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Internet addiction is a rapidly growing field of research, receiving attention from researchers, journalists and policy makers. Despite much empirical data being collected and analyzed clear results and conclusions are surprisingly absent. This paper argues that conceptual issues and methodological shortcomings surrounding internet addiction research have made theoretical development difficult. An alternative model termed compensatory internet use is presented in an attempt to properly theorize the frequent assumption that people go online to escape real life issues or alleviate dysphoric moods and that this sometimes leads to negative outcomes. An empirical approach to studying compensatory internet use is suggested by combining the psychological literature on internet addiction with research on motivations for internet use. The theoretical argument is that by understanding how motivations mediate the relationship between psychosocial well-being and internet addiction, we can draw conclusions about how online activities may compensate for psychosocial problems. This could help explain why some people keep spending so much time online despite experiencing negative outcomes. There is also a methodological argument suggesting that in order to accomplish this, research needs to move away from a focus on direct effects models and consider mediation and interaction effects between psychosocial well-being and motivations in the context of internet addiction. This is key to further exploring the notion of internet use as a coping strategy; a proposition often mentioned but rarely investigated.

Anecdotal reports indicated that some on-line users were becoming addicted to the Internet in much the same way that others became addicted to drugs or alcohol, which resulted in academic, social, and occupational impairment. However, research among sociologists, psychologists, or psychiatrists has not formally identified addictive use of the Internet as a problematic behavior. This study investigated the existence of Internet addiction and the extent of problems caused by such potential misuse. Of all the diagnoses referenced in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—Fourth Edition (DSM-IV; American Psychiatric Association, 1995), Pathological Gambling was viewed as most akin to the pathological nature of Internet use. By using Pathological Gambling as a model, addictive Internet use can be defined as an impulse-control disorder that does not involve an intoxicant. Therefore, this study developed a brief eight-item questionnaire referred to as a Diagnostic Questionnaire (DQ), which modified criteria for pathological gambling to provide a screening instrument for classification of participants. On the basis of this criteria, case studies of 396 dependent Internet users (Dependents) and 100 nondependent Internet users (Nondependents) were classified. Qualitative analyses suggest significant behavioral and functional usage differences between the two groups such as the types of applications utilized, the degree of difficulty controlling weekly usage, and the severity of problems noted. Clinical and social implications of pathological Internet use and future directions for research are discussed.

The rapid growth of the Internet provides a wealth of new research opportunities for psychologists. Internet data collection methods, with a focus on self-report questionnaires from self-selected samples, are evaluated and compared with traditional paper-and-pencil methods. Six preconceptions about Internet samples and data quality are evaluated by comparing a new large Internet sample (N = 361,703) with a set of 510 published traditional samples. Internet samples are shown to be relatively diverse with respect to gender, socioeconomic status, geographic region, and age. Moreover, Internet findings generalize across presentation formats, are not adversely affected by nonserious or repeat responders, and are consistent with findings from traditional methods. It is concluded that Internet methods can contribute to many areas of psychology.

From Publisher: Manuel Castells is one of world's leading thinkers on new information age, hailed by The Economist as the first significant philosopher of cyberspace, and by Christian Science Monitor as pioneer who has hacked out a logical, well-documented, and coherent picture of early 21st century civilization, even as it rockets forward largely in a blur. Now, in The Internet Galaxy, this brilliantly insightful writer speculates on how Internet will change our lives. Castells believes that we are entering, full speed, Internet Galaxy, in midst of informed bewilderment. His aim in this exciting and profound work is to help us to understand how Internet came into being, and how it is affecting every area of human life--from work, politics, planning and development, media, and privacy, to our social interaction and life in home. We are at ground zero of new network society. In this book, its major commentator reveals Internet's huge capacity to liberate, but also its ability to marginalize and exclude those who do not have access to it. Castells provides no glib solutions, but asks us all to take responsibility for future of this new information age. The Internet is becoming essential communication and information medium in our society, and stands alongside electricity and printing press as one of greatest innovations of all time. The Internet Galaxy offers an illuminating look at how this new technology will influence business, economy, and our daily lives.

