Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues

and Methods for Examining the Net

Studying the Net: Intricacies and Issues

Contributors: Steve Jones

Edited by: Steve Jones
Book Title: Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net
Chapter Title: "Studying the Net: Intricacies and Issues"
Pub. Date: 1999
Access Date: December 4, 2018
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9780761915942
Online ISBN: 9781452231471
DOI: [Link]
Print pages: 1-28
© 1999 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of
the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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Studying the Net: Intricacies and Issues

SteveJones

Even after all the research, and the most skillful storytelling, reality remains obdurate.

—John Pauly (1991, p. 23)

We look for evidence of culture at those minute points of contact between new things
and old habits, and … we include in our sense of history the power of things
themselves to impress and shape and evoke a response within consciousness.

—Alan Trachtenberg (1986. p. xiii)

There is always risk in probing into mysteries.

—David Plath (1980, 218)

For all the newness and hoopla associated with the Internet, much of the narrative
surrounding it is quite predictable. As I have noted in other essays (Jones, 1995, 1997b), the
hype about the Internet, whether accurate or not, is tellingly like that which accompanied the
introduction of earlier media technologies. It is possible to go so far as to say that technology
itself (and the uses to which it is put) is less predictable than the hopes and promises for it
that we harbor.

The Internet is not only a technology but an engine of social change, one that has modified
work habits, education, social relations generally, and, maybe most important, our hopes and
dreams. It is in some ways the technological embodiment of a particularly American social
project (Jones, 1995, 1997b), and importantly, it is a social project rooted in what James
Carey (1997b) aptly describes as “the union of science and state” (p. 3). In this regard, our
metaphors have led us astray: The Internet is not an information highway; it is in reality only
peripherally about information. It is, instead, the first evidence we have of what we have
believed that we are for quite some time—an information society. It is not that the Internet
illustrates that the public has made a leap to becoming an information society. It is that for the
first time we can point to something outside of society as we know it and say, “There—that is a
society made up of information,” in a somewhat literal sense. The Internet is a social space, a
milieu, made up of, and made possible by, communication (the cornerstone of community and
society). Of course, this is facile: Information is hardly the only thing necessary for society,
and information is hardly communication (Ong, 1996). However, both the notion of an
“information society” and modern conceptualizations of the Internet as a self-regulating
“entity” (however one may envision its shape)—that arena in which our “digital being” lives—at
least evade, if not altogether avoid, the centrality of values to the processes of communication
that the Internet, as a form and medium of communication and meaning, sustains.

The Internet and the Market

Our historical work is only just begun when it comes to the Internet, and the sooner we get on
with it, the better. Our histories must go beyond the origins of ARPANET (the Advanced
Research Projects Agency Network precursor to the Internet), a starting point often
misinterpreted as to mean that the Internet was created solely as a command-and-control
mechanism to ready the United States for nuclear war. The work of Vannevar Bush, J. C. R.

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Licklider, Vint Cerf, and researchers at Xerox PARC—that ran along with, and parallel to,
ARPANET—was itself from the start co-opted, and not only by academics. Our histories must
go into greater depth, and recent and forthcoming research efforts such as Ronda and
Michael Hauben's (1997) Netizens and a forthcoming book by Janet Abbate represent the first
scholarly efforts that systematically delve into Internet history. It is important to note that
Internetworking was co-opted by various cultures; as Steven Levy (1984) shows, by 1960s MIT
hackers; as Katie Hafner (1991) shows, by computer hobbyists and academics; as Bruce
Sterling (1992) shows by the 1980s, hackers and bulletin board system operators and users;
as Gary Chapman, columnist and director of the 21st Century Project at the University of
Texas—Austin has said, by professional organizations such as Computer Professionals for
Social Responsibility and the Electronic Frontier Foundation; and even perhaps by the media
itself, which gives us images of cyberspace pioneers such as John Perry Barlow, wily hackers
such as Knight Lightning, and the Chaos Computer Club and the Legion of Doom—images of
teachers and students somehow transforming educational processes and images of danger
and delight.

These intertwined histories are particularly critical to understanding the origins of the Internet
in the early 1960s culture of science, at least because our present conceptualizations of the
Internet still operate within their framework. The frame has, however, shifted slightly, as
capitalism has come to preoccupy science and the state. Instead of a culture of science,
science (and likely even culture, too) has been disguised in the sphere of the popular press
(and popular imagination) by the market, a guise that allows value to be … well, valueless,
empty, in regard to the human dimensions of social relations and “value-able” in regard to
commodity and capital. This is a guise that the media of mass communication have long
adopted (Peterson, 1956), and one in which audiences and markets are summarily conflated.
The Internet in this guise is both a medium of communication and a medium of choice. On it,
within it, we are to choose from among communities of interest and to participate in what we
are led to believe is essentially democratic (Jones, 1995, 1997b). But as Carey (1997b) notes,
the conception of the self in such a system is ultimately characterized as “unfit for
democracy,” because “freedom consists solely in the capacity of people to choose their own
ends and all social arrangements [are] mere means to be manipulated in satisfying individual
desire” (p. 9).

Such a positivist conception frames much of the discourse about what the Internet is and
should be. In turn, there is both the sense that Internet research can be eminently predictive
and the sense that the Internet is the ultimate (or at least so far the best) means of delivering
personalized mass media. The Internet-as-market metaphor derives its power from the notion
that the market is not only theoretically based but quite practically functional, at the level of
the individual, thanks to new technologies. But the development of various “push”
technologies (e.g., the use of web-based “cookies”1 and the like), the trading of personal
information for personal service, is little more than a technical version of what has long
sustained barter economies, and even government, for centuries. For example, when I launch
my web browser, its default page is at [Link] I have personalized it through use of
keywords and other means. Consequently, the first web page I see is filled with news filtered
for me, a near-equivalent of Nicholas Negroponte's (1995) “Daily Me” newspaper. In some
ways, this is no different from exchanging gossip: I tell you something, you tell me something,
and those “somethings” are usually things we think the other wants or needs to know. What is
different in these scenarios involving technology is the speed and accuracy of information
trading, the accumulation and accretion of information, and the uses (in terms of variety and
scope) to which the information can be put.

