International Handbook of Internet Research

Instant messaging (IM) is commonly viewed as a “spoken” medium, in light of its reputation for informality, non-standard spelling and punctuation, and use of lexical shortenings and emoticons. However, the actual nature of IM is an empirical issue that bears linguistic analysis.

To understand the linguistic character of IM, this article begins by considering differences between face-to-face speech and conventional writing. Because gender can affect language usage, we also review relevant gender-specific literature, both for speech and writing, as well as existing studies on the linguistic makeup of computer-mediated communication.

Our empirical study is based upon a collection of college student IM conversations gathered by the author and her students. We analyze these data with respect to message length issues, use of lexical contractions (e.g.,

don’t

for

do not

), as well as chunking of IM turns into multiple transmissions that are sent seriatim. Our findings are compared with Chafe’s notion of an “intonation unit,” used for describing spoken discourse. Taken as a whole, the IM conversations were more akin to face-to-face speech than to conventional writing. However, when data were analyzed by gender, male IM more closely resembled speech, while female IM conversations conformed more to written norms.

Today’s massively multiplayer online role-playing games are the direct descendants of the textual worlds of the 1980s, not only in design and implementation terms but also in the way they are evolving thematically.

Thus far, they have faithfully mirrored the path taken by their forebears. If they continue to do so, what can we expect of the graphical worlds of the future?

An Instant Messaging (IM) conversation is a dynamic communication register made up of text, images, animation and sound played out on a screen with potentially several parallel conversations and activities all within a physical environment. This article first examines how best to capture this unique gestalt using in situ recording techniques (video, screen capture, XML logs) which highlight the micro-phenomenal level of the exchange and the macro-social level of the interaction. Of particular interest are smileys first as cultural artifacts in CMC in general then as linguistic markers. A brief taxonomy of these markers is proposed in an attempt to clarify their frequency and patterns of their use. Then, focus is placed on their importance as perceptual cues which facilitate communication, while also serving as emotive and emphatic functional markers. We try to demonstrate that the use of smileys and animation is not arbitrary but an organized interactional and structured practice. Finally, we discuss how the study of visual markers in IM could inform the study of other visual conversation codes, such as sign languages, which also have co-produced, physical behavior, suggesting the possibility of a visual phonology.

This contribution examines various aspects of “openness” in research and seeks to gauge the degree to which contemporary “e-science” practices are congruent with “open science.” Norms and practices of openness are held to have been vital for the work of modern scientific communities. But concerns have arisen recently about the growth of strong technical and institutional restraints on access to research tools, data and information, in part because of the adverse implications these may have for the effective utilization of advanced digital infrastructures and information technologies in research collaborations. Our discussion first clarifies the conceptual differences between e-science and open science, and it then reports findings recent exploratory research on institutional policies and local practices affecting information access in U.K. e-science projects. In both of its parts the discussion underscores the point that it is unwarranted to presume that encouraging the development of e-science by providing enhanced technical infrastructures and tools alone will necessarily promotes global open science collaboration.

This article presents Information Infrastructure Studies, a research area that takes up some core issues in digital information and organization research. Infrastructure Studies simultaneously addresses the technical, social, and organizational aspects of the development, usage, and maintenance of infrastructures in local communities as well as global arenas. While infrastructure is understood as a broad category referring to a variety of pervasive, enabling network resources such as railroad lines, plumbing and pipes, electrical power plants and wires, this article focuses on

information

infrastructure, such as computational services and help desks, or federating activities such as scientific data repositories and archives spanning the multiple disciplines needed to address such issues as climate warming and the biodiversity crisis. These are elements associated with the internet and, frequently today, associated with cyberinfrastructure or e-science endeavors. We argue that a theoretical understanding of infrastructure provides the context for needed dialogue between design, use, and sustainability of internet-based infrastructure services. This article outlines a research area and outlines overarching themes of Infrastructure Studies. Part one of the paper presents definitions for infrastructure and cyberinfrastructure, reviewing salient previous work. Part two portrays key ideas from infrastructure studies (knowledge work, social and political values, new forms of sociality, etc.). In closing, the character of the field today is considered.