There have been many claims that the Internet represents a new nearly “frictionless market.” Our research empirically analyzes the characteristics of the Internet as a channel for two categories of homogeneous products—books and CDs. Using a data set of over 8,500 price observations collected over a period of 15 months, we compare pricing behavior at 41 Internet and conventional retail outlets. We find that prices on the Internet are 9–16% lower than prices in conventional outlets, depending on whether taxes, shipping, and shopping costs are included in the price. Additionally, we find that Internet retailers' price adjustments over time are up to 100 times smaller than conventional retailers' price adjustments—presumably reflecting lower menu costs in Internet channels. We also find that levels of price dispersion depend importantly on the measures employed. When we compare the prices posted by different Internet retailers we find substantial dispersion. Internet retailer prices differ by an average of 33% for books and 25% for CDs. However, when we weight these prices by proxies for market share, we find dispersion is lower in Internet channels than in conventional channels, reflecting the dominance of certain heavily branded retailers. We conclude that while there is lower friction in many dimensions of Internet competition, branding, awareness, and trust remain important sources of heterogeneity among Internet retailers.

Author Q&A with Eli Pariser Q: What is a Filter Bubble? A: Were used to thinking of the Internet like an enormous library, with services like Google providing a universal map. But thats no longer really the case. Sites from Google and Facebook to Yahoo News and the New York Times are now increasingly personalized based on your web history, they filter information to show you the stuff they think you want to see. That can be very different from what everyone else sees or from what we need to see. Your filter bubble is this unique, personal universe of information created just for you by this array of personalizing filters. Its invisible and its becoming more and more difficult to escape. Q: I like the idea that websites might show me information relevant to my interestsit can be overwhelming how much information is available I already only watch TV shows and listen to radio programs that are known to have my same political leaning. Whats so bad about this? A: Its true: Weve always selected information sources that accord with our own views. But one of the creepy things about the filter bubble is that were not really doing the selecting. When you turn on Fox News or MSNBC, you have a sense of what their editorial sensibility is: Fox isnt going to show many stories that portray Obama in a good light, and MSNBC isnt going to the ones that portray him badly. Personalized filters are a different story: You dont know who they think you are or on what basis theyre showing you what theyre showing. And as a result, you dont really have any sense of whats getting edited out or, in fact, that things are being edited out at all. Q: How does money fit into this picture? A: The rush to build the filter bubble is absolutely driven by commercial interests. Its becoming clearer and clearer that if you want to have lots of people use your website, you need to provide them with personally relevant information, and if you want to make the most money on ads, you need to provide them with relevant ads. This has triggered a personal information gold rush, in which the major companies Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and the like are competing to create the most comprehensive portrait of each of us to drive personalized products. Theres also a whole behavior market opening up in which every action you take online every mouse click, every form entry can be sold as a commodity. Q: What is the Internet hiding from me? A: As Google engineer Jonathan McPhie explained to me, its different for every person and in fact, even Google doesnt totally know how it plays out on an individual level. At an aggregate level, they can see that people are clicking more. But they cant predict how each individuals information environment is altered. In general, the things that are most likely to get edited out are the things youre least likely to click on. Sometimes, this can be a real service if you never read articles about sports, why should a newspaper put a football story on your front page? But apply the same logic to, say, stories about foreign policy, and a problem starts to emerge. Some things, like homelessness or genocide, arent highly clickable but are highly important. Q: Which companies or Websites are personalizing like this? A: In one form or another, nearly every major website on the Internet is flirting with personalization. But the one that surprises people most is Google. If you and I Google the same thing at the same time, we may get very different results. Google tracks hundreds of signals about each of us what kind of computer were on, what weve searched for in the past, even how long it takes us to decide what to click on and uses it to customize our results. When the result is that our favorite pizza parlor shows up first when we Google pizza, its useful. But when the result is that we only see the information that is aligned with our religious or social or political beliefs, its difficult to maintain perspective. Q: Are any sites being transparent about their personalization? A: Some sites do better than others. Amazon, for example, is often quite transparent about the personalization it does: Were showing you Brave New World because you bought 1984. But its one thing to personalize products and another to personalize whole information flows, like Google and Facebook are doing. And very few users