The Handbook of Internet Studies E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Handbooks in Communication and Media
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1138

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The Handbook of Internet Studies HANDBOOKS IN COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA "Highly recommended." CHOICE "A state-of-the-art collection that represents and celebrates the diversity of theoretical and disciplinary approaches marking this brave new field. A new must-have reference book for Internet studies." Caroline Haythornthwaite, University of Illinois "This indispensable volume reflects the complexity of Internet studies - indeed, the Internet itself - by bringing together a diverse set of voices, geographies, disciplines, and arguments. It is not only an important resource for practitioners, but will also spark the curiosity of those on the edges of the field, including humanists, social scientists, and engineers alike." Michael Zimmer, University of Wisconsin "A comprehensive and useful volume that will appeal to students, teachers, and researchers. I highly recommend it to those who have been following the field since its emergence in the 1990s as well as to those new to the field." Steve Jones, University of Illinois at Chicago "This handbook is landmark, documenting that Internet studies have now come of age." Niels Ole Finnemann, Aarhus University To fully understand the impact and significance of the Internet, it is essential to consider its historical, societal, and cultural contexts. This handbook presents a wide range of original essays by established scholars in the field of Internet studies exploring the role of the Internet in modern societies, and the continuing development of its academic study.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Half Title page

Handbooks in Communication and Media

Title page

Copyright page

Notes on Editors and Contributors

Acknowledgment

Introduction: What is “Internet Studies”?

Internet Studies: Emerging Domains, Terrains, Commonalities

Where Are We Now – And Where Are We Going?

Postlude

Notes

References

Part I: Beyond the Great Divides? A Primer on Internet Histories, Methods, and Ethics

Introduction to Part I

Introducing the Chapters

References

Chapter 1: Studying the Internet Through the Ages

Pre-History

The First Age of Internet Studies: Punditry Rides Rampant

The Second Age of Internet Studies: Systematic Documentation of Users and Uses

The Third Age: From Documentation to Analysis

Note

References

Chapter 2: Web Archiving – Between Past, Present, and Future

Web Archiving and Archiving Strategies

A Brief History of Web Archiving

The Archived Web Document

Web Philology and the Use of Archived Web Material

The Future of Web Archiving

Notes

References

Chapter 3: New Media, Old Methods – Internet Methodologies and the Online/Offline Divide

Introduction

Media of Three Degrees

After the Great Divides

Methodologies versus Methods

Availability, Accessibility, and Performativity

Remediated Methods

The Double Hermeneutics of the Internet

Conclusion

References

Chapter 4: The Internet in Everyday Life: Exploring the Tenets and Contributions of Diverse Approaches

Introduction

What is Everyday Life?

The Surface Everyday: Measuring Trends and Impacts

The Deeper Everyday: Interpretation and Critique

Conclusion

References

Chapter 5: Internet Research Ethics: Past, Present, and Future

Introduction and Background

Enter the Internets

Ethical Considerations

Future Directions and Future Research: Research Ethics 2.0?

References

Part II: Shaping Daily Life: The Internet and Society

Introduction to Part II

Introducing the Chapters

Final Questions

Chapter 6: Assessing the Internet’s Impact on Language

Chapter Overview

A Note on Terminology

Direct Effects: Is EMC Harming the Language?

Effects on Written Culture

Controlling the Volume and Multitasking

Conclusions

Notes

References

Chapter 7: Internet Policy

What is Policy?

What Is Internet Policy?

Where is Internet Policy Made?

The “Big Four” Issues

Conclusions

Notes

References

Chapter 8: Political Discussion Online

Why Political Discourse Matters for Democracy

Internet and Discourse Online: Features and Challenges

Technologies for Political Discourse Online

Who Talks

The Quality of Online Deliberation

Nation-Based Influences of Online Discussion

Conclusions

Notes

References

Chapter 9: Does the Internet Empower? A Look at the Internet and International Development

Theories of Information Technology (IT) for Development – a Cross-Disciplinary Global Narrative

IT and Development in Practice

Least Developed Countries Initiative

Conclusions – The Persistence of Development Challenges, in Spite of Web Diffusion

