Society Online

The Internet in Context

Philip N. Howard, Steve Jones, Philip E. N. Howard, Steven Jones

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780761927082
  9780761927075
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781452262871
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"These editors have the respect, visibility, and track-record to make this volume a contribution to the field of Internet studies. It will be adopted as an upper-division text and can also serve as a valuable reference work for doctoral students. Given its broad mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches, this work should have wide appeal across the Social Sciences and Information Studies." 

-- Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern
                                                                                                                            California

Within the developed world, much of society experiences political, economic, and cultural life through a set of communication technologies barely older than many citizens. Society Online: The Internet in Context examines how new media technologies have not simply diffused across society, but how they have rapidly and deeply become embedded in our organizations and institutions.

Society Online is not exclusively devoted to a particular technology, or specifically the Internet, but to a range of technologies and technological possibilities labeled "new media." Rather than trying to cover every possible topic relating to new communication technologies, this unique text is organized by how these new technologies mediate the community, political, economic, personal, and global spheres of our social lives. Editors Philip N. Howard and Steve Jones explore the multiple research methods that are required to understand the embeddedness of new media.

Society Online discusses the findings of the Pew Internet and American Life Project and is the first book to bring together leading social scientists to provide the most comprehensive and far-reaching Internet research data sets and to contextualize Internet use in modern life. The book features contributions by leading scholars from across the social sciences using a range of research techniques including systematic content analysis; comparative methods; quasi-experimental methods; probit; ordinary least squares and logistic regression analysis; small focus groups; historical, archival, and survey methods; ethnographic and auto-ethnographic work; and comparative analyses of policy traditions to probe, analyze, and understand the Internet in the context of everyday life.

Society Online is designed for undergraduate and graduate students taking media studies courses in the areas of Communication, Sociology, Political Science, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Information Sciences, and American Studies.

For more information about Society Online, please visit www.societyonline.net.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Foreword
• Prologue: The Case for Multimethod Research
• 1 - Embedded Media
• Part I: Social Capital, Community, and Content
• 2 - The Bridging and Bonding Role of Online Communities
• 3 - Deeper Understanding, Deeper Ties
• 4 - Bending Gender Into the Net
• 5 - Interrogating the Digital Divide
• 6 - Will Internet Voting Increase Turnout?
• 7 - The Internet and Political Involvement in 1996 and 2000
• 8 - New Media, Internet News, and the News Habit
• 9 - Crisis Communication and New Media
• Part III: Economic Life Online
• 10 - “sHoP onLiNE!”
• 11 - Permanently Beta
• 12 - Art Versus Code
• Part IV: Culture and Socialization Online
• 13 - Wired and Well Read
• 14 - The Disembodied Muse
• 15 - Technology and Tolerance
• Part V: Personal and Global Contexts of Life Online
• 16 - Informed Web Surfing
• 17 - American Internet Users and Privacy
• 18 - Sited Materialities With Global Span
• 19 - The Future of the Internet
• 20 - Conclusion
• Index
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors