If you viewed Internet communication only in terms of technologies, you might be baffled by its rising popularity. After all, the technology necessary to communicate online is complicated, buggy, fairly expensive, unreliable, and often cryptically documented. It must be that only geeks would want to use the Internet. However, there is a different view that holds CMC on the Internet as not determined by technology, but shaped by human needs for communication. Human communication is chaotic, often irrational, but has seemed to be an activity that people have consistently pursued throughout history.
People seem to do almost anything to be able to be in contact with each other.
But that contact, as adoption patterns have demonstrated several times in history, show that people adopt communications technologies on their own terms, not in terms of the technical characteristics or capabilities of those technologies. Ever since I first sent and received email more than ten years ago, I've grown in my understanding of the Internet. When I worked as a software engineer, I exchanged email with people I knew and worked with. I read Usenet news and read what people were writing about many subjects. I knew the Net wasn't like a library, and I knew that I could not rely on the truth of what I read without critical consideration, just as I didn't believe everything my neighbor told me, or believe all that I saw on TV or what I read in newspapers.