The affective sentiments of Internet participants towards Internet concepts

I report the findings of a Web-based survey of Internet participants that asked about their feelings towards common Internet concepts. The core analyses, which are quantitative in nature, focus on three issues related to the connotative meanings of Internet concepts: First, what do the affective sentiments of Internet participants towards Internet concepts suggest about the character of the online social environment? Second, do the sentiments of Internet participants towards Internet concepts suggest that the meanings of those concepts are highly consensual? Finally, are the affective sentiments of Internet participants towards Internet concepts significantly more extreme than those of ordinary people towards offline concepts? In addition to evaluating the usefulness of two theoretical models for answering these questions (Pelto's cultural tightness-looseness construct and Latane's Catastrophe Theory of Attitudes), I also examine how a number of demographic traits and Internet use patterns influence the twin issues of affective consensus and extremity. Two findings are especially interesting: First, the cumulative number of years that respondents reported spending online had little impact on the variability or extremity of their Internet concept ratings. Second, the amount of time respondents reported spending online per week had a significant impact on the variability and extremity of their Internet concept ratings. I interpret these two findings as indicating that socialization to the online social environment (in the sense of long-term experience with it) is less influential than their level of current, ongoing immersion in the online social environment in determining the variability and extremity of Internet participants' feelings towards online concepts. The survey findings also indicate that demographic traits and usage patterns provide good explanatory power. However, a cluster analysis model, which treats each case as a member of a group of respondents sharing equivalent connotative meanings rather than as a linear combination of demographic variables, may be a more useful approach for understanding the cultural meanings shared by indigenous groups of heterogeneous Internet participants. Researchers examining the Internet social environment in the future could profitably use the Internet participant response clusters identified in this study to refine their classification of different sectors of the online population.