Notes

References

Chapter 10: Internet and Health Communication

Information

Exchange

Treatment

Infrastructure

Theoretical Approaches to Health and the Internet

Future Directions

References

Chapter 11: Internet and Religion

Mapping Three Waves of Research

“First-Wave” Research on Religion and the Internet

“Second-Wave” Studies of Religion Online

“Third-Wave” Research

Future of Research on Religion Online

References

Chapter 12: Indigenous Peoples on the Internet

Introduction

The Strength of the Indigenous Internet Presence

Challenges to Indigenous Participation on the Internet

Reaffirmation of Indigenous Identity

Reconnecting the Indigenous Diaspora

Indigenous Cyberactivism

Language Online

Conclusion

References

Chapter 13: Community and the Internet

Serious Play and Shifting Internet Cultures

Genre, Accountability, and Credible Selves

Intersections of Gender and Sexuality

Bodies as Borders of Community

Queer Movements and Emotions

Future Challenges of Internet Studies, Gender, and Sexuality

Notes

References

Part III: Internet and Culture

Introduction to Part III

Introducing the Chapters

Future Questions

References

Chapter 14: Community and the Internet

Defining the Undefinable

Community versus Networked Individualism

Real Communities versus Pseudocommunities

Virtual Communities

Community Lifecycles

Conflict, Cooperation, and Control

Identity

Community On- and Offline

Future Directions

References

Chapter 15: MOOs to MMOs: The Internet and Virtual Worlds

A Short History of Virtual Worlds

Research on Virtual Worlds

References

Chapter 16: Internet, Children, and Youth

Introduction – The “Digital Generation”

Theoretical Framings

Explorations of the Self

Learning – Traditional and Alternative

Opportunities to Participate

Risky Encounters

Conclusions

References

Chapter 17: Internet and Games

Brief History of Online Gaming

Player (and Character) Identity

Studying Communities In and Around Games

Digital Play Industry and The Co-Construction of Games

Conclusion

Notes

References

Chapter 18: Social Networks 2.0

Social Network Sites

Identity

Relationships

Community

Missing Topics

References

Chapter 19: Newly Mediated Media: Understanding the Changing Internet Landscape of the Media Industries

Promotion

Replication

Income

Alliances

Replacement

Conclusion

References

Chapter 20: Online Pornography: Ubiquitous and Effaced

Pornography, Technology, and Moral Panics

Netporn and Alt Porn

Amateurs Abound

Methodological Challenges

Local and Global

References

Chapter 21: Music and the Internet

Music and the Internet: The Music Industry

Music and the Internet: The Audience

Music and the Internet: Musicians

Conclusion

References

Chapter 22: Why and How Online Sociability Became Part and Parcel of Teenage Life

Introduction

The Escalation of Online Sociability

Young, Dim, and Vulnerable?

Risk-Assessment in Networked Publics

Concluding Discussion

Notes

References

Index

The Handbook of Internet Studies

Handbooks in Communication and Media

This series aims to provide theoretically ambitious but accessible volumes devoted to the major fields and subfields within communication and media studies. Each volume sets out to ground and orientate the student through a broad range of specially commissioned chapters, while also providing the more experienced scholar and teacher with a convenient and comprehensive overview of the latest trends and critical directions.

The Handbook of Children, Media, and Development, edited by Sandra L. Calvert and Barbara J. Wilson

The Handbook of Crisis Communication, edited by W. Timothy Coombs and Sherry J. Holladay

The Handbook of Internet Studies, edited by Mia Consalvo and Charles Ess

The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, edited by Shawn J. Parry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan

The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, edited by Thomas K. Nakayama and Rona Tamiko Halualani

The Handbook of Global Communication and Media Ethics, edited by Robert S. Fortner and P. Mark Fackler

Forthcoming

The Handbook of Global Research Methods, edited by Ingrid Volkmer

The Handbook of International Advertising Research, edited by Hong Cheng

The Handbook of Communication and Corporate Social Responsibility, edited by Oyvind Ihlen, Jennifer Bartlett and Steve May

The Handbook of Gender and Sexualities in the Media, edited by Karen Ross

The Handbook of Global Health Communication and Development, edited by Rafael Obregon and Silvio Waisbord

The Handbook of Global Online Journalism, edited by Eugenia Siapera and Andreas Veglis

This edition first published 2011© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The handbook of internet studies / edited by Mia Consalvo and Charles Ess.

p. cm. — (Handbooks in communication and media) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-8588-2 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Internet—Social aspects. I. Consalvo, Mia, 1969– II. Ess, Charles, 1951–

HM1017.H36 2010 303.48′34—dc22

2009032170

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Notes on Editors and Contributors

Mia Consalvo is Associate Professor in the School of Media Arts and Studies at Ohio University. She is the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (MIT Press, 2007) and was executive editor of the Research Annual series, produced by the Association of Internet Researchers. Her research focuses on the hybrid character of the global games industry, as well as gender and sexuality as related to digital gameplay.

Charles Ess is Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Drury University (Springfield, Missouri). He is Professor with special responsibilities in the Information and Media Studies Department, Aarhus University (Denmark, 2009–2012). He has published extensively in computer-mediated communication and cross-cultural approaches to information and computing ethics.

