Internet Studies

Past, Present and Future Directions

Panayiota Tsatsou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409446415
• eBook ISBN: 9781317113614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book considers the lessons learnt so far from the emergence of the Internet and the development of the field of Internet studies, whilst also considering possible directions for the future. Examining broad media theories and emerging theorisations around the Internet specifically, it explores the possibility of the development of an Internet theory in the future. A comprehensive overview of the field, Internet Studies considers key issues of social importance that the study of the Internet draws upon, such as the role of the Internet in civic participation and democratisation, the development of virtual communities, digital divides and social inequality, as well as Internet governance and policy control. At the same time, it examines the role of the Internet in social research and the development of highly interdisciplinary and rapidly developing Internet research. Hence, this volume maps key areas of certainty and uncertainty in the field of Internet studies and, as such, it will be of interest to scholars and students of media and communication, sociology and social research methods.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Moving from Mass Media to Internet Studies?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315589572-1

In considering the angles from which this book will inform the reader on the study of the Internet, I regarded it inevitable to commence with a rather generic but nevertheless informative introduction to the Internet and its social positioning.

The Internet emerged in the 1960s as an experimental network to connect remote computers and from the 1990s onwards evolved into a medium of global, multi-layered and multi-media communication. Since its astonishing degree of appropriation (which is still ongoing) at the local, regional, national and international levels, the Internet has complemented, challenged, enriched and, in some cases, undermined mass-media production and the content of communication, while introducing new discourses and understandings of the characteristics, magnitude and quality of media audiences and their role(s) in shaping communication. According to the latest world figures, Internet penetration (i.e. Internet use) has achieved a massive increase since the year 2000, even in the world's poorest places. Internet use grew by 3,606.7 per cent in Africa, 2,639.9 per cent in the Middle East and 1,310.8 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean over the period 2000–2012. Internet use rates have also increased significantly in the more developed areas of the world, although at a less spectacular pace than in developing countries. In the period 2000–2012, Internet use grew by 393.4 per cent in Europe, 218.7 per cent in Oceania and Australia and 153.3 per cent in North Africa. Regardless of this extensive growth, gaps in Internet penetration are still in place and only about a third of the world's population (34.3 per cent) were Internet users in 2012. The picture becomes even more complex when the persistent discrepancies in Internet penetration between the West and the rest of the world are considered. In 2012, 78.6 per cent of the North American population, 67.6 per cent of the Australian population and 63.2 per cent of the European population used the Internet. In contrast, only 42.9 per cent of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean, 40.2 per cent of the population in the Middle East, 27.5 per cent of the Asian population and 15.6 per cent of the population in Africa were Internet users in 2012 (www.internetworldstats.com).¹

¹ The Internet-use statistics are for June 2012 and rely on data published by Nielsen Online, the International Telecommunications Union, GfK, local ICT regulators and other sources.

Does this challenging picture of enormous growth, on the one hand, and persistent gaps and inequalities, on the other, justify the hyperbole typical of what is contended about the present of the Internet and of what is foreseen for its future role in mediated communication, exchange and collaboration? Probably not, and this invites us to seek a better understanding of what the Internet is (and what it is not) and how it has been approached, studied and researched over the past two decades and more.

The Internet: Technology, People and Communication

What is the Internet and how has it evolved over time? How can one make sense of its elements and functions alongside its usages and the role it plays in individual and social-life settings?

Although the term ‘Internet’ is more or less known to all scholars and to most ordinary people, from its outset it was comprehended as fluid, hardly definable and largely controversial. According to Allen, the term ‘Internet’ is ‘seductively totalising, gathering together many diverse developments in ways that make sense now’ and, thus, ‘the simplicity of the term occludes the multiple pathways of technological and social development that preceded our capacity to speak of this network’ (2012: 101). The fact that the term ‘Internet’ refers to a range of technologies – as well as to diverse forms, services and content of information dissemination, communication exchange and even collaboration, all resulting in a plethora of usage experiences – is what makes the singularity of the term problematic (Livingstone 2005: 3). In addition, rapid technological development and barely predictable shifts in the development and appropriation of the Internet make any precise definition of it subject to criticism or even dismissal: ‘the Internet cannot be captured in an individual “picture” … The pictures are stagnant, but the Internet is in a constant state of flux … the Internet is often experienced but difficult to translate and express’ (Costigan 1999: xviii).