of those services are even marginally aware that this kind of filtering is at work. Q: Does this issue of personalization impact my privacy or jeopardize my identity at all? A: Research psychologists have known for a while that the media you consume shapes your identity. So when the media you consume is also shaped by your identity, you can slip into a weird feedback loop. A lot of people see a simple version of this on Facebook: You idly click on an old classmate, Facebook reads that as a friendship, and pretty soon youre seeing every one of John or Sues posts. Gone awry, personalization can create compulsive media media targeted to appeal to your personal psychological weak spots. You can find yourself eating the equivalent of information junk food instead of having a more balanced information diet. Q: You make it clear that while most Websites user agreements say they wont share our personal information, they also maintain the right to change the rules at any time. Do you foresee sites changing those rules to profit from our online personas? A: They already have. Facebook, for example, is notorious for its bait-and-switch tactics when it comes to privacy. For a long time, what you Liked on Facebook was private, and the site promised to keep it that way. Then, overnight, they made that information public to the world, in order to make it easier for their advertisers to target specific subgroups. Theres an irony in the fact that while Rolex needs to get Tom Cruises permission to put his face on a billboard, it doesnt need to get my permission to advertise my endorsement to my friends on Facebook. We need laws that give people more rights in their personal data. Q: Is there any way to avoid this personalization? What if Im not logged into a site? A: Even if youre not logged into Google, for example, an engineer told me there are 57 signals that the site uses to figure out who you are: whether youre on a Mac or PC or iPad, where youre located when youre Googling, etc. And in the near future, itll be possible to fingerprint unique devices, so that sites can tell which individual computer youre using. Thats why erasing your browser cookies is at best a partial solutionit only partially limits the information available to personalizers. What we really need is for the companies that power the filter bubble to take responsibility for the immense power they now have the power to determine what we see and dont see, what we know and dont know. We need them to make sure we continue to have access to public discourse and a view of the common good. A world based solely on things we Like is a very incomplete world. Im optimistic that they can. Its worth remembering that newspapers werent always informed by a sense of journalistic ethics. They existed for centuries without it. It was only when critics like Walter Lippman began to point out how important they were that the newspapers began to change. And while journalistic ethics arent perfect, because of them we have been better informed over the last century. We need algorithmic ethics to guide us through the next. Q: What are the business leaders at Google and Facebook and Yahoo saying about their responsibilities? A: To be honest, theyre frustratingly coy. They tend to frame the trend in the passive tense: Googles Eric Schmidt recently said It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them, rather than Google is making it very hard Mark Zuckerberg perfectly summed up the tension in personalization when he said A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. But he refuses to engage with what that means at a societal level especially for the people in Africa. Q: Your background is as a political organizer for the liberal Website MoveOn.org. How does that experience inform your book? A: Ive always believed the Internet could connect us all together and help create a better, more democratic world. Thats what excited me about MoveOn here we were, connecting people directly with each other and with political leaders to create change. But that more democratic society has yet to emerge, and I think its partly because while the Internet is very good at helping groups of people with like interests band together (like MoveOn), its not so hot at introducing people to different people and ideas. Democracy requires discourse and personalization is making that more and more elusive. And that worries me, because we really need the Internet to live up to that connective promise. We need it to help us solve global problems like climate change, terrorism, or natural resource management which by their nature require massive coordination, and great wisdom and ingenuity. These problems cant be solved by a person or two they require whole societies to participate. And that just wont happen if were all isolated in a web of one.

The Internet could change the lives of average citizens as much as did the telephone in the early part of the 20th century and television in the 1950s and 1960s. Researchers and social critics are debating whether the Internet is improving or harming participation in community life and social relationships. This research examined the social and psychological impact of the Internet on 169 people in 73 households during their first 1 to 2 years on-line. We used longitudinal data to examine the effects of the Internet on social involvement and psychological well-being. In this sample, the Internet was used extensively for communication. Nonetheless, greater use of the Internet was associated with declines in participants' communication with family members in the household, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in their depression and loneliness. These findings have implications for research, for public policy and for the design of technology.

