American authorities. Nazi radio propaganda had essentially put Hitler into power during the 1930s in Germany; Nazi sympathizers were broadcasting from within the United States, and the American government was regretting its loss of control over radio at home. “By the grace of history, this country has been left time to solve some of the problems which have precipitated chaos in Europe. We ought to use this time to understand what social forces are operating and to adapt our thinking and our way of life to a greatly changed situation.” (p. xvii–xviii) Lazarsfeld’s observations are as salient today as they were during World War II. Examples of terrorist use of the Internet in the 1990s demonstrate yet again that anyone with an agenda can use communication technologies for subversive purposes. But, what is interesting to note about Lazarsfeld’s comments is that radio did not produce a nation of illiterate zombies who could be easily controlled by those in charge of the communication medium. Radio historian Susan Douglas (1999) writes that radio “is arguably the most important invention of the [twentieth] century” (p. 9). She makes this claim, in part, because of the way in which radio prepared its audience for the technologies that were to follow. But her contention is based on a fundamental belief that radio is

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the ultimate interactive technology that has never stopped adapting to its cultural and political contexts. “Because radio has taken so many forms over the century and is such a flexible, adaptable, and relatively inexpensive technology, it has been used both to buttress and to challenge the economic, political, and cultural status quo in America. It has been neither the particular technical qualities of the device nor the people’s goals and ambitions but rather the often unstable, unpredictable marriage between the two that has determined radio’s relationship to social change.” (pp. 20–21)

STUDYING THE NET As a society, we pay a price for devoting so little attention to our own technological history. Part of that price is that we regularly confuse the difference between one-way and two-way communication technology. And in so doing, we misunderstand the dynamics between people and new technologies. So, the now-ness of the Internet is part of an historical trend that prevents us from connecting it to similar developments and effects in the recent past. This is especially the case because, unlike other communication technologies, the Internet has developed like magic before our very eyes. The speed and nature of this metamorphosis is both fascinating and terrifying, depending on how we situate ourselves with respect to change and computer technology. If we are not rhapsodizing daily about each new Internet application, we are worrying about its effects on us as individuals and as a society. When we do turn from wonder to analysis, we are often most concerned with the effects of communication technology on society. In general, such analysis takes three broad theoretical approaches. The first falls under the heading of technological determinism, which examines the ways in which technology shapes society. The second approach tries to counter the first by looking at how people use the technology. The third analyzes the historical contexts in which technology develops. If we look at the Internet from the standpoint of technological determinism, we assume that technology affects all patterns of human activity and that changes to technology constitute the single most important changes in society. Each technology has certain inherent characteristics that direct its use. In fact, any given period of history can be defined by the technology in use at the time. The two communication theorists most often associated with technological determinism were Harold Innis (1950) and Marshall McLuhan (1967). Innis is best remembered for his original observation that each technology alters the relationship that its users have with time and space. McLuhan’s work first explored the notion that the form of technology is more significant than its content. When studying the relations between society and the Internet, a determinist perspective might lead us to claim that ours is now a digital society; that the ways