Numerous attempts have been made to define the Internet, aiming mainly to describe its technical features and usage affordances. From a rather technical perspective, the Internet has been defined as ‘a network of computer networks that works based on the TCP/IP protocol’ (Fuchs 2008: 121), and as ‘a decentralised, global communications network mediated by the conjunction of computers and telecommunications’ (Livingstone 2005: 1). Its technical design consists of a top thick layer, which includes application protocols required for running a vast, ever-changing and ever-developing range of Internet applications; a bottom thick layer, which includes protocols and standards required for the traffic of Internet data through telecommunications media; and a middle thin layer, which constitutes the vital core infrastructure of the Internet and features domain names, routing of data packets and assignment of addresses (Dutton and Peltu 2007: 65–66). This technical design makes the Internet an open system of networked computer networks, where control of information, communication and collaboration activities is decentralised and transferred to the user. In addition, the power to control is assigned to the user at the software level, since software is traded and promoted as a service rather than a product, essentially requiring usage and user co-production instead of pure one-way trade and consumption (O’Reilly 2005).

The Internet is far more than technology, though. It is essentially a techno-social system, ‘a global decentralized technological structure consisting of networked computer networks that store objectified human knowledge’ while human actors ‘permanently re-create this global knowledge storage mechanism by producing new informational content, communicating, and consuming existing informational content in the system’ (Fuchs 2008: 122). The word ‘Internet’ itself alludes to the idea of inter-networks and the fact that it constitutes ‘a “network of networks”, each with their own design and unique structure, yet they all follow some basic rules that allow them to interconnect’, while ‘social structures of the Internet mimic this design’ (Costigan 1999: xviii). As ‘a global network of computer networks’ (Castells 2001: 10), the Internet consists of both technical elements (i.e. design) and social structures, with the latter giving meaning and importance to the former and with design-grounded networks going hand in hand with social networks and networks of Internet users. Given this network logic², the Internet is considered pioneering and revolutionary because of the complex interrelationships and flows of influence it facilitates between the technical and social subsystems and among networked technologies, content, services, actors and even entire phenomena and broader social settings: ‘the technological structure is a structural mass medium that produces and reproduces networked communicative and cooperative actions and is itself produced and reproduced by such practices’ (Fuchs 2008: 123). From a broader sociological perspective, the Internet has been conceived as strengthening pre-existing debates on the ‘Information Society’ that mass and electronic media first sparked (Webster 2004a: 1). Or, as put forward by Lievrouw and Livingstone (2006: 7), ‘new media research and scholarship have moved away from a dependence on theories of mass society and toward post-industrial or post-modern theories of society’.

² A detailed discussion of the ‘Network Society’ theory is offered in Chapter 3.

So where do the complexity and appeal of the Internet lie?

The Internet is a complex and multifaceted example of new media, and the artefacts, activities and arrangements it encompasses differ from those found in mass media ‘in terms of the recombinant and networked ways they develop, and their ubiquitous and interactive consequences’ (Lievrouw and Livingstone 2006: 11). ‘Recombination’ points to the continuous hybridisation of old and new technologies and innovations within Internet settings and platforms. It was first flagged up in Bolter and Grusin's (1999) notion of ‘remediation’, according to which new media remediate – in other words, translate, refashion and reform – other, older media, in terms of both content and form_ ‘What is new about new media is therefore also old and familiar: that they promise the new by remediating what has gone before’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 270). Bolter and Grusin (1999: 31) present recombination as ‘hypermediacy’, with new-media raw ingredients (e.g., images, sound, text, animation and video) borrowing from old forms of media (e.g., television, film, photography and print). According to these authors, remediation has two other elements worthy of attention: ‘immediacy’, namely the user's sense of immediate contact with the content or activity she/he engages with through new media, and ‘transparency’, which suggests an interface that is transparent and the user can ignore or even be unaware of when confronting a medium.

