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Are Instant Messages Speech? Read chapter Read first chapter

2010 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Trouble with the Commercial: Internets Theorized and Used

Author : Susanna Paasonen

Published in: International Handbook of Internet Research

Publisher: Springer Netherlands

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Abstract

If a future archeologist were to reconstruct internet cultures of the 1990s on the basis of available research literature written during the decade in question, what shape would the resulting “internet” take? How would it correspond to the everyday uses of the internet, or public discourses concerning the medium? Taking these hypothetical questions as starting point, this article investigates some of the gaps between the Internets theorized and used since the 1990s. I argue that premises concerning the internet as a communication medium, as articulated in existing research literature have given rise to ideals and norms with a continuing legacy in internet research.

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Footnotes
1
David Silver’s (2000) well-known model of three internet research generations operates with a different understanding of the field. Silver’s three generations – ranging from journalistic enthusiasm of the early 1990s to studies of virtual communities in the mid-1990s and “critical cyberculture studies” of the new millennium encompassing more multimedial and interdisciplinary investigations – all fit in a decade and describe a field evolving toward increased complexity. Research generations were also the theme of the annual Association of internet Researchers conference in 2005. As I have argued elsewhere (Paasonen, 2005b, 2007), the widely used and pedagogically appealing model of research generations is both specific to developments in the Anglophone academia and not the best of models for describing continuities within the field. It also risks locking individual scholars into figures of a certain historical moment or generation, independent of their later intellectual trajectories.
 
2
It should be noted that cyberspace discourse has not had universal appeal but remains largely specific to the Anglophone academe (discussed in Paasonen, 2009).
 
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Metadata
Title
Trouble with the Commercial: Internets Theorized and Used
Author
Susanna Paasonen
Copyright Year
2010
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Book
International Handbook of Internet Research

Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-9788-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-4020-9789-8

Copyright Year: 2010

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9789-8_25

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