The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project is a “fact tank” of primary research that has documented three revolutions in digital technology in the United States since 2000. First, the project has charted the rise of the Internet and broadband connections in the U.S. Second, it has explored the rise of mobile connectivity on mobile phones and laptops. Third, it has charted the growth of social media, especially social networking websites. At the same time, the project has paid particular attention to probing the impact of digital technology on six domains of the social world: 1) the impact on families, 2) communities, 3) healthcare, 4) education, both formal and informal, 5) politics and civic life, and 6) workplaces. All of the reports of the project and the survey data it has collected are available for free from its website at pewinternet.org.

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As users interact via social media spaces, like Twitter, they form connections that emerge into complex social network structures. These connections are indicators of content sharing, and network structures reflect patterns of information flow. This article proposes a conceptual and practical model for the classification of topical Twitter networks, based on their network-level structures. As current literature focuses on the classification of users to key positions, this study utilizes the overall network structures in order to classify Twitter conversation based on their patterns of information flow. Four network-level metrics, which have established as indicators of information flow characteristics—density, modularity, centralization, and the fraction of isolated users—are utilized in a three-step classification model. This process led us to suggest six structures of information flow: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, in and out hub-and-spoke networks. We demonstrate the value of these network structures by segmenting 60 Twitter topical social media network datasets into these six distinct patterns of collective connections, illustrating how different topics of conversations exhibit different patterns of information flow. We discuss conceptual and practical implications for each structure.

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The Internet opens new options for communication and may change the extent to which people use older communication media. Changes in the way people communicate are important, because communication is the mechanism people use to develop and maintain social relationships, so valuable for their physical and mental health. This paper uses data from a national panel survey conducted in 2000 and 2001 to examine the influence of Internet use on communication and on social involvement. In doing so, it contrasts the conclusions one can draw from cross‐sectional and longitudinal data on these issues. Longitudinal analyses provide stronger evidence of the causal effects of using the Internet than do the cross‐sectional ones. The longitudinal data show that heavy use of the Internet is associated with reductions in the likelihood of visiting family or friends on a randomly selected day. Cross‐sectional analyses show high correlations between the frequency with which respondents communicate with specific family members by visits, phone calls and email, suggesting that communication in one medium stimulates the others. In contrast, longitudinal analyses suggest that the links between communication media are asymmetric: visits drive more email communication and phone calls drive more visits, but email drives neither phone calls nor visits.