Poker Tournament was held in 1997. Today, those figures have increased by a factor
of ten—1.8 million players bet $300 million online every single day. The single largest
group of online poker players is young men, 14 to 22 years old, according to the
National Annenberg Risk Survey (NARSY) in 2003 and 2004. One in eight college
guys is betting on poker games online at least once a week (see Conley, 2005).
Pornography is a massive media category worldwide. In the United States, gross
sales of all pornographic media range between $10 and $14 billion a year for the
whole industry—more than the NFL, the NBA, and Major League Baseball combined,
or, in media terms, with revenues greater than ABC, NBC, and CBS combined. Sales
and rentals of videos and DVDs alone gross about $4 billion a year. More than 200
new pornographic videos are produced every week. Adult bookstores outnumber
McDonald’s restaurants in the United States—by a margin of at least three to one.
On the Internet, pornography has increased 1,800 percent, from 14 million web pages
in 1998 to 260 million in 2003 (Williams, 2004). One study found that the adult enter-
tainment is the number one thing people do online, outpacing even e-mail and search
engine use (Grover, 2006).
What often concerns parents is the time boys spend using these media. They claim
that these media have replaced social interaction with these solitary activities. What
is of interest to sociologists, though, is that the use of these new media is so heavily
gendered, and that young males seem to use them not in place of social interaction
but as a form of interaction itself. Young males play video games together, play poker
online together, and even watch pornography together. How does this new medium
of interaction change the patterns of friendships and interaction?The Internet. There was a home computer on the market as far back as 1975: the
Altair 8800, which came unassembled, with a price of $5,000 (in today’s dollars,
that would be $18,000). Personal computers were a business tool, not a mass
medium. But with the development of the World Wide Web in the 1980s, the
computer had transformed the world yet again. Later called the Internet, online
usage grew 300,000 percent per year: There were 10,000 network hosts in 1987,
and 1,000,000 in 1992. By 2007, every country in the world, with a very few
exceptions (Monserrat, the Isle of Man,
Palau), was online (Abbate, 2000; Campbell-
Kelly, 2004; World Internet Statistics).
As of 2007, the Internet was accessed by
76 percent of the population of Sweden, 70
percent of the United States, 67 percent of
Japan. Beyond the core countries, penetration
is considerably smaller: 16 percent in Colom-
bia, 13 percent in Venezuela, 11 percent in
Saudi Arabia, 10 percent in South Africa, 7
percent in Pakistan. In poor countries, Internet
access remains an overwhelmingly elite activ-
ity, available to well under 1 percent of the
population. But even there, change is coming.
In 2000, Somalia had 200 users; today it has
90,000, an increase of 44,900 percent (World
Internet Statistics).
The Internet became so integral to middle-
class lives, both at home and at work, that it
is hard to believe that it is only 20 years old,
and most people in the world grew up without594 CHAPTER 18MASS MEDIAPersonal computers, now
nearly universal in the indus-
trialized world, are the center-
piece of our interface with
media—they store informa-
tion, give access to the Web,
store music, video, movies, TV,
and old love letters. The first
general-purpose computer,
called the Electronic Numeri-
cal Integrator and Computer
(ENIAC), was built by the U.S.
Army in the 1940s. It weighed
30 tons, was eight feet high,
three feet deep, and 100 feet
long, and contained over
18,000 vacuum tubes that
were cooled by 80 air blowers.
And it mainly stored
information. n