Today, participatory or citizen journalism – journalism which enables readers to become writers – exists online and offline in a variety of forms and formats, operates under a number of editorial schemes, and focuses on a wide range of topics from the specialist to the generic and the micro-local to the global. Key models in this phenomenon include veteran sites

Slashdot

and

Indymedia

, as well as news-related weblogs; more recent additions into the mix have been the South Korean

OhmyNews

, which in 2003 was “the most influential online news site in that country, attracting an estimated 2 million readers a day” (Gillmor, 2003a, p. 7), with its new Japanese and international offshoots, as well as the

Wikipedia

with its highly up-to-date news and current events section and its more recent offshoot

Wikinews

, and even citizen-produced video news as it is found in sites such as

YouTube

and

Current.tv

.

Among the most controversial of current information technology projects on the Internet is the Google Book Search project. Google, owner and operator of a leading Internet search engine, has contracted with a variety of libraries to scan the contents of the books held in these libraries, many of which are under current copyright. From the scanned images, Google uses search engine technology to map the relationship of words in the scanned text to the other words in the text. Access to this index is provided via an online interface. However, Google has not sought the permission of copyright holders, and book publishers through their professional association have sued Google for copyright infringement, charging that the scanning process creates unauthorized digital copies of many copyrighted works. While Google has asserted a defense to these claims under the doctrine of fair use, a far more difficult and more far-reaching issue for database technologies is the legal status of the index created by Google, which maps the positions of the words in the books. This metadata is not technically a “copy” of the books in question, but the books can be recreated from such metadata. The ownership and control of such metadata is becoming an increasingly contested question in database construction, and the resolution of this question presents a difficult but critically important problem of copyright doctrine and policy in the United States and around the world.

This article presents a discussion of methodological considerations in urban informatics research. As an exemplar, we examine a health communication research blog set up to produce insights into the choices made by residents of a master-planned development affecting their health and well-being. It served both as a repository for collection and a tool for the strategic selection and analysis of internet research data. We reflect on the nature of the online data contributed by an urban demographic about their physical activity practices within this particular neighbourhood. The blog provided a forum for detailed responses which allowed participants to reflect on their answers over a period of time, and write with the privacy and protection effects provided by the anonymity of contributions, coupled with the advantage of being able to view the contributions made by other residents. Opinions, stories and discussions were instigated by questions and photographs posted on the blog about residents’ levels of engagement with the neighbourhood for staying active and healthy. Residents reported on the social and physical aspects of the new urban environment that either encouraged or inhibited them from leading active and healthy lifestyles. In this context the blog provided insights into the role of both the planning rhetoric associated with a new urban village and the meanings attached to the lifeworld of the residents in their health practices. A total of 214 contributions to the blog were made by the residents, with the analysis and findings highlighting implications for urban design and health promotion research and practice.

This article addresses the ephemeral nature of digital media, especially of artworks designed for the world wide web and other network devices. It traces debates over the nature of digital aesthetics, including discussions of software authoring, interaction and conviviality. It looks at low and high tech paths, suggesting that the fundamental dialectic in digital media lies between democratisation and expertise. It concludes with the suggestion that digital aesthetics are subject to change, because they are embedded in the broader social, political and economic histories, as well as the technological and regulatory environments, in which they evolve.

The term “internet sexuality” (or OSA, online sexual activities) refers to sexual-related content and activities observable on the internet (cf. Adams, Oye, & Parker, 2003; Cooper, McLoughlin, & Campbell, 2000; Leiblum & Döring, 2002). It designates a variety of sexual phenomena (e.g., pornography, sex education, sexual contacts) related to a wide spectrum of online services and applications (e.g., websites, online chat rooms, peer-to-peer networks). If an even broader range of computer networks – such as the Usenet or bulletin board systems – is included in this extensional definition, one speaks of “online sexuality” or “cybersexuality.”

The term “convergence” has been used to describe the media developments following digitalization. In this article, Fagerjord argues that while convergence was a suitable term to describe the first developments, it is no longer fitting. Convergence levelled out the differences between media, allowing for the developments we now see, and for which Fagerjord proposes the term “remix”. Using

YouTube

as an example, he outlines how genre developments may be seen as remixes of earlier genres, how remixing has become a widespread creative practice, and how online media also remix power relations between media owners and their audience.

This article addresses the diverse patterns of internet access, uses and appropriations by different populations in Latin America. The correlation between nequalities in access and economic disparities is not sufficient to define or explain the region’s complexity. In an attempt to avoid economic and technological determinism while simultaneously visualizing the general picture of the internet in Latin America without disregarding its finer grain idiosyncrasies, the text is organized in three sections. First, a brief overall picture of the global position of Latin America with respect to the internet. Second, a discussion of three profiles of internet penetration and appropriation vis a vis similar local socioeconomic conditions. Third, qualitatively significant examples of the forms of use and appropriation of the internet in Latin America.