Maria Bakardjieva is Professor at the Faculty of Communication and Culture, University of Calgary, Canada. She is the author of Internet Society: The Internet in Everyday Life (Sage, 2005) and co-editor of How Canadians Communicate (University of Calgary Press, 2004, 2007). Her research examines Internet use practices across different social and cultural contexts, focusing on the ways users appropriate new media communication possibilities in their daily projects.

Naomi S. Baron is Professor of Linguistics at American University in Washington, DC. A specialist in electronically mediated communication, she is the author of Alphabet to Email (Routledge, 2000) and Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World (Oxford, 2008). Her current research is a cross-cultural study of mobile-phone use in Sweden, the US, Italy, Japan, and Korea.

Nancy K. Baym is Associate Professor of Communication Studies, University of Kansas. She teaches about communication technology, interpersonal communication, and qualitative research methods. Her books include Tune In, Log On:Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (Sage, 2000) and, co-edited with Annette Markham, Internet Inquiry: Conversation about Method (Sage, 2009). She was a co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers, co-organized its first conference, and served as its President.

Sandra Braman has studied the macro-level effects of digital technologies and their policy implications since the early 1980s. Her recent work includes Change of State: Information, Policy, And Power (MIT Press, 2007), and the edited volumes The Emergent Global Information Policy Regime (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Biotechnology and Communication: The Meta-Technologies of Information (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), among others.

Janne Bromseth is working with cultural analysis, in particular queer perspectives, on new media, education and lgbtq subcultures (i.e. lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer subcultures). She has long focused on Scandinavian mailing lists, studying constructions of group norms, gender and sexuality, and the intersection of online/offline in creating local (sub)cultural mediated community. At present she works as a researcher at the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, Sweden.

Niels Brügger is Associate Professor at the Centre for Internet Research (CIR), University of Aarhus, Denmark. His primary research interest is website history, including his current work on the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s website, The History of dr.dk, 1996–2006, and the volume Web History (Peter Lang, 2009). He has published a number of articles, monographs, and edited books, including Archiving Websites: General Considerations and Strategies (CIR, 2005).

Elizabeth A. Buchanan is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Information Policy Research, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She specializes in the areas of information and research ethics, information policy, and intellectual freedom, including a current project funded by the National Science Foundation (US). Most recently, she co-authored with Kathrine Henderson Case Studies in Library and Information Science Ethics (2008, McFarland Press).

Heidi Campbell is Assistant Professor of Communication at Texas A&M University. She teaches Media Studies. For over a decade she has studied the impact of the Internet on religious communities and culture as well as the sociology of technology. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including New Media & Society, The Information Society, and the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. She is the author of Exploring Religious Community Online (Peter Lang, 2005).

Laurel Dyson is a senior lecturer in Information Technology at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. She has published many articles on the adoption of information and communication technologies by Indigenous people. She has also published the book Information Technology and Indigenous People (Information Science Publishing, 2007), and a report for UNESCO evaluating their Indigenous ICT4ID Project. The focus of her current research is on the use of mobile technology by Indigenous Australians.

Lorna Heaton is Associate Professor at the Department of Communications, University of Montreal. She is author of The Computerization of Work (Sage, 2001) and a number of articles in journals such as Management Communication Quarterly and the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Her research focuses on organizational and inter-organizational issues in the implementation and use of information and communication technologies.

Klaus Bruhn Jensen is Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Publications include A Handbook of Media and Communication Research (Routledge, 2002) and contributions to the International Encyclopedia of Communication (12 vols., Blackwell, 2008), for which he served as Area Editor of Communication Theory and Philosophy. His current research interests are Internet studies, mobile media, and communication theory.

Steve Jones is UIC Distinguished Professor, Professor of Communication, and Research Associate in the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is author and editor of numerous books, including Society Online, CyberSociety, Virtual Culture, Doing Internet Research, CyberSociety 2.0, the Encyclopedia of New Media, and Afterlife as Afterimage. He founded the Association of Internet Researchers and is co-editor of New Media & Society.

Lori Kendall is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and researches in the areas of online community and culture. Her publications include “Beyond Media Producers and Consumers” (on online videos, in Information, Communication and Society) and her most recent of several chapters on online research in Internet Inquiry (Annette Markham and Nancy Baym, eds.).

Sonia Livingstone is Professor in the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests center on media audiences, children and the Internet, domestic contexts of media use and media literacy. Books include The Handbook of New Media (Leah Lievrouw, co-editor, Sage, 2006), The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture (Kirsten Drotner, co-editor, Sage, 2008), and Children and the Internet (Polity, 2009).