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The metaphor of the Internet as a market-driven social space lends itself particularly well to
market research that has long desired predictive precision at the level of the individual
consumer and has employed a variety of technologies with which to gather sufficient
information in an attempt to ensure predictive power. For example, when I shop at a grocery
store, to get discounts and to use a form of payment other than cash, I have to hand over a
“preferred customer card” (a misnomer, really, because most all customers have one). To get
such a card, I had to fill out a form providing all manner of personal information, usually
demographic but also psychographic, information subsequently used to set up a file on me in
a database. When I go through the checkout lane, I hand over my card to be scanned, and I
am identified. My purchases are then scanned and recorded (it's relevant that this activity is
performed as a service of A. C. Nielsen in most markets). When a receipt is printed, on the
reverse are coupons directed right at me based on my purchasing history. They may be for
products I already buy, or from competing brands—either way, Nielsen profits as it plays off
one firm against another in a struggle over my loyalties, and presumably, the store profits
from my return visits to use the coupons, and the brands in question profit from my continued
purchasing.

But the important lesson is this: It is now possible to care less about the market and care
more about the individual, or to put it another way, to disaggregate the market that the media
of mass communication had, of necessity, aggregated. One effect has been a tendency
toward privileging loyalty and attention, as in the case of World Wide Web-based search
engines that “are evolving into full-fledged online services where a company can be judged
on its ability to earn user loyalty” (Vonder, 1998). Loyalty, construed and constructed from
habit, has been the hallmark of the latest attempts to predict on-line behavior, the latest
journey in “the quest for certainty (that) is the heritage of the objectivist epistemology”
(Jensen, 1993, p. 71). The predictive tendencies of social science have led to the realization
that it is much easier, in fact, to predict individual behavior when supplied with sufficient data
than it is to determine the course of a mass audience irrespective of the amount of knowledge
we have about it. It is important to remember, as Plath (1980) reminds us, that

we are born individual: separate organisms each biologically unique. We grow jointly:
each in the company of others mutually tending the wild genetic pulse, as we
domesticate ourselves along pathways marked out for us by the vision of our group's
heritage. (p. 215)

To have a holistic sense of our interactions (on-line or off-line) we must take good care to
understand individuals and their relationships together—and to maintain a curiosity about
Plath's notion of a “heritage,” the lingering and persistent accumulation of our experiences
that, somehow, goes beyond ourselves.

Information, Persistence, and the Net

Perhaps, in fact, one may consider personal information as a form of “heritage.” My web-
browsing habits, gleaned from cookies and the like, can be cross-referenced with credit card
purchases I have made, the aforementioned grocery-shopping habits, and so on. There is
thus another difference in kind from previous methods of information exchange, a difference
related to the processing power gathered from the accumulated and seemingly dispersed and
differentiated data. Networked communication is not only communication between people but
between databases. But most important, the information, whatever it may be (grocery
purchases, web sites visited, etc.) lingers; it is not forgotten, nor is it distorted over time, as
gossip can become. It is not so much that it is necessarily accurate per se, but that, right or

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wrong, it is persistent.

This notion of persistence intrigues me. What about the Internet is persistent, and what about
it is ephemeral? In regard to the notion of personalized mass media, social theorists have
begun to ask, What might be the consequences of such a personalized form of news
consumption to our public, common, conversations? To some extent, although we may have
arguments about what constitutes the public sphere, we have largely been in agreement
about the commonality that constitutes that conversation, that makes possible a “public.”
Regardless of which theory one subscribes to concerning definitions of “the public,” it has
largely been taken for granted that the media of mass communication are the forum within
which public discourse occurs in contemporary society (although it may not be so anymore).
We have assumed, too, that in many ways, these media are ephemeral, regardless that we
can use recording technologies to make them replicable. The connections between the
ephemeral and our conception of ritual are worth exploring, particularly when it comes to the
Internet's forms of communication. The notion of media “events” (Dayan & Katz, 1992) has
been one way in which we have denied the persistence, and emphasized the ritual nature, of
mass-mediated phenomena, continuing to rely on a Benjamin-esque (1968) sensibility that an
“aura” exists surrounding an event. In this age beyond mechanical reproduction, an era of
digital reproduction, it is our memory that suffuses an event with “aura” rather than our
participation. Does persistence require reproduction, ritual, memory, or some combination
thereof?

But the Internet is not simply persistent due to its nature as a medium of information. Were
that to be the case, one must believe the Internet is only a storage medium and not a medium
of communication. Yet it is true that much Internet research relies on a conceptualization of
the Internet as a storage medium, as one that “fixes” communication in a tangible (typically
textual) form, making it seem ripe for the picking by scholars. Newhagen and Rafaeli (1997)
noted the same in regard to

the inviting empiricism inherent in Net behavior. Not only does it occur on a
computer, communication on the Net leaves tracks to an extent unmatched by that in
any other context—the content is easily observable, recorded, and copied.
Participant demography and behaviors of consumption, choice, attention, reaction,
learning, and so forth, are widely captured and logged. Anyone who has an
opportunity to watch logs of WWW servers, and who is even a little bit of a social
scientist, cannot help but marvel at the research opportunities these logs open.

And yet the Internet is not nearly as “fixed” in these terms as one might believe, given that it is
a constantly changing medium. One may take “snapshots” of it from time to time or of some
portions of it. But in general, the Internet does not meet requirements for fixity that
scholarship might require: Its very nature as a store-and-forward medium, one that is
designed to act “intelligently” in regard to its network abilities, makes it an ever-changing
medium.

What is persistent is not the information passed between us and among us, between us and
“them” on the Internet, but an abstracted order of information that we leave behind as we
move about cyberspace, information left behind in the form of cookies, filled-out web forms, e-
mail, textual messages, and so on. As persistent is our own memory of our encounters in
these media. These are the “memory” of the Internet, if you will, the connections between the
connections. Rather than use it to predict future behavior, instead how might we get at it, “jog”
it? What might it tell us about who, collectively, we are on-line, who we have been, what we

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have searched for, the past as it is remembered through associative links, hyperlinks, web
pages, and visits come and gone? Might an understanding of the Internet as a connected
space rather than a “cyberspace” allay some of the predictive tendencies at the forefront of
Internet research thus far?