This article reports a research project concerned with Information War (Robins and Webster, 1999; Webster 2003, 2006; Pickerill and Webster 2006). It stresses that, in privileged areas of the world, war is now fought generally at a distance, with little direct risk to citizens of these nations. Yet these populations experience war in much expanded mediated ways, so much so that perceptions of threat may be disproportionate during a period of declining armed conflict. The significance of mediation in war is thereby heightened, making this central to the conduct of Information War.

The article highlights ways in which war now operates in an information environment that appears increasingly `chaotic’ (McNair 2006), being pervasive, instantaneous, massively expanded, highly unpredictable and continuous. This situation subverts approaches to information and communication that operate with traditional models of media control (Tumber and Webster 2006).

It focuses on an under-researched dimension of Information War, the social movements today that coalesce as the anti-war and peace movement. It reports empirical work from the United Kingdom where anti-war and peace movements operate with a range of new media and develop coalitions from diverse constituencies. It is suggested that an `alternative information environment’ may be created by opponents of war, as they participate in symbolic struggles to persuade people of opposition to war.

The article identifies key features of new media, drawing attention to common features as well as to particular dimensions of the anti-war and peace movement’s use of ICTs. It examines ways in which the anti-war and peace movements use new media to frame, contest and amplify information about contemporary war. It traces ways in which new media allow innovation in campaigns as well as identify continuities amongst groups involved in what is a diverse movement (e.g. maintaining the established political practices of particular groups; expressing long- held values in form and content of websites).

Are established methods of content analysis (CA) adequate to analyze web content, or should new methods be devised to address new technological developments? This article addresses this question by contrasting narrow and broad interpretations of the concept of web content analysis. The utility of a broad interpretation that subsumes the narrow one is then illustrated with reference to research on weblogs (blogs), a popular web format in which features of HTML documents and interactive computer-mediated communication converge. The article concludes by proposing an expanded Web Content Analysis (WebCA) paradigm in which insights from paradigms such as discourse analysis and social network analysis are operationalized and implemented within a general content analytic framework.

The internet enables the easy collection of massive amounts of personally identifiable information. Unregulated data collection causes distrust and conflicts with widely accepted principles of privacy. The regulatory framework in the United States for ensuring privacy and security in the online environment consists of federal, state, and self-regulatory elements. New laws have been passed to address technological and internet practices that conflict with privacy protecting policies. The United States and the European Union approaches to privacy differ significantly, and the global internet environment will likely cause regulators to face the challenge of balancing privacy interests with data collection for many years to come.

This article critically analyzes the cyberinfrastructure and e-science policy discourse in the knowledge society. As a work in critical infrastructure studies, I argue that the tendency of cyberinfrastructure and e-science to reify certain misunderstandings of science and knowledge as social and cultural processes misaligns the policy outputs with the policy practices. From this understanding, I argue that we need to consider the development of a nomadological cyberinfrastructure.

The use of information and communication technology has been leading to foundational changes in democratic society. In the US, new forms of information distribution, citizen discussion and citizen-to-citizen exchange, including content syndication, tagging, and social software, are changing the ways that citizens access information and participate in democratic discussion with other interested citizens as well as government, especially at the local level. We are interested in how local governments and citizens act as agents of change in the community-wide use of social media (also known as Web 2.0). To what extent and for whom does citizen exchange, discussion and collective decision-making supplement offline communication. What is lost in the migration from direct democracy to digital democracy? There are perils as well as opportunities to civic life with the advent of new forms of interaction. Some traditionally politically active participants in the US, such as the older generation, are often uncomfortable with computers. Has their access or participation declined with the migration to electronic forms of government? Conversely, could young adults become more active in civic life through new forms of online social interaction around local or national issues? We report here on changes in

civic awareness, political participation, political

and

collective efficacy, and knowledge sharing

among diverse community members based on a decade of research on the social and political use and impact of community-wide computer networking.

Peer-to-peer sharing of music files grew in the face of consumer dissatisfaction with the compact disc and the absence of any real alternative. Many users were more or less “forced” to turn to illegal file sharing to access single tracks, back catalogues, and niche genres. Recently the almost simultaneous arrival of broadband internet and the iPod has seen music downloading become a respectable activity and a multi-billion dollar industry.