Marika Lüders is Research scientist at SINTEF ICT (the Foundation for Industrial and Technical Research), Oslo. She studies emerging uses of personal and social media, particularly with a focus on young people. She is a co-editor of the Norwegian anthology, Personlige medier: Livet mellom skjermene [Personal Media: Life between Screens] (Gyldendal Akademiske, 2007), and her work has been published in Norwegian and international anthologies and journals.

P. David Marshall is Professor and Chair of New Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies at Deakin University, and head of the School of Communication and Creative Media. His publications include New Media Cultures (Edward Arnold/Oxford, 2004), The Celebrity Culture Reader (Routledge, 2006), and many articles on the media, new media, and popular culture. He has two principal research areas: the study of the public personality and the study of new media forms.

Susanna Paasonen is Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, with interests in Internet research, feminist theory, affect, and pornography. She is the author of Figures of Fantasy (Peter Lang, 2005), and co-editor of Women and Everyday Uses of the Internet (Peter Lang, 2002), Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture (Macmillan, 2007), as well as the forthcoming Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences (Routledge).

Jennifer Stromer-Galley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, University at Albany, State University of New York. Her research interests include: the uses of communication technology and its implications for democratic practice; mediated political campaign communication; and, deliberative democracy. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Communication, Javnost/The Public, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and the Journal of Public Deliberation.

Jenny Sundén is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Technology, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, with interests in new media studies, queer/feminist theory, and games. She is the author of Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment (Peter Lang, 2003), and co-editor of Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights: Gender and Digital Media in a Nordic Context (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) and Second Nature: Origins and Originality in Art, Science and New Media (forthcoming).

T. L. Taylor is Associate Professor at the Center for Computer Games Research, IT University of Copenhagen. She has published on values in design, avatars and online embodiment, play and experience in online worlds, gender and gaming, and pervasive gaming, including her book, Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press, 2006), which uses her multi-year ethnography of EverQuest. She is currently at work on a book about professional computer gaming.

Barry Wellman directs NetLab, Department of Sociology, at the University of Toronto, a team studying the intersection of online and offline networks – social, communication, and computer – in communities and at work. He is currently writing Networked with Lee Rainie. Wellman has (co-)written more than 200 papers with more than 80 co-authors, including The Internet in Everyday Life (2002). Wellman is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Deborah L. Wheeler is Assistant Professor in Political Science at the United States Naval Academy. Her areas of research include information technology diffusion and impact in the Arab world; Gender and international development; and the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. Her extensive publications include The Internet in the Middle East: Global Expectations and Local Imaginations in Kuwait (State University of New York Press, 2006).

Alexis Wichowski is a doctoral candidate in Information Science at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her research interests include computer-mediated communication, incidental information encountering, Internet studies, and the evolution of information environments.

Acknowledgment

We begin with our contributors: you have each researched and authored what we take to be watershed chapters – and you have further worked with us patiently and cooperatively throughout the course of developing this volume. We cannot thank you enough.

We are further very grateful indeed for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) that in innumerable ways has served as the inspiration, incubator, and scholarly “sandbox” of this volume – i.e., the place where we can freely explore and play with both new and old ideas in a supportive but still appropriately critical milieu. In particular, we hope that the mix here between younger and more senior scholars and researchers faithfully reflects one of AoIR’s distinctive characteristics – namely, recognizing that some of the best work in Internet studies comes precisely from the fresh eyes and minds of those at the beginnings of their scholarly careers, especially as this work is fostered and enhanced through mutual dialogue with their more experienced peers.

We wish also to thank Elizabeth Swayze at Wiley-Blackwell, who first invited us to develop this Handbook. It has always been a pleasure to work with Elizabeth, Margot Morse, Jayne Fargnoli, and their other colleagues at Wiley-Blackwell, who could be counted on for unfailing support, advice, and encouragement.

Mia would like to thank Ohio University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for providing wonderful environments to engage in this work. Likewise she would like to thank students in her classes on new media, who have sharpened her thinking on many of these topics, as they have challenged her to consider (and then explore) multiple aspects of life online that she had not yet studied.

Charles thanks Drury University for leaves of absence and a sabbatical year; and the Institute for Information and Media Studies (IMV), Aarhus University, for correlative guest professorships. The IMV secretaries, librarians, colleagues, and head of department Steffen Ejnar Brandorff, were consistently generous with their resources, insight, and perhaps most importantly, warm hospitality, all of which created an ideal environment in which much of this Handbook took shape.

Last, but certainly not least, we are deeply grateful to our families and friends. You know all too well how we were compelled on more than one occasion to ask for your forgiveness and patience as we struggled to sort out yet one more snarl or meet still one more deadline. As only friends and family would do, you have lovingly supported this work in manifold ways. As one says – but only rarely – in Danish, tusind tak! (a thousand thanks!), and in New England, that the publication of this volume represents a “Finestkind” of day.