History, Prediction, or Both

In the case of Internet research, our vision of the future has a tendency to color our narratives
of its history. Not only is the research we perform to discover its nature—its “flavor” of reality—
predictable, but in a sense, the research itself is eminently predictive, based on notions of
what we think the Internet will (or should) become, what it will (should) be, rather than on
precise determination of what it has been. The predictability of the research stems in part from
our use of tools, paradigms, theories, and so on currently available to us. And part of it stems
from the difficulty to be precise about anything on-line. Neither of these are great cause for
concern. The Internet changes, almost moment to moment. The tools we have, conceptually
and otherwise, are the ones we should initially use. The overarching concern is that scholars,
like programmers, businesspeople, and government officials, are part of the Internet “land
grab,” even if only symbolically. We rush to fill the vacuum of knowledge created by the
extraordinary interest in the Internet. The metaphor of the Internet as an electronic frontier is
one that still carries much power of suggestion. Scholars and educators are “out there” in
covered wagons, sometimes circling them (as is the case with many traditional educational
institutions' response to Internet-based “distance education” programs) and sometimes
engaged in a frenzied land rush to colonize cyberspace with “virtual campuses.” In some
sense, we are doomed to repeat the future—the one we will create by establishing what is
important to think about in regard to studying the Internet, the one we have already created
countless times in our institutions, media, and relationships.

The Need for Reflection

The very publication of this book is implicated in the aforementioned “land grab.” Can it, can
we, as scholars, sufficiently eschew the prescriptive and predictive, embrace the critical and
self-critical, and be sufficiently sensitive to language and meaning so that our work will be
meaningful to those we study?

One imperative is for reflection. Scholars studying the Internet must be reflexive, for (at least)
two reasons. First, because we have all, scholar and citizen alike, become savvy media
consumers. The “I-know-that-you-know-that-I-know” game is played out every day in
countless advertisements, marketing plans, newscasts, comedy programs, even in
conversations between us (and perhaps within us), to the extent that one might suspect we
can never again find naïveté. Whether this situation is labeled as the often-mentioned
“postmodern condition,” or the just-as-often-mentioned “information overload” is not as
important as the conceptualization of audiences beyond “active” or “passive.” Indeed, it may
be necessary to reconceptualize the notion of “audience” altogether. Joli Jensen and John
Pauly (1997), in a perceptive essay on the conceptualization of the audience in cultural
studies, noted that “with each image [of the audience] come assumptions about who the
research is in relation to the audience—who are ‘we’ in relation to ‘them’?” (p. 155). They note
that “doing cultural studies requires the work of heart and hands as well as head,” but that
“theoretical complexity marks one's status in the academy” (p. 168). I believe the Internet is a
fertile site at which we can put to the test Jensen and Pauly's request that we take audience
research “seriously as a democratic task,” that we be “more modest about (our) theories and

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more respectful of vernacular accounts of experience” (p. 167). Indeed, one of the most
fascinating elements to Internet research is that it so frequently and obviously intersects with
the experience of the new. Indeed, as I have already mentioned, much Internet research is
itself motivated by scholars “discovering” e-mail, Usenet, and so on. There is nothing
inherently wrong with that: In fact, that is as it should be. However, we must be cautious
about overlapping method and experience. If, as I believe, we have (at least for now) only the
methodological tools available to us to which we are accustomed, it is critically important that
we do not transfer the experiential demands they make (in regard to language, meaning,
epistemology) to the realm of the Internet, lest we confine experience to that which we know
but that others either may not know or, importantly, that which they experience as new, or
experience in ways that we have not. The range of experience is somehow changed on-line,
both qualitatively and quantitatively, and our explanatory abilities must change with it.

In regard to the media of mass communication, I have found it useful to ask, For whom are
media made? For whom and to whom do media communicate? And what if the answer to
those questions is, simply, “Us”? Audiences have become visibly fragmented, the media of
mass communication seem less and less like they are, in fact, “mass” oriented. But it may be
as well that our logics are fragmented, or to borrow from Jensen and Pauly, it is how we
“imagine the audience” that is at stake. Rather than holding fast to an understanding of mass
communication that has guided research for decades, an understanding that has, somehow,
simultaneously encompassed and collapsed notions of consumption, production, and
distribution, scholars must be savvy to the differences not only between those activities but
within them as well. The complexity is, of course, staggering. In regard to the Internet, it is not
only important to understand audiences—people—and what they do with media, it is
important to understand what audiences think they do, what creators and producers think
audiences do and what they think audiences will do, what venture capitalists think about
audiences and producers, what software and hardware makers think and do, and so on.

In regard to the Internet as a medium of communication, this is a particularly critical line of

questioning. It is still not clear, and it may be unclear for a long time to come, at which level of
communication (mass, interpersonal, group, organizational, etc.) the Internet operates:
whether it operates on multiple levels (it seems likely it does) and, if so, whether it can
operate on multiple levels simultaneously (this, too, seems likely) and, if it can, with what
consequences for our understanding of the people engaged in Inter-networked
communication? The situation is far from lamentable. We have come to understand, thanks in
part to the visibility on the Internet of process, that we are all engaged in incredibly
meaningful communicative processes, all the time. That it took our near-obsession with this
technology to firmly point it out is ironic, for these are processes that have been going on
throughout human history. The Internet, however, has made clear that even when it seems
that we are a voice in the wilderness, there are other voices occupying the same space.
Whether or not anyone hears the others is, however, one thing fundamentally at stake when
we attempt to assess the Internet's intersection with social life and social being.

The Internet and the Academy

The second reason scholars of the Internet must be reflexive is that the Internet is both
embedded in academic life and owes much of its existence and conceptualization to
academia. According to Newhagen and Rafaeli (1997),

Thinking about academia's role vis-à-vis the Net, we are reminded that what we call
the Net today has roots in the Internet, Bitnet, and Arpanet, all partly academic

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institutions. Just at the point in history when critical voices speak of the decreasing
relevance of research and universities, along come the Net and its attendant large-
scale commercial, industrial, organizational, and social relevancies. In large
measures, the Net can be considered an academic accomplishment. As you indicate,
this alone behooves our involvement.

But the discourse concerning the Internet has shifted with tremendous rapidity from one with
an academic and scientific basis to one based in commerce. We know that the Internet's
growth since the development of the World Wide Web is attributable (at least in part if not in
general) to its promise as an economic engine, at both the multinational corporate level as
well as that of the individual. That it has become a commercial technology in multiple senses
of that phrase (a technology itself for sale and used for selling) has become commonplace.
But in regard to scholarship, the Internet still provides much: e-mail, networks, information
with unparalleled speed, availability, and accessibility.

