The Net's population has not only changed numerically
but demographically since the beginning of the Nineties.
In 1993, the WWW's coloured surface was still somewhat
of a novelty and there were not
yet as many WWW servers on the Net.
Compared to previous offers on the Net,
the WWW is an almost exclusively
passively-used service, i.e. social
interaction does not take place as
much as it does on the older services Usenet
or Internet Relay Chat or on mailing lists.
The WWW's development was one of the reasons
why the Internet became immensely popular
and resulted in a large number of new users
and user groups. For many of these user groups,
"Community", "Global Village" or "Netizen"
remain meaningless catchphrases.
If for a growing number of screen-potatoes mouse-clicking on the WWW,
and therefore the passive consumption of information is the dominant online activity, then conditions for forming cultural patterns by way of social interaction are no longer given. In spite of this new "potato" way of using the Net, traditional "insiderism" on the Internet, which grew during the pre-WWW days, is characterized by a strong interest in computer technology. And even today there are people on the Internet who love computers.