Introduction: What is “Internet Studies”?

Charles Ess and Mia Consalvo

The project of saying what something is may helpfully begin by saying what it is not. In our case, “Internet studies” as used here is not primarily a study of the technologies constituting the ever-growing, ever-changing networks of computers (including mobile devices such as Internet-enabled mobile phones, netbooks, and other devices) linked together by a single TCP/IP protocol. Certainly, Internet studies in this sense is relevant – in part historically, as these technologies required two decades of development before they became so widely diffused as to justify and compel serious academic attention. That is, we can trace the origins of the Internet to the first efforts in 1973 by Vincent Cerf and Robert E. Kahn to develop the internetworking protocol that later evolved into TCP/IP (cf. Abbate, 2000, pp. 127–33). By contrast, we and our colleagues seek to study the distinctive sorts of human communication and interaction facilitated by the Internet. These begin to emerge on a large scale only in the late 1980s and early 1990s as within the US, ARPANET and its successor, NSFNET (an academic, research-oriented network sponsored by the United States National Science Foundation) opened up to proprietary networks such as CompuServe and others (Abbate, 2000, pp. 191–209). NSFNET simultaneously fostered connections with networks outside the US built up in the 1970s and 1980s: 250 such networks were connected to NSFNET by January 1990, “more than 20 percent of the total number of networks” – and then doubled (to more than 40 percent) by 1995 (Abbate, 2000, p. 210). Following close behind the resulting explosion of Internet access, as Barry Wellman details in our opening chapter, Internet studies may be traced to the early 1990s.

As Susan Herring reminds us, prior to this activity there were computers, networks, and networked communication – studied as computer-mediated communication (CMC), beginning in the late 1970s with Hiltz and Turoff’s The Network Nation (1978: Herring, 2008, p. xxxv). Nonetheless, if we define Internet studies to include CMC as facilitated through the Internet, Internet studies is still barely two decades old. On the one hand, the rapid pace of technological development and the rapid global diffusion of these technologies (at the time of this writing, over 26 percent of the world’s population have access to the Internet in one form or another [Internet World Stats, 2010]) would suggest that two decades is a very long time. On the other hand, scholars, researchers, and others interested in what happens as human beings (and, eventually, automated agents) learn how to communicate and interact with one another via the Internet are not simply faced with the challenge of pinpointing a rapidly changing and moving target. Our task is further complicated by complexities that almost always require approaches drawn from the methodologies and theoretical frameworks of many disciplines – a multidisciplinarity or interdisciplinarity that is itself constantly in flux. Moreover, as the Internet grew beyond the US in the late 1990s,1 it became clear that culturally variable dimensions, including communicative preferences and foundational norms, values, practices, and beliefs, further complicated pictures we might develop of the diverse interactions facilitated through the Internet (e.g., Ess, 2001, 2007; Ess & Sudweeks, 2005). Finally, while initial activity on the Internet was mostly text-based, we now navigate a sea of images, videos, games, sound, and graphics online, often all at once. Given these complexities, two decades to build a new academic field is not much time at all.

Nonetheless, when we began work on this volume in 2007, we were convinced that Internet studies had emerged as a relatively stable field of academic study – one constituted by an extensive body of research that defines and depends upon multiple methodologies and approaches that have demonstrated their usefulness in distilling the multiple interactions made possible via the Internet. These knowledges2 appear in many now well-established journals (in many languages), including New Media & Society (established 1990), the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (1995), and Information, Communication, & Society (1998). Such activity is fostered by both individual scholars and researchers across the range of academic disciplines (humanities, social sciences, and computer science), as well as diverse centers and institutes around the globe.

The first purpose of our Handbook, then, is to provide both new students and seasoned scholars with an initial orientation to many (though not all) of the most significant foci and topoi that define and constitute this field. To begin with, our contributors were charged with providing a comprehensive overview of relevant scholarship in their specific domains, conjoined with their best understandings of important future directions for research. Each chapter thus stands as a snapshot of the state of scholarship and research within a specific domain. To be sure, no one would claim finality, in light of the constantly changing technologies in play. Nonetheless, each chapter provides one of the most authoritative and comprehensive accounts of a given aspect of Internet studies as can be asked for – and thereby our contributors demarcate and document in fine detail many of the most significant domains or subfields of Internet studies.

