ABSTRACT
The Internet offers many venues for social interaction, from topical newsgroups and chat rooms to electronic mail and interactive games. More and more, Internet entrepreneurs are discovering that although people do use it as an information source, much like a fabulous home library, the most popular use of the Internet is to interact with other people. Social interaction has become the number one home use of the Internet (Kraut, Mukopadhyay, Szczypula, Kiesler, & Scherlis, 1998; Moore, 2000). Nearly 80% of those going online in a typical day in 2000 did so in order to send an e-mail to another person (Pew Internet Report, 2000). And access to (and therefore social interaction on) the Internet is no longer solely a North American phenomenon; according to the most recent Nielsen-NetRatings survey, 33% of homes in the Asia-Pacific region now have Internet access, and 25% of European homes do so (“Net access growing,” 2001); and although access in Latin America and Africa currently lags behind, it is growing at a rapid rate (Tomlinson, 2001).
