From: david silver [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2001 6:01 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Internet Studies 1.0: a Discipline Is Born
John,
would this be appropriate to post to CSL?
david silver
http://www.glue.umd.edu/~dsilver
*** cut here ***
This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com)
From the issue dated March 30, 2001
Internet Studies 1.0: a Discipline Is Born
By SCOTT McLEMEE
It has been a year since Black April, when the air started
going out of the dot-com bubble, at a cost to investors and
businesses of many billions. You might assume there could not
be a worse time for a field calling itself "Internet studies."
You would be wrong. Scholars in the field are careful to keep
irrational exuberance over it strictly in check. Even so,
recent developments suggest that the Internet is becoming
established not simply as a tool for research or another way
to teach classes, but also as an object of interdisciplinary
study.
In February, Brandeis University announced that, starting this
fall, it would offer an undergraduate concentration in
Internet studies -- the first in the country. That development
comes in the wake of Georgetown University's master's degree
focused on the Internet, offered by the communication,
culture, and technology program. Enrollment in that program
has grown from 30 students in 1996 to 160 today.
And courses devoted to the Net have blossomed across the
country even where no degree program exists, says David Silver
of the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies. When he
founded the center at the University of Maryland at College
Park five years ago, while a graduate student in American
studies, Mr. Silver searched nationwide for courses on the
topic. He found only five. Today, his site lists some 400.
This semester's offerings include "Sociology and the Internet"
(at Rutgers University at Camden), "Cyberculture and Virtual
Community" (George Mason University), and "Digital Narrative"
(Emerson College).
But perhaps the most telling sign of the field's momentum is
the recent history of the Association of Internet Researchers
-- which was born in October 1998. Steve G. Jones, a
communications professor at the University of Illinois at
Chicago, brainstormed with a couple of graduate students to
form the group. He recalls hoping that it might draw 100
scholars, eventually. But more than 300 participants turned
out for the association's first conference, in September. He
now counts about 750 members, many of them scholars from
abroad. This year's meeting, to be held at the University of
Minnesota-Twin Cities in October, drew 450 submissions for
papers and panels.
More than one publisher has approached the group about
starting a journal. Yet another place to publish is arguably
the last thing Internet researchers need. Besides the Journal
of Online Behavior and New Media & Society, they have
CyberPsychology & Behavior, Convergence, and The Journal of
Virtual Environments.
Mr. Jones has edited several anthologies that turn up in
everyone else's bibliographies -- including Doing Internet
Research (Sage Publications, 1999), perhaps the first volume
to consider the methodological problems of the field. He is
also in charge of Digital Formations, a book series
forthcoming from Peter Lang Publishing.
So just what do Net researchers actually study? Skeptics might
wonder how intellectual inquiry can keep pace with the
technology. The field has already produced some landmark works
-- including Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen: Identity in
the Age of the Internet (Touchstone, 1995) and three imposing
volumes of economic and sociological analysis in The
Information Age (Blackwell Publishers, 1996-98), by Manuel
Castells, a professor of city and regional planning at the
University of California at Berkeley. But a glance at recent
papers suggests that not many scholarly works published
before about 1999 qualify as formative.
Still, the field does cohere around a few key issues. One is
the topic of community -- the way people use the Web to locate
and interact with others who share similar backgrounds or
interests. If you really want to discuss, say, the synthetic
unity of apperception, you can find Kantians online, arguing
at any hour. Likewise with any other concern, from the sublime
to the ridiculous. Scholars are investigating how such groups
form and what combination of formal rules and informal
understandings govern their conduct. What generalizations can
be made about "computer-mediated communication" (often
abbreviated C.M.C.)? What patterns of conflict and consensus
emerge?
In the pioneering days of C.M.C. research, back in the early
1990's, scholars concentrated on "virtual" communities, in
which participants only interact while online, not in R.L.
(real life). That focus has shifted, according to Martin J.
Irvine, executive director of Georgetown's program in
technology and culture. "We're seeing much more of a
continuum," reports Mr. Irvine, ranging from people who have
never met each other, to groups who use the Net to reinforce
their connections offline, to groups who merely share a
demographic profile and a certain level of purchasing power.
"'Community' has become a pretty fuzzy term," he says.