Internet Studies: Emerging Domains, Terrains, Commonalities

We originally organized our chapters into three parts. These constitute a general structure that offers an initial taxonomy and orientation. Part I collects historical overviews of Internet studies, including web archiving, methodologies, and ethics, that serve as a primer for Internet studies per se and as the introduction to the following sections. The chapters constituting Part II examine eight distinctive domains: language, policy, democratization and political discourse, international development, health services, religion, indigenous peoples, and sexuality. Part III approaches “culture” in terms of online community, virtual worlds, the cultures of children and young people, games, social networking sites (SNSs), media most broadly, pornography, music, and the social life of teenagers online.

Moreover, we found that our contributors, independently of one another, contributed to a larger picture – one of shared insights and conceptual coherencies that add substantial structure and content to the map of Internet studies initially demarcated by these three parts.

One of the first commonalities to emerge is an interesting agreement between sociologist Barry Wellman and religion scholar Heidi Campbell. For Wellman, we are in the third age of Internet studies; Campbell similarly characterizes studies of religion and the Internet as now in their third wave. Wellman describes two distinct trends of this third age. First, Internet research is increasingly incorporated into “the mainstream conferences and journals” of given disciplines, so as to bring “the more developed theories, methods, and substantive lore of the disciplines into play” (this volume, chapter 1). Second is “the development of ‘Internet studies’ as a field in its own right, bringing together scholars from the social sciences, humanities, and computer sciences” (ibid.). For Wellman, a key focus of this third age is community, specifically as “community ties … [are] thriving, with online connectivity intertwined with offline relationships” (ibid.). In parallel, Campbell notes that the third wave of Internet research is marked by a shift towards “more collaborative, longitudinal, and interdisciplinary explorations of religion online,” along with the development of increasingly sophisticated theoretical frameworks for examining online religious communities (this volume, chapter 11).

Where Are We Now – And Where Are We Going?

Our contributors highlight two further commonalities that articulate a significant current perspective of Internet studies, and point towards an important direction for research in Internet studies.

First, several contributors note that Internet studies are no longer constrained by certain dualisms prevailing in the 1990s – specifically, strong dichotomies presumed to hold between such relata3 as the offline and the online in parallel with “the real” and “the virtual,” and, most fundamentally from a philosophical perspective, between a material body and a radically distinct, disembodied mind. These dualisms appear in the highly influential science-fiction novel Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984). The resulting emphasis on opposition between these relata is at work in the central literatures of hypermedia and hypertext, much of the early (pre-1995) work on virtual communities, postmodernist celebrations of identity play and exploration in (early) MUDs and MOOs (most famously Turkle, 1985), and influential punditry regarding “liberation in cyberspace” for disembodied minds radically freed from “meatspace” (e.g., Barlow, 1996). Of course, such dualisms were questioned as early as 1991 by Allucquére Roseanne Stone (1991) and more forcefully into the 1990s. In 1996, for example, Susan Herring demonstrated that, contra postmodernist dreams, our gender is hard to disguise online in even exclusively text-based CMC. By 1999, Katherine Hayles could characterize “the post-human” as involving the clear rejection of such dualism in favor of notions of embodiment that rather emphasize the inextricable interconnections between body and self/identity (p. 288; cf. Ess, in press).

The shift away from such dualisms is consistently documented by our contributors, including Nancy Baym, whose early studies of fan communities highlighted important ways that offline identities and practices were interwoven with online interactions (1995; this volume, chapter 18). Similarly, Janne Bromseth and Jenny Sundén point to the work of Beth Kolko and Elizabeth Reid (1998), which highlights the importance of a coherent and reasonably accurate self-representation in online communities (cited in Bromseth and Sundén, this volume, chapter 13). In a volume appropriately titled The Internet in Everyday Life, by 2002, Barry Wellman and Caroline Haythornthwaite could document how “networked individuals” seamlessly interweave their online and offline lives. That same year, Lori Kendall reiterated Herring’s findings in her study of the BlueSky online community (2002; see Kendall, this volume, chapter 14).

Barring some important exceptions (e.g., venues dedicated explicitly to exploration of multiple and otherwise marginalized sexualities or identities, etc.), the earlier distinctions between the real and the virtual, the offline and the online no longer seem accurate or analytically useful. This means that the character of research is likewise changing. As Kendall observes, “In recent research on community and the Internet, the emphasis is shifting from ethnographic studies of virtual communities, to studies of people’s blending of offline and online contacts” (this volume, chapter 14). More broadly, Klaus Bruhn Jensen makes the point that, contra 1990s’ celebrations of the imminent death of the book, “Old media rarely die, and humans remain the reference point and prototype for technologically mediated communication” (this volume, chapter 3).