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we think, act, and interact are governed by the ways we communicate using networked digital technology. Certain words and phrases from the technology make their way into our vocabulary, reshaping the way we see the world. Certain modes of communication are opened to us and others are closed because of the dominant technology. Extreme points of view on technological determinism, like that taken by Jacques Ellul (1964), would argue that technology has even taken on a life of its own apart from human agency. Ellul is perhaps the most important proponent of the notion that technology is out of control. He would claim that the technological creations of humankind have a willful, self-determining quality of their own. “At the present time, technology has arrived at such a point in its evolution that it is being transformed and is progressing without decisive intervention by man” (p. 85). Many would make similar claims about the Internet. Technological determinism takes little account of social context or individual action. So, a second way of analyzing the effects of communication technology is to take a “uses and gratifications” approach. Social psychologists and communications scholars often employ this theoretical framework as a means of balancing technological determinism with human agency. Uses and gratifications adopts the stance that people can choose to use technology or not, or even to adapt it to their own needs. This way of examining the relations between technology and society explores first the types and levels of human needs and then the ways in which we try to satisfy them. Scholars who use this approach to study the Internet might argue that the technology is a useful tool for increasing the amount and kinds of personal interactions we have all enjoyed using, for example, telephone technology: that it saves us time, or that it allows previously disadvantaged individuals to have personal relationships that are otherwise not possible. Joe Walther’s “Social Information Processing Theory,” first formulated in 1992, is a good example of early attempts to understand interpersonal communication on the Internet. He developed the theory in rejection of the determinist stance that claimed such communication was inferior to face-to-face communication. In the years since he proposed the SIP framework, Walther (Walther & Parks, 2002) has discovered that computer-mediated communication is far more complex than he first assumed; he is now reexamining his original framework to accommodate a decade of research. Walther’s case is not unusual. Theories addressing the uses and effects of communication technologies must remain supple enough to incorporate new knowledge. In fact, he now calls his framework a perspective rather than a theory, partly because our psychosocial experience of the Internet is changing too rapidly for theory to be reliably predictive. Other theorists have been more concerned with the uses that specific groups make of the Internet. In recent years, Cheris Kramarae has extended to the Internet the notions of “Muted Group Theory,” which examines how women are disadvantaged because language (and its technologies) are male-dominated. According to Kramarae (Taylor & Kramarae, 2004), the Internet is still the purview of men and

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of those women who can afford to be online. The true potential of cyberspace will not be realized for women until computer terminals are readily available in shelters for the homeless, in laundromats, daycare centers, and so on. A third approach to studying new technologies focuses on the various contexts in which the technology is introduced and employed. Both Franklin (1990) and Rowland (1997) take this approach when studying technology. They maintain that technology does not fall from the sky fully formed. It is developed by individual societies for particular reasons. Once it is in use, it has a complex relationship with that society: technology affects and is, in turn, affected by the social, technological, and political context in which it is used. This approach sees the Internet as a participant in the history of technological developments, rather than as a sudden and inexplicable arrival. Since the Internet is such a recent arrival on the technological scene, appears to incorporate so many previous technologies, and continues to evolve, communication theorists have been slow to construct frameworks that describe and explain this new phenomenon. The starting point must be to situate the Internet within the history of communication technologies. One useful such attempt is that of Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin in Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999). Like Ursula Franklin, these authors argue that the new media are best understood not as unique technologies, but as developments from older media. Their theory of new media claims that all communication technologies refashion, or “remediate,” previous forms, while negotiating space in the existing technological landscape. But the “landscape” is not passive. Their theory also explains how preexisting media resist, imitate, or accommodate the new. Although all three of these approaches may be used separately, we frequently combine them, especially when trying to account for the introduction of a new technology as complex as the Internet.

SUMMARY Internet technologies seem to have taken linguistic and narrative hold in western society. The myths of origin are in place. An Internet-specific lexicon has developed. The metaphors that bridged old and new technologies have served their purpose and been discarded. The second phase of technological innovation outlined by Ursula Franklin (1990) seems to have been achieved: infrastructures have been constructed and Internet use has become more or less compulsory. Remediation, as posited by Bolter and Grusin (1999), seems to be ongoing. Internet technologies have adopted the shape and functions of several preexisting technologies; radio is one example. And other technologies have taken on attributes of the Internet in order to survive; television comes to mind.

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The tentativeness of theory-making with respect to the Internet reflects its relative youth and continuing growth. Joe Walther’s (2002) reluctance to use the word “theory” for his own attempts to develop predictive mechanisms for the Internet is indicative of the historical moment we all occupy with respect to this particular technology. His is an honest admission that our intellectual engagement with Internet technologies needs to be as open and fluid as the technologies now are.