Academia is not without its connections to the world of commerce, of course, and the Internet
is implicated in several such connections (not least being in connection to new forms of
delivery for education, a matter of great import, but not directly related to those at hand).
Academic fame and fortunes can be made: Scholars can be first to identify Internet-related
phenomena; they might write that dissertation that Microsoft buys; or they might find
themselves on the cover of Wired magazine, earning a $50,000 “Innovation Grant” from Merrill
Lynch for “potentially profitable dissertations” (Secor, 1998), and so on. But are there dangers
or hindrances to good, wise thought, brought about by this mixture? Quite likely our sense of
discovery and wonder, senses that we rightly cultivate as scholars and senses that drove us
to the academic life in the first place, are titillated by the sheer scale and penetration of the
Internet. Perhaps the Internet can restore a bit of luster to the faded glory that came with
being a PhD, a “scientist” in the post-Sputnik 1960s, the time when, not coincidentally, the
Internet's conceptual and structural foundations were laid, and the time, again not
coincidentally, when the “union between science and state” in the United States enfolded the
social as well.

One perspective on technological development and the relationship of technology to society is

based on the notion that technology is designed in anticipation of its effects, and it may well
be that research is designed in anticipation of its effects, to borrow from Max Weber (1973).
Such effects may, in addition, be ones beyond the outcomes of a research project's findings,
ones that involve publication, funding, promotion, tenure, and the like. As Cathy
Schwichtenberg (1993) noted in relation to Madonna studies, there may be an opportunity to
assess the relationships between academia, the public, and the press, to “witness the fight
over fragmented roles and fracturing power” (Jones, 1997c, p. 207) that erupts when an area
of research suddenly becomes “hot.” The research process is no less part of “the ongoing
construction of individual and collective reality” (p. 215) than is the Internet—and discourse
within it and external to it.

Framed that way, it is possible to consider the nature of research as a meaning-making

process, as a version of reality by, and perhaps in some ways even for, scholars. The
intersection of individual reality with that of collective reality produces some interesting results
when both realities are shifting within, and between, disciplines. For instance, it is possible
that we lose sight of the fact that few people are generally, in fact, pioneers when it comes to
the Internet and Internet research. How many have “discovered” e-mail and written studies
about it? How many analyses have been published or are underway that examine on-line
discourse in MUDs (multi-user domains), MOOs (multi-user domains object oriented), and IRC

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(Internet relay chat)? I do not wish to disparage any such work, because it is important that
we undertake it. I do wish to point out that no matter how interconnected we may become
thanks to the Internet, we, as scholars, are as fragmented as the audiences that technologies
of mass communication had once brought together and now take apart. There is, and will be,
of course, much more to be discovered about on-line communication, community, and social
relations. But the penetration of the Internet across disciplines, as both an object of study and
a channel of academic discourse, brings to light that no matter how we may value
interdisciplinarity, academia is far from interdisciplinary in the way scholars communicate
across disciplines.

How Do We Study the Internet?

As a friend and colleague, Jim Costigan, remarked, studying communication is a lot like
getting a grip on Jell-O. The more you squeeze, the more it changes shape. The Internet is so
fluid as to be rendered meaningless as a storage medium; it is never constant, never fixed, no
matter that the textual traces left there seem to give it form. (That in and of itself may be the
best argument for rallying us to the cause of ensuring that Internet studies not become
institutionalized and structured as a discipline.)

In regard to the Internet as a social space, it is no easier to get a grip on the human
dimensions of the Internet than it is to get a grip on human interaction, generally. It is easier,
however, to be fooled into believing that we can have a firmer grip when the communicative
aspects of interaction, particularly as they are rendered textual on-line, are fixed and available
to us. To some degree, the sheer availability of chat sessions, MUD/MOO sessions, e-mail,
and the like provide us with a seductive data set, and it takes little effort to be of the belief that
such data represent … well, something, some semblance of reality, perhaps, or some “slice of
life” on-line. Our own precepts about ideas relating communication and interaction,
communication and community, are as much engaged with determining whether such data
“map” to reality or not.

So—how do we study the Internet, then? What, precisely, do we probe, analyze, scrutinize?
The technology is not difficult to examine and is in its way rather seductive when it comes to
research. One can get one's arms around the networking issues, the protocols, the
components (routers, computers, cables, modems, etc.), the hardware and software. Plotting
the network and determining the paths taken by messages, packets, and information is not so
difficult and can be rather fascinating (How does this thing work? How, for instance, does my
e-mail get broken up, each piece shipped, piecemeal, along different routes, reassembled,
and delivered to me?). The “classic” model of communication (sender → message → receiver)
is not only a tempting one with which to build analyses of the Internet, it can be a valuable
first step.

Are the methods we have for studying other media (methods that scholars from many
disciplines—such as communication, anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, and
dozens of others—have contributed and used to assist us with understanding newspapers,
speech, radio, television, telephony, and public life generally) ones that we can use to study
the Internet and its position within modern life? Can the hypotheses, research questions,
models, statistical procedures, close readings, and thick descriptions that we have used to
study and describe media technologies, societies, media events, meanings, and intentions be
(to borrow from the language of computing itself) “ported” over to study of the Internet and to
what goes on within it and around it? Rice and Rogers (1984) noted that “the natural contexts
of new media may limit how faithfully traditional research designs and methods may be

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applied … the nature of new media themselves may create limitations, as well as new
opportunities” (p. 82).

An obvious step is to describe and interpret on-line communication. Thanks to the hardware
and software, we have the artifactual textual traces of interaction created instantaneously, at
the moment of utterance. For scholars with an interest in discourse analysis, literary criticism,
rhetorical studies, textual analysis, and the like, the Internet is a research setting par
excellence, practically irresistible in its availability. But the social issues surrounding the
Internet are far more difficult to untangle than its texts. Most of the issues with which
researchers, thus far, have been concerned, relate to the Internet's effects on society: Will it
bring us closer together? Will it tear us apart, isolate us? Will it form the foundation on which
electronic communities will flourish, or will it be the basis of the true “nuclear” family, allowing
closeness via interaction at a distance? Will we divide into information “haves” and “have-nots”
and with what consequences? (Have we not already been so divided: Is it simply clearer now
that we are?) These are the obvious questions, and there are less obvious ones, such as
those related to the epistemological consequences of the Internet. For instance, what does it
mean for scholars and their scholarship when a particular technology with distinctive and
peculiar modes of address, identity, behavior, and responsibility becomes a preeminent
medium of information exchange? Or what of questions related to the insertion of the Internet
into modern life, itself already replete with media of communication of all kinds, shapes, and
sizes? What will be the interaction between scholars when they share the same “space”
asynchronously, even invisibly? What will the subjective changes in our sense of the speed
with which information can be moved bring to epistemology? As Breen (1997) put it,

The resort to speed is a key feature of the contemporary communications

mediascape…. Virtuality has served to heighten and individualize the speed at which
information is gathered. What we cannot identify is where the information is
grounded…. Scholarship may enjoy the benefits proposed by this sort of speed of
access to digitized information. What that speed tells us little about are the
organizing principles of the structures that bring the information to our screens and
printers, research and publication efforts, not to mention the politics of our lives. In
many respects, speed both empowers the user to gain access to pragmatic sources,
while disempowering the critical apparatus of knowledge-history. It disarticulates one
set of concerns—information retrieval and the re-creation of author information sets
in the virtual world—from the field of knowledge.

