of speech, which is why certain countries such as China and Germany, have done everything in their power to restrict the content made available to citizens. However, because of the Constitution, American government is finding it rather difficult to set up a ‘gatekeeping’ system, which will restrict content available within the United States. To allow the government to do this would completely defeat the purpose of such a versatile and expansive medium.In order to research the societal effects of this mass medium on the population, it is more convenient to break the audience up into groups, rather than look at the individuals. Because of the expansiveness of the Internet, it is not easy to ascertain the demographics of the average users in an accurate way. Surveys can be created, but it is even more difficult to gather demographic research for the Internet than it is for television or radio, and acceptable samples of Internet users are not easy to obtain. Internet users can be broken up into groups of gender and age first, and further down the line, by social class. Ethnicity is generally not a good way to analyze the ‘average’ user because within the US there is a very small portion of non-whites using the Internet, so generally, targeting a particular ethnic group is not commonly done by sites on the Internet. The difficulty of breaking up the Internet audience into ‘manageable’ groups has been a source of some debate among researchers and academics. Leslie Regan Shade noted in a talk, Community Internetworking: The International Free-Internet Conference, ‘One of the characteristics of computer mediated-communication (CMC) is its lack of easy social contextualization.’Most current researchers tend to analyze the Internet through the critical approach. Rather than attempt to look at the influence on individuals using the Internet, they study the influences on society, or the whol...
