| Under the broad canopy of communication, in the subsidiary field of mass communication, this work investigates the emerging domain of computer-mediated communication, chiefly mass communication via global computer information networks. This work extends the study of mass communication to include neoteric media forms. It explores the World Wide Web, a segment of the global information internetwork, as a medium of mass communication. A theoretical framework is drawn from a review of mass communication literature to place global information networks as mass media. Twentieth century social, cultural and technological history of global information networks are explicated, particularly the hypertext, hypermedia World Wide Web. ARPAnet, a 1969 Pentagon doomsday plan to operate computers in a nuclear war, spawned the Internet which brought global information storage and retrieval to the common person in the 1990s as the World Wide Web. Multimedia publication is explored as a creative project in which a news publication circulated via global information networks is constructed. The processes and procedures in conceiving and implementing such an Internet mass medium are compared with the methods and operations during design and execution of a traditional print magazine. An "everbearing model" for Internet publishing is set forth. In this paradigm, a publication is produced continuously and is driven neither by calendar deadlines nor news hole as in the traditional printed magazine model. The everbearing model devolves a publication more reminiscent of a newspaper which might always include and reproduce its own morgue, than it is of a traditional monthly magazine with previously-published information locked into separate back issues. Unlike a magazine, the everbearing online publication always grows. It doesn't grow and shrink monthly according to available news hole-space on its pages. A 400-entry glossary defines Internet, World Wide Web, and computer-network terms. |
