A study has found that alternative news and comment sites have failed to divert the public from traditional media online, writes Karlin Lillington.

The internet may not be as revolutionary as you think.

Those are the conclusions drawn from a new European study that examines the role of the internet on influencing how people obtain information on, and ultimately, think about current events and politics.

Despite the hype over new net-based formats for discussion - in particular, weblogs or online journal/commentary sites, but also independent sites that offer spiky or unconventional coverage - such new sources for information have not changed the way people seek out what they consider to be reliable sources of information online.

"The results were very disappointing because the web seems only to reflect actions in the offline world," says Ann Zimmermann, one of the authors of the study and a PhD candidate studying political communities at the Free University of Berlin, who spoke last week on a panel on internet communities in Brussels at the launch of the European Parliament's redesigned website (www.europarl.eu.int).

"Traditional media remain the main actors, and one of my conclusions is that the traditional mass media are, and in future will remain, the most important source of information for people."

The funded study used search engines to conduct keyword searches in seven countries on topics as varied as pension schemes to agricultural policy. The researchers wanted to see which of what they termed "actors" or "claimants" were able to gain public attention for their claims. They also examined newspaper coverage within the same countries.

"Then, we could compare the distribution of the speakers that get heard on the internet versus the speakers in mass media," she says. Other studies focused on websites or certain commentators, she says.

But what about the way in which various search engines work - wouldn't that influence the results?

"From our perspective, it wasn't too important how search engines work, just as it wasn't important with newspapers and how they 'work' to decide which stories to cover. It is a different question to ask, 'what is the social reality reflected by this?'," she says.

The social reality that her group uncovered is one which won't make many webloggers and alternative news sites very happy.

"Even though the net complements existing channels, it neither overturns existing channels nor revolutionises ways of challenging existing power structures." The question of what people read and where they seek information on given topics has a bit of a chicken and egg slant.

According to Zimmermann: "It's more likely that people find the information on the net that corresponds to their pre-existing point of view, rather that a different point of view." Why?

"To perform a search on the internet, you need some pre-existing interest. These are largely shaped by existing mass media." This perspective received mixed backing from another researcher on the panel, Guilhem Fouetilou of French research group RTGI, who has created visual maps that show the interrelatedness of internet communities and websites. His group sent out "webbots" - small programmes that crawl the internet to bring back information about sites - and from this information, they mapped geographies of both the sites themselves and their relationship to other sites.

His work focused on websites created to provide information during the recent French referendum on the EU constitution. He felt the sites provided information that wasn't available from traditional media sources - for example, tens of thousands of people went to sites that offered the actual text of the proposed constitution, which few politicians or media outlets examined in the minute detail provided by the referendum sites.

On the other hand, such websites primarily offered links only to other related sites within their communities, he says. Few offered links to any sites offering an oppositional view, suggesting that people came to such sites with a pre-existing point of view, and then only viewed other sites that reinforced that pre-existing view.

Interestingly, Fouetilou felt that his own research demonstrated that the richest debates, reflecting the broadest range of views on the constitution and the referendum, came from traditional media sites - the bulletin boards and comment boards provided for readers on websites for traditional news media such as French newspapers, Le Monde and Libération.

Media sites "can really act as mediators," he says.

"On traditional media sites, people came from all directions and really had a debate, whereas they didn't do this on independent sites." Zimmermann feels that perhaps the role of the internet in shaping discussion and influencing news delivery is overstated simply because it is not the principal medium through which the majority of people get information on current events.

"I think one point where traditional media will remain the most important media is that not everyone wants to go to the internet for information nor is it clear which sources are reliable there. Therefore I don't think the web will be a central source for debates on political issues."

She is blunt on what she feels is its unimportance - it is a tool, but not a revolutionary tool: "I don't think the internet will change the structure of society or the political system. It does not inherently change what we are, or what we do." Now, there's a hot topic for debate on weblogs and the online bulletin boards.