What is a Netizen?

Well, that is a very good question. In conducting research on-line to determine people's uses for the 'Net in early 1990s, I became very excited at the prospects of this new social institution. In response to the excitment others had (and which I also had), I felt that the people I was writing about were citizens of the Net. Sometimes people on the Net would call the users of the Net, a net.citizen (read net citizen) as newsgroups were all originally net.x, where x was the subject and this was used in describing net entities. This idea I changed into the english Net Citizen, which further led to Netizen.

Here are some More thoughts on Netizens. Also, a speech I gave in Japan about the origins of Netizen, and an info page for the Netizens Association Mailing List.

Those interested in reading the results of my research can retrieve my paper "The Net and the Netizens: The Impact the Net has on People's Lives" in one of several ways:

Via FTP at wuarchive.wustl.edu
Via Plaintext WWW in USA. [Latest edited version of paper.]
Via Hypertexted WWW in USA.
Via Plain-text WWW at wuarchive.wustl.edu

Look to the Netizens Cyberstop page, the Netizens Netbook, and the Netizen Issue of the Amateur Computerist Newsletter for more information and thoughts about the concept of a Net Citizen.

E-mail me at hauben@columbia.edu if you have any thoughts or concerns about this concept, and thank you for reading! :-)

Return to the Netizens Cyberstop, or the Netizens Association Mailing list web page.

Michael Hauben / hauben@columbia.edu