Permanently Online: A Challenge for Media and Communication Research

Media and communication research has developed and flourished mainly as a discipline that investigates what the media do to people. In the 1970s, this question was turned upside down and gave way to the opposite question: What do people do with media? The underlying assumption that led to this new paradigmatic question was the model of a person who is not only capable of resisting persuasive messages but who individually selects, understands, interprets, and, lately, even produces such messages in a way that is difficult to predict and that seems to be dependent only on the given situation and the personality of the user. Along this line, media effects research has become a scientific endeavor about people’s exposure to media content, focusing on psychological and sociological processes that moderate and mediate what happens between a communication intention and a communication effect. With the Internet, this situation has again changed fundamentally. The Internet allows people to communicate seemingly independent from time and place—that is, potentially always and everywhere. People are no longer subject to individual messages; rather, they seem to communicate and interact almost permanently. Why they do this and what the long-term effects of it are, however, are questions our discipline has not yet started to study and to debate. Following media effects research from the 20th century, we tend to believe that media users use the media in ways that serve them best—that is, in people’s best interest. However, in light of more recent observations about people’s online behavior, this assumption seems increasingly questionable. We discuss in this article why media users tend to be online almost permanently and how this question—and the possible answers to it—challenge the discipline and affect (or should affect) its development and future.