NIGHTLY-AT-NBC.COM - AUDIENCE SCOPE AND THE PERCEPTION OF INTERACTIVITY IN VIEWER MAIL ON THE INTERNET

A content analysis looked at 650 Internet mail messages sent to NBC Ni ghtly News in response to an invitation during a series dealing with t he impact of new technologies. Message indexes were created to reflect the scope of the audience they addressed. Macro-scopic messages were formal dealt with political issues, and either did not mention technol ogy or mentioned mass media. These messages resembled a letter to a ne wspaper editor Mezzo-scopic messages were positive and avoided politic al issues. They congratulated NBC as a team for their work on the tech nology series and tended to mention computers. Macro-scopic messages s tood out for their authors' high perception of interactivity. These me ssages mentioned computer technology snore than any other group and ap pear similar to face-to-face communication in many ways. Results are d iscussed in terms of how the relationship between media users' perceiv ed sense of interactivity and the scope of the audience they address a re related to message style and content.