Second, several of our contributors point towards a shared set of issues emerging alongside this shift. As Maria Bakardjieva observes, Internet studies has long involved what she characterizes as “the critical stream of studies,” defined by the central question: “Is the Internet helping users achieve higher degrees of emancipation and equity, build capacity, and take control over their lives as individuals and citizens?” (this volume, chapter 4). While some of our contributors can provide positive examples and responses to this question (e.g., Lorna Heaton and Laurel Dyson), all caution us not to fall (back) into the cyber-utopianism characteristic of the previous decade. So, Deborah Wheeler summarizes her review of Internet-based development projects this way: “some development challenges are too big for the Internet. When people need food, safe drinking-water, medicine, and shelter, Internet connectivity does little to provide for these basic necessities” (this volume, chapter 9).

Others raise similar concerns. Janne Bromseth and Jenny Sundén note that the restoration of the embodied person – in contrast with an ostensibly disembodied mind divorced from an embodied person and identity – means that such a user “brings to the table of his/her interactions the whole world of interrelations that body means with larger communities, environments, their histories, cultures, traditions, practices, beliefs, etc.” (this volume, chapter 13). But this implicates in turn central matters of gender, sexuality, and power : “Online communities are embedded in larger sociopolitical structures and cultural hegemonies, with a growing amount of empirical research slowly dissolving the image of a power-free and democratic Internet” (ibid.). Bromseth and Sundén refer to the work of Leslie Regan Shade (2004) who called attention to the commercial roots and foci of these powers: “online communities are today deeply embedded in a commercialized Internet culture, creating specific frames for how community, gender, and – we will add – sexuality are constructed on the Internet (ibid.; our emphasis, MC, CE).

This commercialized culture, Marika Lüders points out, has long been recognized as problematic: “online content and service providers have developed a commercial logic where they offer their material for free in return for users giving away personal information (Shapiro, (1999))” (Lüders, this volume, chapter 22). But especially for young people in the now seemingly ubiquitous and ever-growing SNSs such as Facebook, as Sonia Livingstone explains, their emerging and/or shifting identities are increasingly shaped by a culture of consumerism built around sites offering targeted advertising and marketing. In these venues,

the development of “taste” and lifestyle is shaped significantly by powerful commercial interests in the fashion and music industries online as offline. […] the user is encouraged to define their identity through consumer preferences (music, movies, fandom). Indeed, the user is themselves commodified insofar as a social networking profile in particular can be neatly managed, exchanged, or organized in various ways by others precisely because it is fixed, formatted, and context-free. (Livingstone, this volume, chapter 16)

But finally, these concerns are compelling not only for those seeking to explore alternative understandings and sensibilities regarding gender and sexuality, nor simply for young people. Rather, SNSs increasingly attract the participation and engagement of ever-more diverse demographics – leading to Nancy Baym’s eloquent appeal for further research and critical analysis:

What are the practical and ethical implications of the move from socializing in not-for-profit spaces to proprietary profit-driven environments? […] As SNSs become practical necessities for many in sustaining their social lives, we become increasingly beholden to corporate entities whose primary responsibility is to their shareholders, not their users. Their incentive is not to help us foster meaningful and rewarding personal connections, but to deliver eyeballs to advertisers and influence purchasing decisions. […] Questions are also raised about the lines between just reward for the content users provide and exploitation of users through free labor. (Baym, this volume, chapter 18; our emphasis, MC, CE)

No one is arguing that we are witnessing an inevitable slide into an inescapable, Matrix -like reality driven by greed and little regard for human beings as anything other than commodified cogs in a consumer machine. Echoing Stromer-Galley and Wichowski’s cautious optimism (chapter 8) regarding deliberative democracy online, Baym continues here:

At the same time, users are not without influence. When Facebook implemented their Beacon system tracking user purchases and other activities across the Internet and announcing them to their friends, a user backlash forced them to change their plans. The power struggles between owners/staffs and users are complex and thus far all but ignored in scholarship. (Ibid.)

Certainly, one way to foster the critical attention and research Baym calls for here is to endorse the call made by Bromseth and Sundén, who point out that “During the mid-1990s, the Internet was central for theoretical debates in feminist theory. Today, Internet studies needs to reconnect with central debates concerning the relationship between gender and sexuality, as well as between feminist and queer theory” (this volume, chapter 13). Joining these two large commonalities together: as the Internet and its multitude of communication and interaction possibilities continue to expand and interweave with our everyday lives, these concerns promise to become all the more extensive – and thereby, critical research and reflection on their impacts and meanings for our lives, not simply as users and consumers, but as human beings and citizens, become all the more important to pursue.

Postlude

As editors, we have been privileged to discover how the individual chapters constituting this Handbook only become richer and more fruitful with each return visit. In addition, as we hope these examples of larger commonalities make clear, careful and repeated reading in this Handbook will unveil still other important insights and conceptual coherencies across diverse chapters – thereby further articulating and demarcating the maps and guides to Internet studies offered here.

