Cyberspace Game Show Hosts : Agents for Socialization, Not Just Entertainment
Kenrick J. Mock, Leora E. Lawton, Michelle Hoyle · 1996
As the Internet has grown in size and popularity, the Internet medium has changed from an educational and technical content to a social and entertainment content. The Lycos search service estimates that the number of WWW pages has grown from 5 million to 6.89 million pages during the months of April to June of 1995, and will reach 10 million pages by 1996. A large number of these pages are devoted to personal pages, whereas only a few years ago personal pages were nonexistent. Similarly, the EFnet Internet Relay Chat (IRC) servers have grown from supporting several hundred concurrent users in 1991 to over 20,000 concurrent users in 1996. Both the WWW and IRC are becoming active vehicles of socialization