study

This page considers the net as an academic discipline or field of study.

It covers -

• introduction
• disciplinarity
• colonisation
• studies

David Gauntlett commented in 2000 that

Before the mid-1990s, academics knew everything about the internet. No wonder: they ran it. It was their best-kept secret. Then there was another couple of years, between 1995 and 1997, when those academics could be rather smug as they saw yet another news item about this 'brand new' phenomenon. The World Wide Web, invented by Tim Berners-Lee around 1992, had suddenly made the internet so easy to use that Guardian journalists had no trouble writing three supplements a week about it. This media fuss was fantastic for internet scholars, who had all been writing manuscripts about 'virtual communities' on the net, and how people could play with their identities within virtual chatrooms. Most of these articles and books were thin on theory. In fact, they didn't really say anything except 'Wow! Virtual communities!' and 'Holy cow! In cyberspace, no-one knows who you are!'. ... The rise of the internet in the past three or four years means that its users know far more about sex, politics, hobbies, and shopping than ever before. You would expect that internet scholars would be lapping all this up. It's a transformation of modern society, affecting many spheres of everyday life as well as broader social processes. If busy, broad-brush sociologists like Anthony Giddens have found time to jam this into the heart of their theory, surely the dedicated internet researchers and communications experts must be having a field day. But no. Publishers are still churning out books called Virtual Something and Cyber Something Else. They might as well be called 'Wow! Virtual communities!' and 'Holy cow! In cyberspace, no-one knows who you are!'. Even the journals are still publishing those articles which people were pulling out of the drawer in 1996. Has no-one changed the record? The internet might change politics. It might not. It's a global phenomenon. It's not really a global phenomenon. Something funny happened to a bunch of people in a chatroom. Give me a break. Of course, academics have always liked to gently discourage interesting phenomena by writing cautious, boring books about them. But the ratio of exciting Web developments to turgid monographs in this area has beaten all previous records. It's as if these internet scholars are so upset at the rate of change and innovation - 'how could my article on Multi-User Dungeons have become prehistoric so soon?' - that they have decided to pretend that time stopped in 1997.

     studies

Key primers are -

• Web.Studies (London: Hodder 2004) edited by David Gauntlett, including Laura Gurak's 'Internet Studies in the Twenty-First Century'
• Gurak's Cyberliteracy (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2001).

For analysis of 'web studies' as a contested discipline see -

• David Silver's 'Looking backwards, looking forward: Cyberculture studies 1990-2000' in the 2000 edition of Gauntlett's Web.Studies, his 2000 paper 'A Field matures: Cyberstudies at the turn of the millennium' and 2004 'Internet/cyberculture/digital culture/new media/fill-in-the-blank studies' in 6 New Media & Society 1
• Barry Wellman's 2004 'Internet studies: fifteen, ten and 0 years ago' in 6 New Media & Society 1
• Denise Rall's 2004 paper 'A preliminary definition of internet studies and research'
• Lance Strate's 1999 'The varieties of cyberspace: Problems in definition and delimitation' in 63 Western Journal of Communication 3 and 'Eight Bits About Digital Communication' (PDF)
• Dimensions of Internet Science (Lengerich: Pabst Science Publishers 2001) edited by Ulf-Dietrich Reips & Michael Bosnjak
• the 'ICT Research and Disciplinary Boundaries: Is "Internet Research" a Virtual Field, a Proto-Discipline, or Something Else?' special issue in 21 The Information Society 4
• Janet Staiger's Media reception studies (New York: New York Uni Press 2005)
• Robert McChesney's Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media (New York: New Press 2007).

   next page  (costs)