With the emergence of online social network services such as Friendster and MySpace, mass interaction and social contact online had since became a vital part of our cyberculture. People who have difficulty engaging in real-life inter-personal contact may have turned reliant towards such sites to seek company. To gain virtual popularity on the Net, these people may spend an overboard amount of time online trying to promote and improving their online profiles. They may also spend an immoderate amount of time browsing other’s profiles.

These social network services, along with Instant Messaging, may also help in alleviating the troubles of shy people suffering from difficulties in communicating verbally. However they may develop a reliance on such online communication instead and become even more withdrawn or shy as they lack the experience of face-to-face communication. They may grow addicted to online communication, often going online just to chat with friends (or even strangers), with the comforts of being behind a computer screen to avoid personal contact, and the luxury of having time to plan and slowly type out a reply, instead of immediate responses expected in a verbal chat.

Blogs have also spawned a new group of Internet users called the “Bloggers”. These bloggers frequently post online on their blogs, which originated from online diaries. With the main source of popularity of blogs stemming from the interlinking of blogs, bloggers may obsessively spend their time getting their blogs onto “blogrolls” (affiliation with other blogs), so as to boost their “e-ego” by having more viewers on their blogs.