Breen's concerns echo concepts that Schivelbusch (1986) set forth regarding changes in the
perception brought about by the development of the railroad:

The notion that the railroad annihilated space and time was not related to that
expansion of space that resulted from the incorporation of new spaces into the
transport network. What was experienced as being annihilated was the traditional
space-time continuum which characterized the old transport technology…. What
Bergson called the durée (duration, the time spent getting from one place to another
on a road) is not an objective mathematical unit, but a subjective perception of
space-time. If an essential element of a given socio-cultural space-time continuum
undergoes change, this will affect the entire structure; our perception of space-time
will also lose its accustomed orientation. (p. 36)

In what ways might the research process, including, particularly, reflection and reflexivity, be
affected by the kinds of changes Breen and Schivelbusch discuss? One issue may be the

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duration between elements in Dilthey's (1990) tripartite arrangement of the interpretive

process, between immediate experience, expression, and interpretive understanding.

The traditional question to ask might be, What are the measures we can use to assess on-line
phenomena? It is more useful, I believe, to adopt methods drawn from John Pauly's (1991)
observations of qualitative research. In a superb monograph, Pauly notes three ways
qualitative researchers have chosen to study mass communication: product, process, or
commentary. To adapt such an approach to study of the Internet provides an opportunity for
an interpretive turn lacking in much, if not most, of the literature to date.

For instance, to study the Internet as product might mean understanding on-line
communication as, to paraphrase Pauly, symbolic forms by which experience is rendered and
made “meaning-full.” To study it as practice might direct us toward “cultural processes rather
than products” and assist with an understanding of how, on-line, we “habitually organize and
institutionalize the meaning-making process” (p. 4), as well as how, off-line, decisions are
made about organizing the on-line. And to study the Internet as commentary might mean that
we are sensitive to the ways it is “a useful thing to think with” (p. 5), as when we talk about the
Internet as a realization of “the global village,” or “networked consciousness,” or even when
we make claims about “Internet addiction,” for these types of discourse “often articulate wider
disputes over cultural style” (p. 5).

Commentary, as Pauly describes it, is something to which we should be particularly sensitive,

as it frames and colors our own scholarly work. At every turn, we must encounter and face our
assumptions. For instance, in regard to electronic communities (an area of study that has
greatly interested me for many years), our arrogations about what is “good” about community
(indeed, even that it seems to go unquestioned that community is of itself a good thing) color
the positive and negative critiques of what the Internet will bring to social relations. One
obvious critique is that electronic communities are, and will continue to be, elitist, no matter
that it is widely believed that “community” implies some sort of “openness” and sense of
belonging. Community is, in some ways, inherently elitist, at least insofar as it is predicated on
the notion that some belong and others do not. At present, the elite are most likely to use
computers and Internet services, and it may well be that the elite are finding community for
themselves. Yet such communities go largely unresearched. Community is as exclusive as it
is inclusive, as bad in some ways as it is good in others. Studies of community on-line will do
well not to cast aside the study of some forms of community that seem less democratic,
participative, “open,” and so on, lest we ignore the range of experience on-line (and off-line)
that enriches social relations.

In the realm of product and process, it is important to consider that community can have a
wide range of meanings and that it can be institutionalized. Community, particularly on the
Internet, is as marketable as any other commodity. Such marketing has been primarily the
province of real estate and, to a degree, of city government (the naming of neighborhoods,
developments, and subdivisions); had once been the province of social groups within those
neighborhoods (and outside them); and is now simply the province of marketing generally.

One sees evidence of this even in broad terms. The Internet has become a segregated
medium of entertainment, particularly since the announcement of plans to develop Internet
2/Next Generation Internet (I2 or NGI), to allow the once-ubiquitous (it is claimed) academic
and research uses of the Internet to again proceed, unfettered by bandwidth constraints and
overuse perpetuated by the incredible increase of commercial and entertainment web sites.
Or perhaps to put it another way, the mix of the scientific and the prosaic, the elite and

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commoners, is again separating, and through technology one finds, among other things,
status being mediated.

Perhaps the elite, too, can be thought of as diasporic communities (Mitra, 1997), even in
terms once reserved for urban development (a form of “white flight” begins as the Internet is
populated by the masses and the elite flee to 12, firewalls create “red-lined” neighborhoods,
and so on). In the realm of real estate, elite communities were signified initially by
suburbanization and the development of social and architectural structures such as gated
buildings and communities. In the realm of what we might term “virtual estate,” what we now
find via the Internet are “Gates-ed” communities, ones cordoned off in other ways, by interest
and by access. The acquisition, buying, selling, and trading of Internet domain names is the
most visible representation of such activity. Less visible representations include the
development of behavioral norms (MacKinnon, 1995, 1997; McLaughlin, Osborne, & Smith,
1995), establishment of limited-access “electronic communities,” and importantly,
maintenance of values prevalent on-line since the origins of hacking (Sterling, 1992). We may
also consider academic communities diasporic, making annual pilgrimages to conferences
and the like, and now able to meet virtually in cyberspace. Perhaps the nature of diaspora
itself, or at least our usage of that term, has changed, alongside our changeable perceptions
of space and distance. My point is not to broaden the scope of how we should conceptualize
diaspora but to ask that we broaden the scope of our explorations and investigations into on-
line communities and, most important, to ask that we do more than rejoice at the opportunities
marginalized groups have to gather on-line, that we be sensitive to the broadest possible
range of understandings of communities, incorporating understandings that those
communities themselves have.

Going Native by Going … On-Line?

