The Internet at home
Robert E. Kraut · Communications of the ACM · 1996
growth occurring in homes.The telecommunications and computing industries are reorganizing to provide electronic services to households through computer-based telecommunications.Hardware and software companies and service providers are redesigning their offerings to appeal to the home market.Finally, federal policy is encouraging and seeding a national information infrastructure designed to make these services widely available.Despite these changes, we have too little understanding of how people at homein their roles as family members, students, participants in the labor force, members of groups and communities, or just as citizens-use the new services and what they want from them.Similarly, we have little understanding about how these services, once used, affect people's lives.The thesis of this special section is that good empirical research is crucial to both designing what might be termed the new home computing and understanding its impact.Most of our current insight about this subject comes from drawing analogies from the histories of older technologies or from carefully examining the behavior of the early adopters of emerging technologies.Both provide valuable insight, but both have limitations.