Fragmentation is apparent in a number of different spheres on the Web. First, the Web offers the ultimate in niche marketing: millions of discussion groups, newsgroups, special interest groups, and a greater diversity of products and services than any shopping or strip mall. Indeed, a significant amount of the material placed on the Internet is designed to reach a single person, a handful of people, or a group of less than 1,000.
Second, the very fact that people find companies' Web sites, rather than companies finding prospective customers, as in traditional media, means that the premise of mass marketing is rendered questionable at best, and irrelevant at worst. The advent of push technologies, though, may render part of the Web a little more familiar to traditional marketing. However, to bank on this is to misunderstand the nature of the Web and ignore its possibilities.
Third, people experience and behave differently in the new medium, with the Web resulting in a fragmentation of consensus. Research suggests that people feel more able to disagree and express differences in virtual media, and specifically on the Internet. Respondents in computer-mediated environments are more frank on sensitive topics, yet more inclined to offer false information in order to avoid identification. There is a lack of self-awareness and self-regulation of behavior. As well, the new medium has fueled and facilitated, to an unprecedented degree the fragmentation of the self. Individuals participating in MUDs, MOOs, and discussion groups regularly adopt multiple, often-contradictory identities, personas, and personalities. For example, research reports that 20 percent of participants in these forums regularly pose as the opposite gender.
Fourth, the Web is the ultimate global presence. This would seem to result in unprecedented unification and integration, yet the more closely we are linked, the more pronounced our differences become. Digitization breaks down wholes or entities (people, personalities, human beings) into millions of fragments, disconnected minutiae that can then be recombined across people into dehumanized profiles. This fragmentation mirrors the underlying Internet communication protocol, packet switching, which disassembles messages into packages (see ). These fragments, mingled with many other fragments, are transported from sender to receiver, where they are finally reassembled. The Web takes this digitization and packetizing to unprecedented lengths, with Internet companies, from banks to bookshops, typically knowing much more about their customers than traditional marketplace-based firms. Yet, paradoxically, as technology facilitates the much sought after one-to-one customer interaction, the customer becomes ever more fleeting, for the same technology allows customers to recreate and reinvent themselves in a collage of new co-existing images.
The Web fragments, and the successful Web companies of tomorrow, will exhibit this process--because their customers will.
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