Contrary to popular belief, chat rooms and blogs aren't just for teens. At no other time in the history of research has the consumer so willingly and publicly surrendered their innermost feelings and sentiments. Although effective for the researcher willing to scour billions of web pages of such banter, they weren't put there for us. They were put there for friends and family.

Like all social gathering places since the birth of man, the internet serves one fundamental purpose - to connect people and allow them to interact with each other. The raging success of email, online chatting, blogs and personal homepages are simply extensions of this truth. To use one of the definitions of environment from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, the internet has become a "complex of social and cultural conditions affecting the nature of an individual or community."

As researchers, we have become accustomed to looking at the internet as just another medium by which it is possible to send out requests for information, and await its return - and we call this interactive. However, as an environment, the internet provides the researcher with a practical, convenient, and quality alternative to sending requests. And in the same manner you, the researcher, go to the mall to interview and observe, it is possible to do the same online. Ultimately, the internet is more than simply a medium.