170 | Mass Media and Historical Change
being used commonly in specific public locations before private appropria-
tion took over. Places for this shared use were market squares (flyers), coffee
houses and pubs (newspapers), reading societies (periodicals) and television
viewing rooms, just as Internet cafés provided initial access to digital com-
munication before private use of the computers became established. As the
older media had done, the Internet has demonstrated that media are closely
connected with personal communication. ‘Social networks’ like Facebook and
email correspondence provide links to friends outside the medium and are
thus considered a ‘real life extension’. Once again, like in the age of radio or
television, personal contacts in the real world have not been diminished, but
have increased due to a new medium.
Although expansive in character, nevertheless the media have also stood for
the exclusion of certain social groups, particularly during the early phases of
their development. As numerous examples in this book have demonstrated, it
was primarily men who used new media initially, although the participation
of women on the public media stage of past centuries has often been under-
estimated. The same holds true for the beginnings of the Internet and still has
some validity today. Like the old media, the Internet exhibits gender-specific
contents and uses. Women primarily opt for the direct communicative func-
tions of the Internet and produce public contents less frequently. Future dia-
chronic studies will show the Internet, like older media, has strengthened and
reshaped gender-specific roles. It has often been pointed out that the Internet
offers women and minorities better opportunities of accessing public spaces
because it enables incorporeal communication and dissimulation. This aspect
too has a tradition reaching back at least as far as the periodical market of the
eighteenth century. Be that as it may, the societal ‘Digital Divide’, as sociolo-
gists call it, nevertheless exists. Internet users, at least in a global perspective,
are overwhelmingly better educated, younger, more affluent, and live in indus-
trialised countries, whereas underprivileged population groups often missed
the new opportunities offered by this new medium. Thus in their early phases,
new media have often been seen to subvert that very promise of integration
and participation which the Internet also holds out. In wealthy countries,
where the majority of the populace enjoys private Internet access, one can
again trace the ‘Knowledge Gap Hypothesis’ that likewise developed with the
old media. According to this theory, educated and successful people become
more clever and more successful through media use, whereas the less educated
do not, since they select and process content differently.
However, future social histories of the Internet must not become too
absorbed in describing such social amplification effects. It was historically
much more common for new media to go hand in hand with changes in
social groupings. One may call to mind the religious division that came in
the wake of print, the formation of the bourgeoisie in the context of the