Notes

1As late as 1998, ca. 84% of all users of the Internet were located in North America (GVU, 1998). As of this writing, North American users constitute 14.4% of users worldwide (Internet World Stats, 2010).

2“Knowledges,” a literal translation of the German Erkenntnisse, is used to denote the plurality of ways of knowing and shaping knowledge defining both the diverse academic disciplines represented in this volume, along with non-academic modalities of knowing that are legitimate and significant in their own right. Cf. van der Velden, 2010.

3“Relata” is the plural Latin term referring to the two (or more) components that stand in some form of relationship with one another, whether oppositional, complementary, analogical, etc. It thus serves as a shorthand term to refer to virtual/real, online/offline, mind/body, and other relata without having to repeatedly name each of these.

References

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Baym, N. (1995). The emergence of community in computer-mediated communication. In S. G. Jones (ed.), CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community (pp. 138–63). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Ess, C. (2001). Culture, Technology, Communication: Towards an Intercultural Global Village. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Ess, C. (in press). Self, community, and ethics in digital mediatized worlds. In C. Ess & M. Thorseth (eds.), Trust and Virtual Worlds: Contemporary Perspectives. London: Peter Lang.

Ess, C., with Kawabata, A., & Kurosaki, H. (2007). Cross-cultural perspectives on religion and computer-mediated communication. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(3), April 2007. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue3/.

Ess, C., & Sudweeks, F. (2005). Culture and computer-mediated communication: Toward new understandings. Theme issue, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(1), October 2005. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue1/ess.html/.

Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books.

GVU (Graphic, Visualization, and Usability Center, Georgia Technological University). (1998). GVU’s 10th WWW user survey. Retrieved July 7, 2010, from http://wwwstatic.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/survey-1998-10/graphs/general/q50.htm.

Hayles, K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, And Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Herring, S. (1996) Posting in a different voice: Gender and ethics in computer-mediated communication. In C. Ess (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives on Computer-Mediated Communication (pp. 115–45). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Herring, S. (2008). Foreword. In S. Kelsey & K. St Amant (eds.), Handbook of Research on Computer Mediated Communication, vol. 1 (pp. xxxv–xxxvi). Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.

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Kendall, L. (2002). Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and Relationships Online. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kolko, B., & Reid, E. (1998). Dissolution and fragmentation: Problems in online communities. In S. Jones (ed.), Cybersociety 2.0 (pp. 212–31). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Shade, L. R. (2004). Bending gender into the net. In P. N. Howard & S. Jones (eds.), Society Online. The Internet in Context (pp. 57–71). Thousand Oaks, CA, London, New Delhi: Sage.

Shapiro, A. L. (1999). The Control Revolution: How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know. New York: Public Affairs.

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Van der Velden, M. (2010). Design for the contact zone: Knowledge management software and the structures of indigenous knowledges. In F. Sudweeks, H. Hrachovec & C. Ess (eds.), Proceedings Cultural Attitudes Towards Communication and Technology 2010 (pp. 1–18). Murdoch, WA: Murdoch University.

Wellman, B., & Haythornthwaite, C. (2002). The Internet in Everyday Life. Oxford, Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Part I

Beyond the Great Divides? A Primer on Internet Histories, Methods, and Ethics

Introduction to Part I

Charles Ess

Part I provides an initial orientation – to Internet studies per se, and thereby to the subsequent work gathered in parts II and III. The first chapter is a brief history of Internet studies by Barry Wellman. This history is particularly important as it clears away a series of dichotomies – what Klaus Bruhn Jensen in his contribution aptly calls “the Great Divides” – that dominated 1990s approaches to computer-mediated communication (CMC) and the Internet. Overcoming these divides is crucial for a number of reasons, as we will see. First of all, these divides included an emphasis on the Internet as utterly novel and thereby revolutionary – hence making all previous history and insight irrelevant. At the same time, however, the Internet is undoubtedly marked by novelty in important ways. So in his chapter, Niels Brügger will highlight how the Internet requires new approaches in terms of archiving and our understanding of archived materials. Similarly, Elizabeth Buchanan argues that in some ways, the ethical challenges to Internet researchers evoked especially by what we call Web 2.0 may require novel approaches, alongside more traditional ones. But we will further see in the contributions by Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Maria Bakardjieva the point emphasized by Wellman: in contrast with such 1990s divides, more contemporary approaches focus on an Internet that is embedded in our everyday lives (at least in the developed world). This means that more traditional methods – quantitative, qualitative, and, for Bakardjieva, qualitative methods conjoined with critical theory of a specific sort – remain fruitful. Buchanan’s introduction to Internet research ethics likewise makes this point with regard to a number of important examples and watershed cases.