However, file sharing was more than the fastest or cheapest way to gain access to music. File sharing was, and is, part of a broader cultural shift towards copying, cloning and re-badging. It developed in an era where companies produce logos, not products, and cut and paste bricolage is applauded as creativity. Downloading music files is more than acquiring the latest hit song. It is an interactive and creative act.

People, music consumers included, work to make sense of rapidly changing systems and situations. Sense-making involves not only knowledge, but equally intuitions, opinions, value judgements and affective investments. Users rationalize their use of dubiously legal Russian music-download sites, with the outcome that there is less cachet in getting your music from Walmart online than from a Russian MP3 site such as GoMusic, MP3Sugar and AllofMP3.

With gameworlds as the prime example, this article discusses online worlds as new forms of cultural entertainment systems and presents a framework with which to analyse them. The framework takes its point of departure in a discussion of what online gameworlds are, which genres of worlds exist and how they can be understood as a new form of engaging experience similar to the type of experience we have when we are captivated by the fictional universes of novels, films and tabletop roleplaying games. The proposed framework is grounded in an aesthetic, communicative and sociological approach to online worlds as digital phenomena, with the primary objective of describing how online gameworlds are systems that create meaning through the production of the experience of “worldness”.

This cross-national comparative case study of online news production analyzes the strategies of Cable News Network (CNN) and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), aiming at understanding of the implications of

organizational

strategy

on the

role

of journalists,

explains why traditional media organizations have a tendency to develop a

multi-platform

approach (distributing content on several platforms, such as television, online, mobile) rather than developing the

cross-media

(with interplay between media types) or

multimedia

approach anticipated by both scholars and practitioners.

Arne H. Krumsvik (1966) is Post-Doctoral Fellow at University of Oslo and Associate Professor II at BI Norwegian School of Management. He has held positions as General Manager at Kanal 24 (national radio), Online Editor at VG and Dagbladet (national newspapers), Editor in Chief at Romerikes Blad (regional newspaper) and Managing Editor at Scandinavia Online. He holds a Ph.D. from University of Oslo, a Master of Management degree from Norwegian School of Management and BA in Journalism from Volda University College. He has co-edited the Norwegian book “Journalistikk i en digital hverdag,” published by Norwegian Academic Press, Kristiansand, 2008.

Despite the growing amount of research on Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FL/OSS) development, there is little insight into how structural factors associated with institutions influence the patterns of software developer activity in this area. This article examines some of the dynamics of the development of this type of software and the extent to which these dynamics are associated with features of the gift economy as is frequently suggested in the literature. Drawing on an empirical analysis of contributors to the GNOME FL/OSS project, we suggest that greater attention should be given to the emergence of a mixed economy in which features of the exchange economy come to the fore with implications for the power relationships among those contributing to FL/OSS.

How do activists use the Internet? This article maps a wide range of activist practice and research by applying and developing Tim Berners-Lee’s concept of ‘intercreativity’ (1999). It identifies four dimensions of Net activism: intercreative texts, tactics, strategies and networks. It develops these through examples of manifestations of Net activism around one cluster of issues: support campaigns for refugees and asylum seekers.

This article focuses on the nature of scientific research in less developed areas in the context of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). We examine the notion that the internet will globalize the practice of science by creating connections between researchers from geographically dispersed areas. By altering the spatial and temporal mechanisms through which professional ties are developed and maintained, internet access and use in less developed areas may change the nature of knowledge production or simply reproduce traditional practices and relationships. The diffusion of the internet to Africa, Asia, and Latin America requires us to go beyond traditional views of development and technology transfer, to contemporary neo-institutional and reagency perspectives. The potential of the internet to globalize science, however, is largely dependent on the places and institutions in which it is used, as well as the identities of its users. Reviewing data collected in Africa and Asia since 1994, we summarize findings on access to and use of the internet and its impact on scientific productivity, collaboration, networking, and gender inequity.

We analyze collaborative play in an online video game,

World of Warcraft

, the most popular multiplayer video game with 11 million players in Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia. Based on an immersive ethnographic study, we describe how the social organization of the game and player culture affect players’ enjoyment and learning of the game. We discovered that play is characterized by a multiplicity of collaborations from brief informal encounters to highly organized play in structured groups. The variety of collaborations makes the game more fun and provides rich learning opportunities. We contrast these varied collaborations, including those with strangers, to the “gold standard” of

Gemeinschaft

-like communities of close relations in tightknit groups.

