Affective Dimensions of Internet Culture

This study examines online culture by constructing an affective portrait of Internet users. Respondents were recruited through a highly visible advertisement on the Yahoo! search engine, and their sentiments were collected with a Web-based survey instrument using Osgood’s semantic-differential technique. The study had three particularly engaging findings: First, Internet users hold extremely intense and nuanced affective sentiments toward the components of their online world. Second, these sentiments vary with the amount of time Internet users spend online as well as their cumulative years of Internet experience. Third, men and women have slightly different affective responses toward many components of online culture, suggesting that despite the supposedly gender-free nature of the Internet, men and women experience somewhat different online social worlds.