Užívání internetu a sociabilita: kořeny, vývoj a současnost výzkumu
Sociability and Internet usage: origins, development and contemporary state of the debate

Summary/Abstract: Since the very inception of social-scientific research on the Internet, the influence of the Internet on sociability has been an important issue. In the past twenty years, there has been an explosion of the volume of empirical evidence on this subject that has largely left students of this field with the impression of being confronted by a labyrinthine mass of observations replete with contradictory conclusions but offering little or no theoretical syntheses. In this article, the author seeks to systematize the broad range of findings on the Internet and sociability by posing three fundamental questions: does the Internet enrich a user‘s social life and if so in what ways; how are the benefits of Internet use as a medium of interpersonal communication distributed; and, what is the interaction between Internet effects and long-run structural changes in social behaviour. In order to answer these questions, the author compares the leading hypotheses on these issues with empirical evidence. The article offers two original contributions to the field. The first is that it links implicit ‘social theory’ of the computer networking inventors to the early stages of social scientific reflection on the issue of changes to sociability. The second is that the author offers the generalized conclusion that the Internet is merely an amplifying intermediary in a specifically structured transformation of social life (that is occurring irrespective of it) and possesses no inherent added value with the capacity to magically transform a user solely by the act of usage. Therefore, the distribution of benefits seems to a significant extent mimic the distribution of resources postulated in the ‘rich-get-richer’ hypothesis. In the concluding part, the author briefly discusses Wellman‘s concept of networked individualism, which is today both the most elaborated answer to the third question and the one most compatible with existing social theory.

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