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.

This article takes as its starting point Gilles Deleuze’s well-known essay on societies of control. Here Deleuze argued that digital technologies express new social forms, including a new mode of power characterised by modulation. A mode of power that, unlike Foucault’s disciplinary mode of power, no longer has as its main product the individual but, a form of subjectivity that Deleuze termed ‘dividual’. A form of subjectivity where identity, unlike the identity that characterises individuality, is constantly and continuously postponed. As Deleuze suggested, where the disciplinary mode of power operated like a mold, where the disciplinary machine’s product is the individual, this new modulatory mode of power operates more like a sieve and has no product, at least not in the sense of it being a finished object. It is this suggestion of Deleuze’s, and specifically the formation and organisation of dividuality, or rather, one component of it in the form of the ‘superject’, through its interface with digital machines, including the Internet, that is explored in this article.

Ever since the internet first became familiar to ordinary people and to popular media, it has been surrounded by conflicts and moral panics. Even if the technology has been praised for the advantages it may bring to its users, it has also been accused of influencing its users in a variety of negative ways. For example, during the late 1990s and early 2000s, the internet was accused of influencing people’s language style, and teachers especially were concerned by the way it might affect children’s language use as well as their knowledge of the vernacular language.

Several years have passed since these debates took place. With the distance that looking in the rear view mirror gives us, we now have the opportunity to revisit the debate and see which arguments still seem to hold. This article will examine a corpus of Swedish computer mediated discourse collected in the late 1990s, to see 1) to what extent English content really occurred, 2) what type of content users chose to write in English, and 3) what functions it may have filled – i.e. how much, what and why.

Web sites are rapidly becoming the preferred media choice for information search, company presentation, shopping, entertainment, education, and social contacts. And along with the various forms of communication that the Web offers the aesthetic aspects have begun to play an increasingly important role. However, studies in the design and the relevance of focusing on the aesthetic aspects in planning and using Web sites have only to a smaller degree been subject of theoretical reflection. For example, Miller (2000), Thorlacius (2001, 2002, 2005), Engholm (2002, 2003), and Beaird (2007) have been contributing to set a beginning agenda that address the aesthetic aspects. On the other hand, there is a considerable amount of literature addressing the theoretical and methodological aspects focusing on the technical and functional aspects. In this context it is the aim of this article to introduce a model for analysis of visual communication on websites.

This article explores the historical development of hypertext, arguing that we have seen a transition from early visions and implementations of hypertext that primarily dealt with using hypertext to gain greater control over knowledge and ideas, to today’s messy web. Pre-web hypertext can be seen as a domesticated species bred in captivity. On the web, however, some breeds of hypertext have gone feral. Feral hypertext is no longer tame and domesticated, but is fundamentally out of our control. In order to understand and work with feral hypertext, we need to accept this and think more as hunter-gatherers than as the farmers we were for domesticated hypertext. The article discusses hypertext in general with an emphasis on literary and creative hypertext practice.

Technologically networked social forms are broad, extensive and in demand. The rapid development and growth of web 2.0, or the social web, is evidence of the need and indeed hunger for social connectivity: people are searching for many and varied ways of enacting being-together. However, the ways in which we think of, research and write about network(ed) sociality are relatively recent and arguably restricted, warranting further critique and development. This article attempts to do several things: it raises questions about the types of sociality enacted in contemporary techno-society; critically explores the notion of the networked individual and the focus on the individual evident in much of the technology and sociality literature and asks questions about the place of the social in these discussions. It argues for a more well-balanced and multilevelled approach to questions of sociality in networked societies. The article starts from the position that possibilities enabled/afforded by the technologies we have in place have an effect upon the ways in which we understand being in the world together and our possible actions and futures. These possibilities are more than simply supplementary; in many ways they are transformative. The ways in which we grapple with these questions reveals as much about our understandings of sociality as it does about the technologies themselves.

Perhaps the most significant tool of our internet age is the web search engine, providing a powerful interface for accessing the vast amount of information available on the world wide web and beyond. While still in its infancy compared to the knowledge tools that precede it – such as the dictionary or encyclopedia – the impact of web search engines on society and culture has already received considerable attention from a variety of academic disciplines and perspectives. This article aims to organize a meta-discipline of “web search studies,” centered around a nucleus of major research on web search engines from five key perspectives: technical foundations and evaluations; transaction log analyses; user studies; political, ethical, and cultural critiques; and legal and policy analyses.