Potentials of the Internet as a "Mass Medium"

   The Internet is rapidly getting popular also in Japan. In this paper, I report some results of our survey on the Internet users, and examine its potentials as mass medium. Optimistic idealists estimate highly its interactivity in communication, and think that many people is getting to use the Internet as the medium to participate 'virtual community.' Contrary to their expectation, our survey result shows that only 5% of users participate 'virtual community' actively and large part of users are passive audience of the WWW.