You’re cruising the Web, finding links for a research paper, downloading a game you heard about in a chat room and checking the traffic for the drive home, when your cellphone beeps–a message from your mom reminding you to pick up your little brother at 4:30. You’re wired. And if you are in your 20s, it may be hard to remember a time when you weren’t.
Professor Barry Wellman predicts that networks and the Internet will become even more intimately wrapped up in our daily lives than they are now. Wellman, who is director of the NetLab at the Centre for Urban and Community Studies here at U of T, has just published a collection of studies entitled The Internet in Everyday Life. Co-edited with U of T alumna Caroline Haythornthwaite (now at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), the two present systematic research studies by themselves and colleagues about Internet use.
Sociological research about the Internet has matured beyond breathless the-Internet-will-change-the-way-we-butter-our-toast proclamations. “We’re getting data instead of hype,” says Wellman. Among his findings is the fact that e-mail is the communication tool of choice world-wide for contacting friends separated by more than 50 kilometres, while phone calls still dominate for contacting relatives and close-by friends. E-mail contact, while adding to our hectic lives, does not fully replace time spent on phone calls and visits.
As a sociologist, Wellman perceives a shift in our immediate family structures. With one e-mail address per person–often even one phone number per person–we are entering an era of “networked individualism.” Asked if family ties are loosening, he worries that “having a computer in the bedroom is a hint.”
According to one study in the collection, even watching TV is on the decline, which, for better or worse, has in the past been a communal family activity. Still, Wellman sees a bright side: “we’re communicating more, probably, than we ever have.” He sees people connecting to their neighbours online, and maintaining more friend and family relationships at a distance.
As Internet usage becomes an integral part of our everyday lives in North America, some are watching how different regions of the world confront the Internet era.
PhD student Wenhong Chen, also at the Netlab, has been researching network use across various countries. The most striking variance is in the demographics of Internet users. For countries that have only begun to use the Internet, she sees the elite predominating online. For example, urban dwellers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong form 30 per cent of China’s Internet users, with peasants (80 per cent of the population) accounting for only one per cent of the country’s users.
But the Internet is not the only way that people around the world connect electronically. Chen points out that cell phones are more popular outside of North America. She explains, by e-mail, that “mobile phones not only bring the convenience and the pleasure to urban youth in rich countries but also provide practical information at low cost to peasants in remote villages–even if they are illiterate and might not be able to come to terms with [the] technological proficiency required [for] surfing on the Internet.”
Chen still sees barriers to full participation by developing countries–often termed the digital divide.
Before the question of resources and access, there is the obvious language divide. English is still the language of choice on the Internet, with 36.5 per cent of users being native English speakers. Like in Toronto, Chinese is now in second place with 11 per cent of users. And finally, she notes “some countries block access to some Web sites or the Internet as a whole.”
Although we may use the Internet’s global reach to e-mail friends in Thailand and order a rare CD from Australia, community norms still dictate the ways people use the Internet. In ongoing research, professor Wellman has been looking at the uses of the Internet in Catalonia. In that region, the small, close-knit communities and the mild climate bring people out to participate in face-to-face communication.
While Catalans do use the Internet to book movie tickets and check plane flights, they don’t use e-mail nearly as much as North Americans. As Wellman describes it, “they like to see each other, they like to sit in cafés and blow smoke in each other’s faces.”