In addition, the ‘network’ metaphor (very briefly introduced above) suggests Internet-enabled one-to-one and many-to-many communication added to one-to-many forms of mass communication. Finally, the Internet demonstrates ubiquity of presence, as well as a new scale, new means and a new scope of interactivity. These technologically and culturally defined characteristics of the Internet result in certain usage affordances, such as multimedia content and forms of communication (i.e. integration of text, sound, images, animation, video etc.); hypertextuality, namely the presence of a fluid and ever-expanding network of interlinked texts; spatiotemporal disembeddedness of communication; many-to-many communication modes; cooperative production of digital content; decontextualisation of information and content (i.e. removal of authorship and of the time and place of production); and derealisation in cyberspace (i.e. blurred boundaries between reality, fiction and virtual reality) (Fuchs 2008: 139).

These features and affordances of the Internet are of interest to broader discussions of its history, present status and potential future development. They are also of interest to those contributing multi-disciplinary theoretical, methodological, empirical or policy accounts of the Internet and the effects of its presence and appropriation. In a way, they oblige those who study the Internet to move beyond the sorts of celebratory or warning accounts that experts and scholars (e.g., De Sola Pool 1983, Negroponte 1995) put forward when the first debates on its role and effects arose. Today, phenomena such as ‘e-democracy’, on the one hand, and ‘digital divides’, on the other,³ invite scholars to produce balanced portrayals of what the Internet is and what it means for individuals and for society. Essentially, those who study the Internet are invited to challenge monolithic and uncritical concepts, explanations and evidence that have long resided in the field of Internet studies: ‘We must continue to be sceptical of claims for change, weighing evidence, clarifying concepts, acknowledging the limits of research’ (Livingstone 2005: 13).

³ Both phenomena are discussed in detail in Chapter 4.

The Internet and its Study

The previous introductory remarks on the Internet bring us to the subject of its study. In actual fact, the ‘new media studies’ pathway within media studies has developed as a result of the innovation that has marked the Internet and other media and communication technologies (e.g., mobile telephony) for the past couple of decades and the increasing interest of experts, decision-makers, industry players and the community of users (and that of non-users) in the effects of new media technologies on how individuals and societies organise themselves and their lives. Internet studies can be considered a major part of new media studies and its agenda is largely in accordance with what the study of new media consists of, namely: ‘the artefacts or devices used to communicate or convey information; the activities and practices in which people engage to communicate or share information; and the social arrangements or organizational forms that develop around those devices and practices’ (Lievrouw and Livingstone 2006: 2, italics in original). In this respect, the field of Internet studies mostly addresses questions that fall into one or more of the following broader themes:

• Design, structure and development of artefacts or technologies used in communication. As regards the Internet, for instance, the hyperlinked and dynamic self-organising structure of the World Wide Web (Fuchs 2008: 123) generates a multitude of questions around cross-border decentralised design and technical structure and the implications for information and communication production, dissemination and consumption.
• Cultural dissemination and social context within which mediated communication emerges and develops, and examination of people's practices through mediated communication. Here we encounter research evidence and scholarly debates around the everyday embeddedness of the Internet (e.g., Bakardjieva 2005, Silverstone 1996, Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2002)⁴ and the political economy of its structures and organisational patterns (e.g., McChesney 2007, Murdock and Golding 2004, Schiller D. 2007).⁵ Questions are posed around the ways in which the Internet is appropriated in people's lives, as well as the role it plays in forming opportunities for and creating risks in how people go about their lives in individual, domestic an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction: Moving from Mass Media to Internet Studies?
• 2 Writing the Histories of the Internet and of its Study: Certainties and Enigmas
• 3 Theorising the Internet: Crafting an Internet Theory
• 4 Studying the Role of the Internet in a Real-Life Context: Opportunities versus Risks
• 5 Research and the Internet: Fast-Growing Internet Research
• 6 Conclusion: The Unexpected Future of the Internet and its Study
• Bibliography
• Index