As I discussed in CyberSociety 2.0, “Definitions of community have traditionally relied on

unproblematized notions of place, a ‘where’ that social scientists can observe, visit, stay and
go, engage in participant observation” (Jones, 1998). This brings up an important issue for
Internet research: Although the artifactual elements of on-line social relationships seem
readily available, in what ways is it possible for the researcher to travel to the “place” occupied
by a community, to observe, participate, to use traditional ethnographic methods? As Lotfalian
(1996) claims, studies of community have relied on terms

that refer to group dynamics such as assimilation, acculturation, adaptation, and

participation [and] to the opposite: expulsion, expatriation, and exile. [On-line] the
terms used for indicating communities are different, such as posting, cross-posting,
reading, lurking, and flaming, which don't imply being part of a whole. (p. 118)

Lotfalian's sensitivity to the language of on-line interaction is a very necessary first step if we
are to get a “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) of on-line social groups. Geertz's assertion that
“man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (p. 5) has a
particularly “Internet-friendly” ring to it, of course. It is important, however, to remember that
Geertz ended his classic The Interpretation of Cultures by noting that “one can start anywhere
in a culture's repertoire of forms and end up anywhere else…. One has only to learn how to
gain access to them” (p. 453). Concerning Internet research, access is simultaneously an
issue in regard to being able to log on and being able to participate, not only for scholars but
for anyone else. It is also an object of study in its own right, insofar as issues of access are
among ones paramount to Internet discourse, on-line and off-line. But access is also of
concern to Internet research as it engages us in questions about our ability to make choices

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about what we will study and where we will study it. What are the boundaries of communities
in cyberspace? Scholars have relied on being able to go places, to engage in participant
observation. In Geertz's terms, to “gain access” means not only to be able “to read over the
shoulders of those to whom” (p. 452) a culture belongs, to not only participate and observe,
but to understand and know. In cyberspace, is there a “there” there? What are the
consequences of an “easy come, easy go” opportunity for sociological work? Can culture
maintain itself even as people rapidly cycle in and out of its milieu?

Perhaps cyberspace is a place where communication must occur if for no other reason than
because tradition is absent, as Carey (1997a) reminds us was characteristic of the American
frontier. If so, we should examine not only the creation and maintenance of community but
also its disruption and destruction. We should be aware of what Carey has described as the
“antinomian counterpart” to the “creative aspect of culture”:

We ceaselessly create communities out of need, desire, and necessity but then
continually try to escape from the authority of what we have created. We are forever
building a city on the hill and then promptly planning to get out of town to avoid the
authority and constraint of our creation. Both the creation and the escape, the
organization and disorganization, involve intense episodes in sense-making, in the
formation and reformation of human identity, in communication in its most
fundamental sense. (p. 27)

Perhaps the formation of “personalized” mass media is, in its way, a manifestation of a
destructive tendency toward existing conceptions of community, one arising from a late 20th-
century distrust of institutions (particularly governmental ones), and one given ground by the
Internet, a medium itself “de-institutionalized.”

If the Internet is a form of “personalized” mass media, perhaps researchers, too, should in
some sense “personalize” their efforts, in two ways. First, to be sensitive to, and aware of,
their own experiences on-line. Second, to focus not only on community but on individuals
within social groups as well. If the Internet is the first truly “personal mass medium,” as some
have claimed (Negroponte, 1995), we must understand that it is not so for all. And we must
understand the Internet in terms of processes engaging individuals and those that individuals
engender as precursors to emergent, or as Daniel Dayan (1997) put it, fugitive, communities.
Is it perhaps time that scholarship takes a page from marketing and disaggregates the
market? Aside from gains and losses in terms of the traditional assessment of the quality of
research generalizability, replicability, sampling, validity, etc.), what might change about the
explanatory and interpretive power of the research? If we do “disaggregate” so, we should
also go to great lengths to ensure that we not erode “moral and civic capacities” and that we
are able to “think beyond individual desire” (Carey, 1997b, p. 23) lest we disaggregate
(perhaps the more appropriate term might be “digitize”) society generally. As Grossberg
(1997a) notes, a “materialist or nomadic model that argues that reality is constructed by
‘anonymous’ travels of people within historically articulated social spaces, places, and
structures of practices” (p. 317) may well make the most sense not only as an interpretive
strategy but as one with which we can understand the role of researchers striving to
understand a place, to understand its people and practices, and to make a place for their own
understandings.

Prediction and Partiality

It is critical that our understandings of social relations on-line are not binding and/or

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structuring interpretation. As Ringer (1997) stated in an examination of Weber's development

of sociological method, “Sociologists must be prepared to deal with merely pretended
purposes, rationalizations, displaced emotional gratifications, and plainly incomprehensible
motivations” (pp. 105–106).

Ringer's words can be applied as a caution to those studying digital media generally. Steven
Johnson (1997) notes, “A computer … is a symbolic system from the ground up” (p. 15).
Another consequence of digitization and disaggregation is recombinance, editing, the ready
and convenient ability by which disparate cultural symbols and elements can be placed in
proximity to each other without a necessary fixed relationship (Jones, 1989). Digital media
have been innovated particularly along these lines; as symbol-manipulating technologies,
they have been driven by the techniques of editing. Our understandings of cultural material
conveyed to us via digital media must not begin with presuppositions about rationality,
linearity, or even “sense” as we may construe it, unless we are aware of, and forthcoming
about, our constructions.

The more manipulable cultural material in a market system, the more economic and political
controls are placed on manipulation. As a further result, economics and political economy are
very important to Internet research. Hackers, we are told, perpetuate the notion that
information wants to be free. That may be true, but humans like to get paid. What happens
when information is simultaneously digitized and owned? And how are scholars implicated in
this fashion (as I myself am)? Copyright and fair use are increasingly important issues: They
will not, cannot, go away. Will we, as scholars, demand payment for our work? Likely we will,
although we may not always seek it in cash; we may get it in the form of tenure and
promotion, recognition and attention, or things such as release time from duties we seek to
not pursue but have done so as part of “paying our dues.” Internet researchers would do well
to maintain self-reflexivity along the economic and political dimension as well as the
epistemological. What are the politics of epistemology and the structuring of knowledge on-
line, the politics of, say, directories, on-line journals, and indexes?

