Internet studies is an interdisciplinary field studying the social, psychological, pedagogical, political, technical, cultural, artistic, and other dimensions of the Internet and associated information and communication technologies. While studies of the Internet are now widespread across academic disciplines, there is a growing collaboration among these investigations. In recent years, Internet studies have become institutionalized as courses of study at several institutions of higher learning, including the University of Oxford, Curtin University of Technology, Brandeis University, Endicott College, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Appalachian State University and the University of Minnesota. Cognates are found in departments of a number of other names, including departments of "digital culture", "new media" or "convergent media", various "iSchools", or programs like "Media in Transition" at MIT. On the research side, Internet studies intersects with studies of cyberculture, human–computer interaction, and science and technology studies. A number of academic journals are central to communicating research in the field, including Bad Subjects, Convergence: The Journal of Research into New media Technologies, Ctheory, Cyber Psychology + Behaviour, Computers in Human Behavior, First Monday, Information, Communication, and Society, The Information Society, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, M/C, New Media & Society, tripleC: Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, Fibreculture Journal, and TeknoKultura, but research relating to internet studies appears in a diverse range of venues and disciplines.
Contents
Internet and society is a research field that addresses the interrelationship of Internet and society, i.e. of how society has changed the Internet and how the Internet is shaped by society.
The topic of social issues relating to Internet has become notable since the rise of the World Wide Web, which can be observed from the fact that journals and newspapers run many stories on topics such as cyberlove, cyberhate, Web 2.0, cybercrime, cyberpolitics, Internet economy, etc. As most of the scientific monographs that have considered Internet and society in their book titles are social theoretical in nature, internet and society can be considered as a primarily social theoretical research approach of Internet studies.
The approach by James Slevin (2000) is a social theory of the Internet that is primarily informed by the line of thought grounded by the British sociologist Anthony Giddens. The approach by Christian Fuchs (2008) is a social theory account that is primarily grounded in the works by critical theory scholars such as Herbert Marcuse, by the concept of social self-organization, and by neo-Marxist thinking.
Fuchs argues that not just any type of Internet studies is needed, but a primarily theoretically informed theory of Internet and society, and that such a theory should be critical in nature (critical Internet theory/research). In this context, critique and critical, he argues, should be understood in the sense of the notion of critique advanced by the Frankfurt School.
Topics of study
Topics within Internet studies include:
History
As Barry Wellman argues, internet studies may find its beginnings with the 1978 publication of The Network Nation, and was largely dominated by computer scientists, presenting at venues like the annual CSCW conference. These were quickly joined by researchers in business fields and library and information science. By the late 1990s, more attention was being paid to systematic investigation of users and how they made use of the new technologies. During the 1990s, the rapid diffusion of internet access began to attract more attention from a number of social science and humanities disciplines, including the field of communication. Some of these investigations, like the Pew Internet & American Life project and the World Internet Project framed the research in terms of traditional social science approaches, with a focus less on the technology than on those who use them. But the focus remained at the aggregate level.
In 1996, this interest was expressed in other ways as well. Georgetown University began offering a related master's program in that year, and at the University of Maryland, David Silver created the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies on the web. Middlebury College developed Politics of Virtual Realities, one of the first undergraduate courses dedicated to exploring the political, legal and normative implications of the Internet for liberal democracy. By 2001, The Chronicle of Higher Education noted that "internet studies" was emerging as a discipline in its own right, as suggested by the first undergraduate program in the area, offered at Brandeis University, and noted that "perhaps the most telling sign of the field's momentum" was the popularity of the annual conference created by the then nascent Association of Internet Researchers.
More recent approaches to studying the internet have focused on situating technology use within particular social contexts, and understanding just how it is related to social and institutional change.