Internet Studies: Perspectives on a rapidly developing field

Charles Ess, William Dutton

doi: 10.1177/1461444812462845

New Media & Society, April 29, 2013

<http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/04/24/1461444812462845.full>

To quote from the introduction – which is available as a free download – We have organized the contributions to this issue such that they flow across four general areas. The first focuses on the field as a whole, and is filled by our lead article, by Tai-Quan Peng, Lun Zhang, Zhijin Zhong and Jonathan JH Zhu, ‘Mapping the Landscape of Internet Studies: Text mining of social science journal articles 2000–2009’. We then shift focus to specific Perspectives from Different Arenas, beginning with Jingyan (Elaine) Yuan’s ‘culturalist critique of “online community” in new media studies’, followed by Heidi Campbell’s ‘Religion and the Internet as a microcosm for studying trends and implications within Internet Studies’, then an article by Jessie Daniels, ‘Race and racism in Internet Studies’, and Michel van Eeten and Milton Mueller’s ‘Where is the governance in Internet governance?’.

The next set of articles focus more on Methodological Perspectives, beginning with Juliette De Maeyer’s ‘Towards a hyperlinked society: A critical review of link studies’, followed by Niels Brügger’s ‘Web historiography and Internet Studies: Challenges and perspectives’. The two final articles are both tied to Critical Perspectives on User Empowerment, a cross-cutting theme of Internet research across various research arenas. Anja Bechmann and Stine Lomborg’s article is entitled ‘Mapping actor roles in social media: Different perspectives on value creation in theories of user participation’, and this is followed by Christian Fuchs and Nick Dyer-Witheford’s challenge to Internet Studies, entitled ‘Karl Marx @ Internet Studies’.

We conclude with a more general account of what we have learned about this evolving field from this special issue in light of work on our respective handbooks.

Several of the articles are already published online; the print version of the complete issue will appear later this year.

We would also like to express our gratitude to numerous reviewers and to Editors, Steve Jones and Nickolas Jankowski, for their constant support and assistance in developing and bringing this special issue to fruition.

Charles Ess and Bill Dutton