The Internet is a critically important research site for sociologists testing theories of technology diffusion and media effects, particularly because it is a medium uniquely capable of integrating modes of communication and forms of content. Current research tends to focus on the Internet's implications in five domains: 1) inequality (the “digital divide”); 2) community and social capital; 3) political participation; 4) organizations and other economic institutions; and 5) cultural participation and cultural diversity. A recurrent theme across domains is that the Internet tends to complement rather than displace existing media and patterns of behavior. Thus in each domain, utopian claims and dystopic warnings based on extrapolations from technical possibilities have given way to more nuanced and circumscribed understandings of how Internet use adapts to existing patterns, permits certain innovations, and reinforces particular kinds of change. Moreover, in each domain the ultimate social implications of this new technology depend on economic, legal, and policy decisions that are shaping the Internet as it becomes institutionalized. Sociologists need to study the Internet more actively and, particularly, to synthesize research findings on individual user behavior with macroscopic analyses of institutional and political-economic factors that constrain that behavior.

We examined audience uses o f the Internet from a uses-and-gratifications perspective. We expected contextual age, unwillingness to communicate, social presence, and Internet motives to predict outcomes of Internet exposure, affinity and satisfaction. The analyses identified five motives for using the Internet and multivariate links among the antecedents and motives. The results suggested distinctions between instrumental and ritualized Internet use, as well as Internet use serving as a functional alternative to face-to-face interaction.

This path breaking book is the first to provide a rigorous and comprehensive examination of Internet culture and consumption. A rich ethnography of Internet use, the book offers a sustained account not just of being online, but of the social, political and cultural contexts which account for the contemporary Internet experience. From cyber cafes to businesses, from middle class houses to squatters settlements, from the political economy of Internet provision to the development of ecommerce, the authors have gathered a wealth of material based on fieldwork in Trinidad. Looking at the full range of Internet media — including websites, email and chat — the book brings out unforeseen consequences and contradictions in areas as varied as personal relations, commerce, nationalism, sex and religion. This is the first book-length treatment of the impact of the Internet on a particular region. By focusing on one place, it demonstrates the potential for a

From the Publisher: Digital Divide examines access and use of the Internet in 179 nations world-wide. A global divide is evident between industrialized and developing societies. A social divide is apparent between rich and poor within each nation. Within the online community, evidence for a democratic divide is emerging between those who do and do not use Internet resources to engage and participate in public life. Part I outlines the theoretical debate between cyber-optimists who see the Internet as the great leveler. Part II examines the virtual political system and the way that representative institutions have responded to new opportunities on the Internet. Part III analyzes how the public has responded to these opportunities in Europe and the United States and develops the civic engagement model to explain patterns of participation via the Internet.

The stages of a quantum internet As indispensable as the internet has become in our daily lives, it still has many shortcomings, not least of which is that communication can be intercepted and information stolen. If, however, the internet attained the capability of transmitting quantum information—qubits—many of these security concerns would be addressed. Wehner et al. review what it will take to achieve this so-called quantum internet and propose stages of development that each correspond to increasingly powerful applications. Although a full-blown quantum internet, with functional quantum computers as nodes connected through quantum communication channels, is still some ways away, the first long-range quantum networks are already being planned. Science , this issue p. eaam9288

Kraut et al. (1998) reported negative effects of using the Internet on social involvement and psychological well‐being among new Internet users in 1995–96. We called the effects a “paradox” because participants used the Internet heavily for communication, which generally has positive effects. A 3‐year follow‐up of 208 of these respondents found that negative effects dissipated. We also report findings from a longitudinal survey in 1998–99 of 406 new computer and television purchasers. This sample generally experienced positive effects of using the Internet on communication, social involvement, and well‐being. However, consistent with a “rich get richer” model, using the Internet predicted better outcomes for extraverts and those with more social support but worse outcomes for introverts and those with less support.