Marcus Breen (1997) argues that

those of us in positions of responsibility, whether researching, teaching, producing,

marketing or promoting the virtual world of digital communication, could use a
political economy critique to inform our engagement with the object of our affection.
This is not always an easy thing to do, Academic work especially is premised on a
relationship between ourselves and the career material with which we are
“employed.” While we may abstractly distance ourselves from some issues,
competition in the workplace tends to force us to become uncritical advocates of the
material we are employed to critique. Fashion dictates our tastes, while the newly
mobilized marketplace of technology directs our careers.

Breen's critique is particularly noteworthy because it can assist us to ask, In what ways do we
(broadly speaking, as individuals, institutions, etc.) pay for information, and with what
consequences? Surely we do not pay for it only in terms of existing currencies of exchange, in
dollars and yen and rubles and dinars. We also pay for it in terms of the attention that we give
to some information and not to other. It is no coincidence that the phrase “pay attention”
incorporates the notion of payment. As Michael Goldhaber (1997, p. 182) points out, the
resource that is scarce and desirable in cyberspace is attention. Consequently, the affective
dimensions both of Internet use and of Internet research must be considered. As Grossberg
(1997b) puts it, “Affective economies of mood” are a plane “on which psychic energy is

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organized.” He goes on to say, “If desire is always focused (as the notion of cathexis
suggests), mood is always dispersed…. It is the coloration or passion within which one's
investments in, and commitments to, the world are made possible” (p. 159). Academic life has
long traded in attention and been driven by affective displacements—and disbursements.
Scholars often ask questions such as, How many citations are there to my work? Who is
reading it? Reviewing it? Are people paying attention to it? What motivates our work? But
most important for Internet research, the affective dimensions of on-line experience largely go
unnuanced as the very newness of the interaction with technology leads to predictive
research, no matter its methodological guise.

There is, of course, much attention (and grant monies) paid to Internet research that is
predictive—in part because the Internet is a newly forming medium and in part because
predictive research will find sources for funding. Such was the situation during television's
early days, as it was during that of film (the Payne Fund studies serve as a classic example).
But there is also much interest in research that is descriptive—again, in part because the
Internet is a newly forming medium and because there is great interest in discovery and
exploration of its contours. Ron Rice has written extensively about research on computer-
mediated communication (CMC), and his work has provided an excellent guide for CMC
researchers. In a 1989 article that provides a foundation for CMC research, Rice made a
distinction between two goals of CMC research: Formative research, which “acquires
information useful in designing and improving project components, and provides feedback
during the design, implementation, and use of [a computer] system” (p. 448), and summative
research, which “aims to summarize how [a computer] system affected those involved with the
system as well as the wider social context, including intended and unintended effects, and to
what extent the systems goals were achieved” (p. 449). At the time that Rice wrote that article,
however, the Internet was still limited, in the main, to the minority of researchers aware of its
existence. Rice noted in the article that CMC at that time was defined as “videotext, audiotext,
personal computers, computer conferencing, word processing, computer bulletin boards,
office information systems, and electronic and voice mail” (p. 436). Nevertheless his ideas, as
an outline of how one might go about studying CMC, are still useful.

As useful is to note that Rice (1989) observed a “variety of disciplines” and “varied
methodologies of these disciplines” used to “study … the uses and effects of computer-
mediated communication systems” (p. 436). He wrote that “the insights [are] bound up in, and
confounded with, the research processes applied in specific studies” (pp. 436–437). He went
on to narrow his focus to the communicative aspects of computer-mediated communication, to
“conversation (communication between individuals via computer systems)” (p. 437) as
opposed to aspects concerning allocution, registration, and consultation. Rice's focus
encompasses the Internet, but it is much more inclusive. Viewing his suggestion that research
on computer-mediated communication proceeds along four dimensions (stakeholders, goals,
analytical domain, and tools) from an Internet-based perspective, one can still see the
practicality of the approaches he encourages.

However, one can also see the difficulties defining the Internet as a communication medium.
Just as the Internet has made more concrete the concept of media convergence by being the
medium of distribution for digitized media content, so too has it made clear the convergence
of different forms of computer-mediated communication. The Internet is at heart an inter-
networking of networks, and, consequently, it creates relationships between a variety of
technologies, techniques, and ways of communicating. The Internet is a computer-mediated
communication system made up of computer-mediated communication systems. How do we
study it; what logics do we apply to it? The ones applied to the individual systems of which it

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is composed? Is there a way to reduce it to its components, to create analytically tractable

elements, and if so, what are the consequences of that reduction? One approach to such
reduction has been to examine the individual modes of communication—textual, hypertextual,
graphical, interactive, and so on—or to examine the individual technologies and ways of
communication that we have come most frequently to use—Usenet, the World Wide Web, e-
mail, and the like. Although such approaches do provide insight into particular uses, they do
not satisfy an appetite for a holistic understanding of the Internet. As Weber (1973) claimed,

There is no purely “objective” scientific analysis of cultural or “social phenomena,”

independent of particular and “one-sided” perspectives…. We want to understand
reality … in its distinctiveness—the interconnectedness and the cultural significance
of its particular phenomena in their contemporary form … and the ground of their
having historically become thus-and-not-otherwise. (pp. 170–171)

It is truly ironic that a technology of internetworking gives us great difficulty when we seek to
understand its social interconnectedness. If, however, we seek only to find
interconnectedness within and between the technology and its antecedents, we will likely not
make the connection we truly desire, the one between life on-line and its meaning in
relationship to life off-line.

Conclusion

It therefore is beneficial not only to study the Internet as an entity unto itself but, rather, to
study it within the context of the particular combination of late 20th-century history and
projections of 21st-century existence. What the Internet has connected is not only computer
networks but ideologies and ways of life that have, thus far, seemed disconnected, perhaps
even beyond connection. If we are to do a substantive, satisfying, social history of the
Internet, our problem may not be the history, as it has been often when scholars have studied
other media. When it comes to the history, we have it. It is written (in the electrons, generally,
or magnetic particles or pits and valleys that make up floppy disks, hard drives, and CD-
ROMs). It is likely not a sufficient history, insofar as we do not have, if you will pardon the
expression, that which is between the electrons. Indeed, much of what has in the past
provided history, the rough drafts, scribbled notes, scratched out lines, disappears with the
electrons and pixels we readily manipulate to erase traces of the creative process in pursuit of
an ideal end product. But many of the historical figures are still with us. It is one of the
advantages of the newness of the Internet that many of the technology's founding figures are
not only still alive but are quite young. One crucial aspect of Internet research should thus be
to learn as much as possible from them, to engage in historical and ethnographic work, of the
kind that David Bennahum, for instance, has undertaken and facilitated with the “Community
Memory” project ([Link]

