Matusitz, J. (2007). The implications of the Internet for human communication. Journal of Information Technology Impact, 7(1), 21-34. Retrieved May 29, 2010.
The Summation of a Biased Report…
“The Internet is a powerful medium of communication” (p. 30). “One of the main concerns over the past ten years has been that the Internet has fundamentally influenced social interactions among humans” (p. 22), and has diminished both the quantity and quality of their face-to-face communication capabilities. For many individuals, the freedom and anonymity of the Internet allows them to take on a second identity; a uniquely subjective, personal creation of their own desire. The instantaneous global connection perpetrated through the Internet defies the logic of both time and geographical proximity. Overcoming these situated barriers instigated the necessity to redefine “community” in order to incorporate the functions of virtual communities.
“The word “community” implies that a group of people share the same environment and that all individual subjects in the environment have something in common; a virtual community is formed by Internet users at their own choice” (p. 23). “Although the Internet can diminish the quality of human interaction in normal, physical settings, it can also contribute to an improvement of the psychological well-being of online users” (p. 29). “Virtual communities and real communities share some common features, including social interaction, common goals, a sense of identity and belonging, norms and rules (whether written or unwritten), and a possibility for exclusion or rejection from community members” (p. 24); but unlike real communities, virtual communities offer to its members, the choice of anonymity. According to Matusitz, “What cyberspace really does is encourage online users to be themselves and express what is on their minds. This, in turn, makes relationships online more real than they actually are offline” (p. 25).
The Only Sentence Which Was Actually Worth Re-Typing
According to Matusitz, “for a scholar like Neil Postman (1993), the adoption of a virtual community is detrimental because it lacks the important element of accountability and mutual obligation present in real-world communities” (p. 24).
My Overall Reflection
This document was published in 2009 by the Journal of Information Technology Impact, which to my utter shock is a scholarly, peer referred journal! This is one of, if not the worst pieces of published writing I have ever read. The author was extremely biased toward the perception of an online extrovert, and had no problem asserting various unsupported claims.
Example one: “What cyberspace really does is encourage online users to be themselves and express what is on their minds. This, in turn, makes relationships online more real than they actually are offline” (p. 25). So through encouragement by cyberspace (whoever or whatever that exactly refers to) to be oneself and speak one’s mind, this will make online relationship “more real” than offline relationships? This statement is really just completely void of anything academic or scholarly.
Example two: “real human relationships on the Internet can develop and last for a long time. As one can see, the Internet solves many of the problems that prevent true relationships from linking people to one another in real-life situations” (p. 26). These statement just left me asking, “based on what?”
Example Three: “The Internet’s ability to make things float in an organizational structure that is horizontal, flat, consisting of flexible communication relationships is just magical” (p. 30). Even if this statement is accurate, who uses the word “magical”?
Potential Explanation From Malcolm Parks
What Will We Study When the Internet Disappears? was published in 2009 in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. The author, Malcolm Parks no longer considers “new media” to be “new”; claiming that “many Internet-based applications have become so commonplace and so integrated into our ever day activities that they are easily taken for granted” (p. 724).
According to Parks, “we should recognize that while the growth of the Internet has attracted large numbers of people to CMC research, the field has suffered from some of the same hyperbole and chaos that has characterized the growth on the Internet itself. Far too much of what we think we know about Internet use comes from uncertain combinations of commercially motivated marketing research, global surveys (e.g., PEW Internet studies), proclamations of self-appointed Internet experts, breathless first-person accounts, and low grade ethnographies” (p. 724). Scholarly research must become more descriptive of the communication process; moving “beyond social technologies and into the discourse regarding those technologies” (p. 727).
COM 6270 Reading:
Parks, M. (2009). What will we study when the Internet disappears? Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14, 724-729.
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