One of the buzzwords in the Information Technology is Internet of Things (IoT). The future is Internet of Things, which will transform the real world objects into intelligent virtual objects. The IoT aims to unify everything in our world under a common infrastructure, giving us not only control of things around us, but also keeping us informed of the state of the things. In Light of this, present study addresses IoT concepts through systematic review of scholarly research papers, corporate white papers, professional discussions with experts and online databases. Moreover this research article focuses on definitions, geneses, basic requirements, characteristics and aliases of Internet of Things. The main objective of this paper is to provide an overview of Internet of Things, architectures, and vital technologies and their usages in our daily life. However, this manuscript will give good comprehension for the new researchers, who want to do research in this field of Internet of Things (Technological GOD) and facilitate knowledge accumulation in efficiently.

The revolution will be Twittered! declared journalist Andrew Sullivan after protests erupted in Iran in June 2009. Yet for all the talk about the democratizing power of the Internet, regimes in Iran and China are as stable and repressive as ever. In fact, authoritarian governments are effectively using the Internet to suppress free speech, hone their surveillance techniques, disseminate cutting-edge propaganda, and pacify their populations with digital entertainment. Could the recent Western obsession with promoting democracy by digital means backfire? In this spirited book, journalist and social commentator Evgeny Morozov shows that by falling for the supposedly democratizing nature of the Internet, Western do-gooders may have missed how it also entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it hardernot easierto promote democracy. Buzzwords like 21st-century statecraft sound good in PowerPoint presentations, but the reality is that digital diplomacy requires just as much oversight and consideration as any other kind of diplomacy. Marshaling compelling evidence, Morozov shows why we must stop thinking of the Internet and social media as inherently liberating and why ambitious and seemingly noble initiatives like the promotion of Internet freedom might have disastrous implications for the future of democracy as a whole.

The description of the Internet topology is an important open problem, recently tackled with the introduction of scale-free networks. We focus on the topological and dynamical properties of real Internet maps in a three-year time interval. We study higher order correlation functions as well as the dynamics of several quantities. We find that the Internet is characterized by non-trivial correlations among nodes and different dynamical regimes. We point out the importance of node hierarchy and aging in the Internet structure and growth. Our results provide hints towards the realistic modeling of the Internet evolution.

David Crystal investigates the nature of the impact which the Internet is making on language. There is already a widespread popular mythology that the Internet is going to be bad for the future of language - that technospeak will rule, standards be lost, and creativity diminished as globalization imposes sameness. The argument of this book is the reverse: that the Internet is in fact enabling a dramatic expansion to take place in the range and variety of language, and is providing unprecedented opportunities for personal creativity. The Internet has now been around long enough for us to 'take a view' about the way in which it is being shaped by and is shaping language and languages, and there is no-one better placed than David Crystal to take that view. His book is written to be accessible to anyone who has used the Internet and who has an interest in language issues.

Despite the apparent randomness of the Internet, we discover some surprisingly simple power-laws of the Internet topology. These power-laws hold for three snapshots of the Internet, between November 1997 and December 1998, despite a 45% growth of its size during that period. We show that our power-laws fit the real data very well resulting in correlation coefficients of 96% or higher.Our observations provide a novel perspective of the structure of the Internet. The power-laws describe concisely skewed distributions of graph properties such as the node outdegree. In addition, these power-laws can be used to estimate important parameters such as the average neighborhood size, and facilitate the design and the performance analysis of protocols. Furthermore, we can use them to generate and select realistic topologies for simulation purposes.

E-commerce success, especially in the business-to-consumer area, is determined in part by whether consumers trust sellers and products they cannot see or touch, and electronic systems with which they have no previous experience. This paper describes a theoretical model for investigating the four main antecedent influences on consumer trust in Internet shopping, a major form of business-to-consumer e-commerce: trustworthiness of the Internet merchant, trustworthiness of the Internet as a shopping medium, infrastructural (contextual) factors (e.g., security, third-party certification), and other factors (e.g., company size, demographic variables). The antecedent variables are moderated by the individual consumer's degree of trust propensity, which reflects personality traits, culture, and experience. Based on the research model, a comprehensive set of hypotheses is formulated and a methodology for testing them is outlined. Some of the hypotheses are tested empirically to demonstrate the applicability of the theoretical model. The findings indicate that merchant integrity is a major positive determinant of consumer trust in Internet shopping, and that its effect is moderated by the individual consumer's trust propensity.