REFERENCES Babe, R. (1989). Emergence and development of Canadian communication: Dispelling the myths. In R. Lorimer & D. Wilson (Eds.), Communication in Canada: Issues in broadcasting and new technologies (pp. 58–79). Toronto: Kagan and Woo. Bliven, B. (1924, April). How radio is remaking our world. Century Magazine, 108, 149. Bolter, J., & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Douglas, S. (1999). Listening: Radio and the American imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ellul, J. (1964). The technological society. New York:Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. London: Allen Lane. Franklin, U. (1990). Real world of technology. Toronto: CBC Enterprises. Gibson, William (1984, 1995). Neuromancer. HarperCollins, 1995. Gimpel, J. (1977). The medieval machine: The industrial revolution of the Middle Ages. New York: Penguin. Hart, J. K. (1922). Radiating culture. Survey, Mar. 18, 1969. Innis, H. (1950). Empire and communications. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Innis, H. (1950). The bias of communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kaempffert, W. (1924, June). The social density of radio. Forum, 71, 772. La Mettrie, J. O. de. (1744). L’Homme machine. Leyde, Netherlands: E. Luzac. Lazarsfeld, P. (1940). Radio and the printed page. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. McLuhan, M. (1967). The medium is the message. New York: Bantam. O’Brien, H.V. (1924, Sept. 13). It’s great to be a radio maniac. Collier’s, 74, 16. Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. New York: Viking. Rowland, W. (1997). Spirit of the web: The age of information from telegraph to Internet. Toronto: Somerville House. Shelley, Mary (2003). Frankenstein. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Classics. Taylor, H. J., & Kramarae, C. (2004). Creating cybertrust: Illustrations and guidelines. In O. V. Burton (Ed.). Computing in the social sciences and humanities, (pp. 141–158). University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Tesla, N. (1919, March). That prospective communication with another planet. Current Opinion, 66, 170. Walker, T. (1920, April). Can we radio a message to Mars? Illustrated World, 33, 242. Walther, J. B., & Parks, M. R. (2002). Cues filtered out, cues filtered in: Computer-mediated communication and relationships. In M. Knapp & J. A. Daly (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication, 3rd ed. (pp. 529–561). Sage: Thousand Oaks, CA. Wolfe, J. (2004). Humanism, machinery, and renaissance literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, G. (2002). Edison’s Eve: A magical history of the quest for mechanical life. New York: Knopf.

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CHAPTER 2

Children and the Internet Connie K. Varnhagen Department of Psychology University of Alberta Alberta, Canada

Introduction What are Children Doing on the Internet? Concerns Becoming “Internet-Wise” References

INTRODUCTION The Internet is a vast virtual environment. Children can access a wealth of information on subjects ranging from acne to zebras. They can communicate with others from around the world, sharing their experiences and interests while breaking down cultural barriers. They can listen to music from around the world, watch awardwinning public service announcements, and play games that test their skill and coordination. Children can also access pornography, hate, and terrorism. In addition, children are vulnerable to sexual solicitation and predation and cyberbullying and harassment. How do we help them access the cognitively and culturally enhancing aspects of the Internet while, at the same time, protecting them from the dark side of the Internet? Although the news media is quick to report on any situations where children are adversely affected by the Internet, we are only beginning to learn about children’s use of the Internet, their exposure to unwanted or undesirable resources, and how these exposures affect their development. We need a principled approach to understanding this new environment and children’s dynamic interactions with it. Critics of the Internet claim that children’s social development is arrested through interactions with the Internet, that children are victimized by unwanted exposure to pornography and hate, and that they are easy targets for sexual predators and cyber-bullies. Although the most dire predictions of critics of the Internet have not been borne out by the research literature, there are risks for children online. Just as we empower our children with shrewd awareness of the possible dangers around 37 Psychology and the Internet: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Transpersonal Implications Copyright © 2007 by Academic Press. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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them as they explore the physical environment, we need to empower them with critical appraisal of information and opportunities they encounter as they explore the virtual environment of the Internet.