Besides work on how people communicate and behave online,
scholars are studying discourses about the Internet. How does
its reception compare with that of earlier communications
media, such as radio or television? When the Internet is
treated as a panacea -- or as grave moral danger -- what
nontechnological issues are being confronted or avoided? After
several years of scholarly work on Web culture, Theresa Senft,
a doctoral candidate in the department of performance studies
at New York University, thinks of Internet research as
offering the same critical perspective on everyday life as
queer theory. "Both," she notes in an e-mail message, "purport
to be about 'unnatural' states (homosexuality, virtuality).
Yet both are most effective when they help us to question just
what 'natural life' is."
Today, of course, there is yet another form of speculation for
Net researchers to investigate: the vexing question of
e-commerce. "One topic I'm very interested in," notes
Maryland's Mr. Silver, "is how newspapers are covering the
failure of the dot-coms. And there's work to be done on the
sociology of pink-slip parties, where you have all these
talented and ambitious young people trying to figure out what
to do next."
Whatever the condition of the economy outside academe,
Internet studies is clearly making itself felt on the academic
job market. In recent months, the e-mail discussion list
sponsored by the Association of Internet Researchers has
announced openings for Net-oriented positions in sociology,
literature, public policy, and communications.
"This is the first year of those who identify themselves as
Net researchers looking for their first jobs," says Mr.
Silver. After finishing his degree at Maryland -- and a brief
stint as an adjunct in the Georgetown program, he received a
half-dozen offers from top-tier research universities. This
fall he will be an assistant professor at the University of
Washington.
The boom is, in part, a product of demand. "Students can't get
enough of this subject," Mr. Silver says. "Classes get filled
immediately, and they come to the table with considerable
knowledge and experience."
That may make classes devoted to the Internet vulnerable to
the same complaint sometimes lodged against popular-culture
courses: They attract students by flattering them for being au
courant.
Mr. Silver denies it's a matter of giving credit for what
students already know. "Focusing on the Internet in the
classroom helps create a critical awareness of the medium," he
says. "This is a way of getting them to analyze something they
take for granted."
Steve Jones explains the field's relatively swift and
uncontroversial emergence within academe this way: Tools such
as e-mail were a familiar part of campus life well before they
caught on in society at large. Many of the original servers
were located at universities -- and ".edu," after all, was
among the earliest domain-name suffixes.
"Internet research is now a basic part of what it means to be
self-reflective about academic work," says Mr. Jones, who will
be heading a new program for new-media studies at
Illinois-Chicago this fall. (The program will offer
undergraduate courses as well as a curriculum leading to the
Ph.D.) "To a degree, we created this medium. It behooves us to
study its impact."
KEY WORKS IN INTERNET STUDIES
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic
Frontier, by Howard Rheingold (Addison-Wesley, 1993; revised
for MIT Press, 2000).
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, by
Sherry Turkle (Simon & Schuster, 1995).
The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the
Mechanical Age, by Allucquere Rosanne Stone (MIT Press, 1995).
The Information Age, by Manuel Castells, (Blackwell
Publishers, three volumes, 1996-98; revised 2000).
Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cyberspace,
edited by Steve G. Jones (Sage Publications, 1997).
CyberSociety 2.0: Revisiting Computer-Mediated Communication
and Community, edited by Steve G. Jones (Sage Publications,
1998).
Doing Internet Research, edited by Steve G. Jones (Sage
Publications, 1999).
Web Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age,
edited by David Gauntlett (Oxford University Press, 2000).
The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory, edited by
Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss (Routledge, 2000).
Race in Cyberspace, edited by Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura,
and Gilbert B. Rodman (Routledge, 2000).
The Language of New Media, by Lev Manovich (MIT Press, 2000).
Reading Digital Culture, edited by David Trend (Blackwell
Publishers, 2001).
For more information, the Resource Center for Cyberculture
Studies (http://otal.umd.edu/~rccs/) maintains an annotated
bibliography on Internet studies. The site also includes
information (including syllabi) on courses offered throughout
the country. Particularly interesting and lively is a section
called Book of the Month, which offers reviews and essays by
Internet scholars evaluating the recent literature in their
field.
The Association of Internet Researchers (aoir.org) runs a
listserv for news and discussion. Its Web site also provides
links to numerous online journals devoted to Internet
scholarship.
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Copyright 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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