Such work will give us, at least, a sense of the time lines involved in the Internet's
development. Our histories can go quite deep and tease out interesting connections, such as
those between early inventors of electrical equipment. Nikola Tesla, for example, envisioned a
variety of forms of “networked” communication (Jones, 1997a). Vannevar Bush, considered
one of the pioneers of network technologies, worked on electrical power systems on a national
scale (see Hughes, 1983), and much of his work in the 1920s (including development of a
“network analyzer”) prefigured later developments in Internetworking (Hillis, 1996). A
particularly salient quote by Bush, for example, in hindsight presages from a technical
standpoint issues related to networking protocols in nonlinear systems like that of the Internet:

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Electrical engineering, for example, having dealt with substantially linear networks
throughout the greater part of its history, is now rapidly introducing these methods[,]
elements the non-linearity of which is their salient feature. (Vannevar Bush quoted in
Hughes, 1983, p. 377)

As Hughes (1983) reminds us, the development of the electrical power grid was closely
connected to university research, and his history of the evolution of electrical power systems
closely parallels, structurally, the Internet's history beginning decades later. Importantly,
Hughes noted that

the interaction between region and technology was more notable than that between
nation and technology. Influences at the national level, such as legislation, affected
evolving technological systems, but local geographical factors, both natural and
man-made, were more direct and discernible determinants of the shape of the
systems. (p. x)

Following Hughes's social history one is often struck by the resonance to social, economic,
and political issues that surround Internet discourse. The Internet's roots indeed go deep, but
our histories have yet to do so.

One hope that historical work can hold out is that it may provide us insight into the decision
making during the Internet's development. Coupling such work with analyses such as the one
Bijker (1995) undertakes to assess the history of technologies such as Bakelite, the bicycle,
and the fluorescent lamp will give us additional insight into the “sociotechnical ensemble”
Bijker has proposed that can enable us to “deal with questions of value-ladenness, of
emancipatory and oppressive potentials, of democratization, and of the embeddedness of
technology in modern culture” (p. 280). It will likely not, however, give us insight into the
Internet's self-development, its social evolution, unless we are able to reformulate the social
element of Bijker's “sociotechnical ensemble” to account for on-line social relations. What is
sociability on the Internet? What indeed is “cybersociety,” and what makes it social? That
there is a group of people? That they communicate? Is the occurrence of communication
“enough” for us to know that there is a “social”?

Williams, Rice, and Rogers (1988) noted that they “consider possible research methods for
new media as mainly extensions of existing methods, [they] propose that the new media
researcher should consider alternative methods, or even multiple methods, and … attempt a
triangulation of methods” (p. 15). But an additional problem may be that, although our
research methods may provide for triangulation, it is possible that when it comes to Internet
research, our methods are not (to borrow another term from computing) scalable. Can our
methods efficiently build on one another, or is it the case that as we apply multiple methods
we are unable to achieve the sum promised by their multiple application? Or, perhaps, that
our methods are not scalable is a failure of our epistemology rather than our methods:
Comprehension is always less than efficient.

The Internet is, in actuality, not just a technology. Were it a technology alone, little about it
would be of such general interest. The technical challenges that brought about its existence
and the ones that spur its development would hold some interest. It is not the technical
challenges but, rather, the social ones that have become most interesting, for those are the
ones that seem to require the most demanding of social balancing acts, between
compromise, competition, and standardization. As Carey (1997b) put it,

Communication requires a mode of understanding actions and motives, not in terms

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of psychological dispositions or sociological conditions but as a manifestation of a

basic cultural disposition to cast up experience in symbolic forms that are at once
immediately pleasing and conceptually plausible, thus supplying the basis for felt
identities and meaningfully apprehended realities. (p. 11)

Communication, whether on-line or off-line, is metaphorically oriented. Our attempts to both

study the Internet and understand it as a medium of communication can either broaden our
options for understanding the fluid and social nature of mediated communication, or it can
narrow our options by focusing on the essentially digital, binary, nature of being on-line:
connected versus not connected, on-line versus off-line. We are both and all of those at once
(unlike the machines we use to physically access the Internet). Computers can be understood
to be digital symbol manipulators, and in fact that is all they are. And we, as humans, and as
researchers, must strive to be symbol perceivers and interpreters, operating in the analog
realm, making digital forms (zeros and ones) that seem indistinguishable again reconstituted
and recognizable.

Note

1. Cookies are files stored on a computer's hard drive by web browser software that allow web
sites to silently track the user's movements from site to site. They can hold information about
the user (user name, passwords, pages accessed, computer type, etc.).

References
Abbate, J. (in press). Inventing the Internet. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Benjamin, W. (1968). Illuminations. N e w Y o r k: H a r c o u r t , B r a c e & W o r l d.
[Link]
Bijker, W. E. (1995). Of bicycles, Bakelites, and bulbs. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Breen, M. (1997, December). Information does not equal knowledge: Theorizing the political
economy of virtuality [On-line]. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 3(3). Available:
[Link]
Carey, J. W. (1997a). The Chicago school and the history of mass communication research. In
E. [Link] & C. [Link] (Eds.), James Carey: A critical reader (pp. 14–33). Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Carey, J. W. (1997b). Reflections on the project of (American) cultural studies. In [Link]
& [Link] (Eds.), Cultural Studies in Question (pp. 1–24). London: Sage.
Dayan, D. (1997, December 3). [Speech at the Second Annual Conference on the Visual
Construction of Reality]. Copenhagen, Denmark.
Dayan, D., & Katz, E. (1992). Media events: The live broadcasting of history. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Dilthey, W. (1990). Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften [Introduction to the human
sciences]. Stuttgart, Germany: Teubner.
Geertz, C. (1973). T h e i n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f c u l t u r e s. N e w Y o r k: Basic Books.
[Link]
Goldhaber, M. (1997, December). Attention shoppersWired, pp. 182–190.
Grossberg, L. (1997a). Bringing it all back home. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Grossberg, L. (1997b). Dancing in spite of myself. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hafner, K. (1991). Cyberpunk: Outlaws and hackers on the computer frontier. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Hauben, R., & Hauben, M. (1997). Netizens. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press.
[Link]

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internet research
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computer-mediated communication
media and communications
cyberspace
mass communication
space perception

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