WHAT ARE CHILDREN DOING ON THE INTERNET? The vast majority of children in the United States and Canada have accessed the Internet; over 95% had been online by 2003 (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2004; Environics Research Group, 2001) and close to 75% had Internet access in their homes (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2004; Statistics Canada, 2003). Internet use is comparable or slightly lower in other developed countries (e.g., Livingstone and Bober, 2005; Nielsen ratings). Many children access the Internet at least once a week from school, home, or libraries; surveys from the past few years indicate that up to one-half of children spend more than one hour on the Internet per day (Environics Research Group, 2001; Roberts et al., 2005). Moreover, children access the Internet from a very early age. In a 2001 Canadian survey for the Media Awareness Network (Environics Research Group, 2001), 15% of youth under the age of 18 years recalled learning to use the Internet at 7 years of age or younger. In a 2003 United States survey of parents, Rideout et al. (2003; see also Calvert et al., 2005) found that children started looking for Web sites without parental supervision at 4 years of age and sent an e-mail by themselves as early as 3 years of age. Clearly, children are immersed in the Internet environment in increasing numbers for increasing lengths of time. Children mainly access the Internet through the World Wide Web. Children use the Web to access information resources through Web searches and browsing preferred Web sites; communicate using e-mail, instant messaging, and discussion; and access music, video, and computer games (Environics Research Group, 2001; Rideout et al., 2003; Roberts et al., 2005). Children as young as second grade have an e-mail address through their classrooms. These e-mail accounts are used as part of the language arts curriculum for developing reading and writing skills and as part of the social studies curriculum for communication with children from other cultures. Young children may also have an e-mail account to communicate with family members. Children also use instant messaging to communicate with friends, often in parallel with playing computer games or doing homework (Shiu & Lenhart, 2004). Children most often surf the Web for games and music but they also search for information for school reports and personal interest (Environics Research Group, 2001; Lenhart et al., 2001). Specialized children’s Internet resources have become increasingly popular— among parents and educators, at least—and are marketed as providing children with safe and secure access to the Internet. For example, although many children use

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Hotmail (http://hotmail.com) or Yahoo (http://mail.yahoo.com) accounts available to everyone, specialized children’s e-mail services such as KidMail (http://kidmail. net) and Surf Buddies (http://www.surfbuddies.com) provide spam-free, secure e-mail for a small fee. These resources allow parents to limit children’s e-mail contacts and the programs automatically filter out questionable content and spam. Almost all other e-mail services allow setup of filters but these childsafe resources appeal to parents who do not feel confident modifying program preferences and options. Child versions of search programs have also become popular. Yahooligans (http://yahooligans.com) and Ask Jeeves for Kids (http://www.ajkids.com/) are search directories designed specifically for children. All resources that can be searched or browsed from the home pages have been verified as appropriate for children by a team of educational consultants. These directories are quite limited, however, and don’t include information on many topics children might be investigating for school or personal interest, such as specialized information on dinosaurs found in Canada or adoption resources for searching for biological parents. Many entertainment resources have been developed specifically for children. A number of media companies, such as the Public Broadcasting Corporation (http:// pbskids.org/), Warner Brothers (e.g., http://harrypotter.com), and Scholastic (e.g., http://scholastic.com/kids/) have developed information and game resources for their child audiences. Most of these resources are completely self-contained and contain no off-site links; those that do include off-site links provide a warning before the child clicks to an off-site link. Finally, children’s Internet access can be controlled through the use of filtering programs, such as Net Nanny (http://netnanny.com/) or Cyber Sitter (http:// www.cybersitter.com/), and children’s browsers, such as zExplorer (http://www. zxplorer.com/). These commercial programs limit children’s access to the Internet, filtering spam, advertising, and content determined inappropriate for children. Because it is difficult to define spam and inappropriate content, these programs necessarily provide very restrictive access to the Internet. Although these child-oriented Internet resources are increasing in number and popularity, given the unorganized and unregulated nature of the Internet, they are not foolproof and children may still be exposed inadvertently to objectionable content. Also, most of these resources are overly restrictive; for example, because of “adult” content of some encyclopedia articles, children are unable to access such ubiquitous resources as the World Book Encyclopedia through many of the resources. Finally, and possibly most importantly, by passively limiting children’s access to possibly unseemly information and resources on the Internet, children may not learn to actively appraise and evaluate Internet information.

