The term netizen is a portmanteau of the English words internet and citizen , [1] as in a "citizen of the net" or "net citizen". [2] [3] [4] It describes a person [5] actively involved in online communities or the Internet in general. [6] [7]
The term commonly also implies an interest and active engagement in improving the internet, making it an intellectual and a social resource, [5] or its surrounding political structures, especially in regard to open access, net neutrality and free speech. [8] The term was widely adopted in the mid-1990s as a way to describe those who inhabit the new geography of the internet. [9] Internet pioneer and author Michael F. Hauben is credited with coining and popularizing the term. [5] [10] [11] [12] [13]
In general, any individual who has access to the internet has the potential to be classified as a netizen. In the 21st century, this is made possible by the global connectivity of the internet. People can physically be located in one country but connected to most of the world via a global network. [12]
There is a clear distinction between netizens and people who come online to use the internet. A netizen is described as an individual who actively seek to contribute to the development of the internet. [14] Netizens are not individuals who go online for personal gain or profit, but instead actively seeks to make the internet a better place. [15] [12]
A term used to classify internet users who do not actively contribute to the development of the internet is "lurker". Lurkers cannot be classified as netizens, as although they do not actively harm the internet, they do not contribute either. [16] [17] [18]
Besides, lurkers seemed to be more critical of the technological elements enabling communities whereas posters appeared to be more critical of users who hampered community creation by making rude or unpleasant comments. Additionally, discussions indicate that both lurkers and posters had distinct motives for lurking and might modify their engagement behaviours based on how they understand the community from various online groups, despite the fact that engagement between those who post and those who lurk was different in the communities studied. [19]
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In Mandarin Chinese, the terms wǎngmín (simplified Chinese :网民; traditional Chinese :網民, literally "netizen" or "net folks") and wǎngyǒu (simplified Chinese :网友; traditional Chinese :網友, literally "net friend" or "net mate") are commonly used terms meaning "internet users", and the English word netizen is used by mainland China-based English language media to translate both terms, resulting in the frequent appearance of that English word in media reporting about China, far more frequently than the use of the word in other contexts. [20] [21]
The international nonprofit organisation Reporters Without Borders awards an annual Netizen Prize in recognition to an internet user, blogger, cyber-dissident, or group who has helped to promote freedom of expression on the internet. [22] [23] [24] The organisation uses the term when describing the political repression of cyber-dissidents such as legal consequences of blogging in politically repressive environments.
With time, more and more people have started interacting and building communities online. The effect it has on human psychology and life is of major interest and concern to researchers. Several studies are being done on netizens under the name Netizens’ Psychology. [25] [26] Problems are internet addiction, mental health, outrage, and the effect on kids' development are some of the many problems netizen psychology tries to focus on. [27]
The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing.
grep
is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines that match a regular expression. Its name comes from the ed command g/re/p
, which has the same effect. grep
was originally developed for the Unix operating system, but later available for all Unix-like systems and some others such as OS-9.
Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telephone line. Dial-up connections use modems to decode audio signals into data to send to a router or computer, and to encode signals from the latter two devices to send to another modem at the ISP.
China censors both the publishing and viewing of online material. Many controversial events are censored from news coverage, preventing many Chinese citizens from knowing about the actions of their government, and severely restricting freedom of the press. China's censorship includes the complete blockage of various websites, apps, video games, inspiring the policy's nickname, the "Great Firewall of China", which blocks websites. Methods used to block websites and pages include DNS spoofing, blocking access to IP addresses, analyzing and filtering URLs, packet inspection, and resetting connections.
Mary Ann Horton, is a Usenet and Internet pioneer. Horton contributed to Berkeley UNIX (BSD), including the vi editor and terminfo database, created the first email binary attachment tool uuencode, and led the growth of Usenet in the 1980s.
Cyberterrorism is the use of the Internet to conduct violent acts that result in, or threaten, the loss of life or significant bodily harm, in order to achieve political or ideological gains through threat or intimidation. Acts of deliberate, large-scale disruption of computer networks, especially of personal computers attached to the Internet by means of tools such as computer viruses, computer worms, phishing, malicious software, hardware methods, and programming scripts can all be forms of internet terrorism. Cyberterrorism is a controversial term. Some authors opt for a very narrow definition, relating to deployment by known terrorist organizations of disruption attacks against information systems for the primary purpose of creating alarm, panic, or physical disruption. Other authors prefer a broader definition, which includes cybercrime. Participating in a cyberattack affects the terror threat perception, even if it isn't done with a violent approach. By some definitions, it might be difficult to distinguish which instances of online activities are cyberterrorism or cybercrime.
