The Internet is no longer a separate world for the techno-savvy. Tens of millions of people around the world now go online daily. Rather than isolating users in a virtual world, the Internet extends communities in the real world. People use it to connect in individualized and flexible social networks rather than in fixed and grounded groups.
References
1.
CastellsManuelThe Rise of the Network Society. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000. Castells presents an insightful account of the transformation of societies into social networks.
2.
JonesSteveHowardPhilip, eds. Society Online: The Internet in Context.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003. This is an important compendium of research, with much representation from the authoritative Pew Internet in American Life studies.
3.
RheingoldHowardThe Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Rheingold delivers a popular and sound account of life online.
4.
WellmanBarryHaythornthwaiteCaroline, eds The Internet in Everyday Life. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000. We present a score of original research articles documenting many of the ideas presented in this article.
5.
http://www.pewinternet.org. The Pew Internet in American Life studies have carried out a large number of surveys on Internet use in American life.
6.
http://virtualsociety.sbs.ox.ac.uk. This is a British scholarly network doing a variety of mostly qualitative analyses of Internet and society.
7.
http://www.webuse.umd.edu. This site is an interactive statistical database that makes it relatively easy to analyze a variety of surveys about the Internet and American life.
8.
http://www.worldinternetproject.net. This site contains the reports of survey researchers in many nations on the nature of the Internet and society.