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Connie K. Varnhagen

CONCERNS Historically, parents, teachers, policymakers, and the press have been concerned about the adverse effects of new media on children (Gackenbach & Ellerman, 1998; Paik, 2001; Wartella & Jennings, 2000). Movies, radio, and television were all seen initially as potentially harmful for children’s development. Computers are seen as depriving children of important social and physical development opportunities. Critics warn that important social contact and physical activities are displaced by time spent socially isolated in front of a computer screen—these are much the same concerns that were expressed when televisions began to appear in living rooms. Because the Internet is freely accessible, critics are also concerned about children being exposed to issues they cannot comprehend or cope with, such as pornography and hate. Finally, given the anonymity of the Internet, critics are now becoming increasingly concerned about children being victimized by sexual predators and cyber-bullies.

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT Children develop a sense of who they are and how they fit into their family, school, and community. They learn to critically evaluate the characteristics that define themselves and they learn to control their behavior to adapt to society’s norms and values. These aspects of social development require children to interact with others in order to differentiate themselves from others, compare characteristics that define themselves with those that define others, and develop self-control. Critics have complained that computer use leads to social isolation, which often leads to depression and other mental disorders. Given that many children have access to the Internet in their bedrooms (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2004), this concern may be valid. There is some evidence to suggest a correlation between social isolation and depression and computer use. Kraut et al. (1998) reported results of a survey of first time Internet users as part of the HomeNet longitudinal study conducted 1995–1998 regarding the impact of the Internet on social interactions. These first-time Internet users reported a decline in social interaction and an increase in depressive symptoms over their first months of Internet use; in addition, the correlations between Internet use and isolation and depression measures were slightly higher for the adolescents in the sample than those for adults. These effects were short-lived, however; Kraut et al. (2002) followed the HomeNet participants over a longer period of time (three years as opposed to 12–18 months) and the negative effects of Internet use had disappeared. In a second study, Kraut et al. (2002) found that extroverted children and adults reported greater increases in social interaction and self-esteem as a function of increased use of the Internet.

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Gross (2004) argued that, as more children use the Internet, more of their friends will as well, and the Internet will simply become one more form of communication and interaction. Other research indicates that the Internet may have positive effects on social development. Stern (2002) analyzed teenage girls’ personal Web sites. She found that the girls’ self-expressions were consistent with theories of social development. Stern argued that the Internet provides an excellent opportunity for children to express themselves as they develop socially and sexually. Several studies have examined the relationships between social well-being and Internet instant message use. Instant messaging is becoming the most common form of communication on the Internet (Environics Research Group, 2001; IpsosReid, 2004; Law, 2004). In a study of the relationship between self-concept and instant messaging use, Law surveyed adolescents between the ages of 11 and 19 years and found no correlation between self-concept and instant messaging use. However, consistent with the statistics on increasing use of instant messaging, over threequarters of Law’s adolescent participants used instant messaging daily. Similarly, Gross (2004) surveyed adolescents aged 11 to 16 years and found no relationship between amount of time spent online and measures of loneliness, social anxiety, depression, or daily life satisfaction. Gross et al. (2002) examined relationships between well-being and closeness of instant message partners in adolescents aged 11–13 years. Among adolescents who used instant messaging, those who reported feeling comfortable in their social interactions reported communicating primarily with school friends whereas adolescents who reported feeling socially isolated also communicated with people they did not know well. Ybarra et al. (2005) found that children aged 10–17 who reported significant depressive symptoms (e.g., experiencing functional impairments in school, personal hygiene, and/or self-efficacy) spent more time on the Internet at school and used e-mail more often for social communications than those reporting fewer or no depressive symptoms. Their sample came from a large United States study, the Youth Internet Safety Survey, conducted in 1999–2000 with children aged 10 to 17 years (Finkelhor et al., 2000). Wolak et al. (2002, 2003), using the same sample as Ybarra et al., found that children who reported depressive symptoms and having been victimized in some way had more close personal relationships with people they had met on the Internet than did children who were not as troubled. Rather than remaining socially isolated and alone, troubled and depressed children and adolescents appear to reach out to online friends. Indeed, online communication may help children develop a sense of self in an anonymous and supportive environment. Turkle (1995) argued that multi-user dungeon games provide an important opportunity for people to experiment with different selves and, in so doing, refine their own self-concept. Subrahmanyam et al.

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