Social Impact
The Internet has created new forums of social interaction and social relations including social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace and sites such as meetup.com and Couchsurfing which facilitate offline interaction.
Though virtual communities were once thought to be composed of strictly virtual social ties, researchers often find that even those social ties formed in virtual spaces are often maintained both online and offline
There are ongoing debates about the impact of the Internet on strong and weak ties, whether the internet is creating more or less social capital, the internet's role in trends towards social isolation, and whether it creates a more or less diverse social environment.
It is often said the Internet is a new frontier, and there is a line of argument to the effect that social interaction, cooperation and conflict among users resembles the anarchistic and violent American frontier of the early 19th century.
Read more about this topic: Sociology Of The Internet
Famous quotes containing the words social and/or impact:
“There is no morality by instinct.... There is no social salvation—in the end—without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)