Human Rights Internet (HRI) is a non-governmental organization based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, supporting the exchange of information within the worldwide human rights community.
Tom Truscott is an American computer scientist best known for creating Usenet with Jim Ellis, when both were graduate students at Duke University. He is also a member of ACM, IEEE, and Sigma Xi. One of his first endeavors into computers was writing a computer chess program and then later working on a global optimizer for C at Bell Labs. This computer chess program competed in multiple computer chess tournaments such as the Toronto chess tournament in 1977 and the Linz tournament in 1980. Today, Truscott works on tools that analyze software as a software developer for the SAS Institute.
Usenet, USENET, or, "in full", User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a general rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an Internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk. Variants include the 1–9–90 rule, which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants change or update content, and 1% of the participants add content.
Human flesh search engine is a Chinese term for the phenomenon of distributed researching using Internet media such as blogs and forums. Internet media, namely dedicated websites and Internet forums, are in fact platforms that enable the broadcast of request and action plans concerning human flesh search and that allow the sharing of online and offline search results. Human flesh search has two eminent characteristics. First, it involves strong offline elements including information acquisition through offline channels and other types of offline activism. Second, it always relies on crowdsourcing: web users collaborate to share information, conduct investigations, and perform other actions concerning people or events of common interest.
The 50 Cent Party, also known as the 50 Cent Army or wumao, are Internet commenters who are paid by the authorities of the People's Republic of China to spread the propaganda of the governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It was created during the early phases of the Internet's rollout to the wider public in China.
Cybersectarianism is the phenomenon of new religious movements and other groups using the Internet for text distribution, recruitment, and information sharing.
The Grass Mud Horse is a Chinese Internet meme and kuso parody based on a word play of the Mandarin profanity cào nǐ mā (肏你妈), which literally means "fuck your mother".
Nawaat is an independent collective blog co-founded by Tunisians Sami Ben Gharbia, Sufian Guerfali and Riadh Guerfali in 2004, with Malek Khadraoui joining the organization in 2006. The goal of Nawaat's founders was to provide a public platform for Tunisian dissident voices and debates. Nawaat aggregates articles, visual media, and other data from a variety of sources to provide a forum for citizen journalists to express their opinions on current events. The site does not receive any donations from political parties. During the events leading to the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, Nawaat advised Internet users in Tunisia and other Arab nations about the dangers of being identified online and offered advice about circumventing censorship. Nawaat is an Arabic word meaning core. Nawaat has received numerous awards from international media organizations in the wake of the Arab Spring wave of revolutions throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
Gabriele Hooffacker is a German journalist, journalism teacher and a professor for specifics of media at Leipzig University of Applied Science. Her research interests are online media as well as interactive and participative formats in journalism.
A cyber manhunt in Hong Kong is a term for the behavior of tracking down and exploring an individual's private information via internet media. A cyber manhunt generally involves netizens and is regarded as the purpose of a cyber judgment to the target through blaming, shaming, and naming culprits.
The Berkeley Network, or Berknet, was an early wide area network, developed at the University of California, Berkeley in 1978, primarily by Eric Schmidt as part of his master's thesis work. The network continuously connected about a dozen computers running BSD and provided email, file transfer, printing and remote command execution services to its users, and it connected to the two other major networks in use at the time, the ARPANET and UUCPNET.
Netto-uyoku or net uyoku, often shortened to neto-uyo (ネトウヨ), is the term used to refer to Japanese netizens who espouse ultranationalist far-right views on social media. Netto-uyoku is evaluated as sharing similarities to Western right-wing populism or the alt-right.
Michael Frederick Hauben was an American Internet theorist and author. He pioneered the study of the social impact of the Internet. Based on his interactive online research, in 1993 he coined the term and developed the concept of Netizen to describe an Internet user who actively contributes towards the development of the Net and acts as a citizen of the Net and of the world. Along with Ronda Hauben, he co-authored the 1997 book Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet. Hauben's work is widely referenced in many scholarly articles and publications about the social impact of the Internet.