ABSTRACT
Very simple and naive questions such as ‘where is the internet now?’ or ‘what is the current state of the internet?’ cannot – of course – get any complete answer, any more than questions such as ‘what is happening now in the world?’. Nonetheless – as it happens in the real world, for instance with press agencies – it is possible to study events and trends in special areas (for an aggregator of field research on the internet, see www.clickz.com/stats). Selecting particularly relevant areas of the internet, and approaching them from the communicative point of view is the goal of this chapter. As we have already discussed, human communication is an ecological system, where the impact of new technologies requires a reorganization of the system itself. In this chapter, as part of a wider consideration of the users of the internet, we focus on how the mass media as a whole are changed by the internet (6.1). When such changes occur, it is invariably the case that they are changes closely bound up with media use and the social organization that is associated with such use. In fact, as mass media were at the same time an effect and a cause of a certain kind of social organization, also electronic media and the internet give birth to (and are promoted by) new social organizations: so-called virtual communities. The nature of these will be explored in their inner nature (6.2) and in a paradigmatic instance: that of video and online games (section 6.2.7).
