From the Chronicle of Higher Education issue dated March 30, 2001

Internet Studies 1.0: a Discipline Is Born Scholars explore how online communication changes commerce, community, and reality

By SCOTT McLEMEE

It has been a year since Black April, when the air started going out of the dot-com bubble, at a cost to investors and businesses of many billions. You might assume there could not be a worse time for a field calling itself "Internet studies." You would be wrong. Scholars in the field are careful to keep irrational exuberance over it strictly in check. Even so, recent developments suggest that the Internet is becoming established not simply as a tool for research or another way to teach classes, but also as an object of interdisciplinary study.

In February, Brandeis University announced that, starting this fall, it would offer an undergraduate concentration in Internet studies -- the first in the country. That development comes in the wake of Georgetown University's master's degree focused on the Internet, offered by the communication, culture, and technology program. Enrollment in that program has grown from 30 students in 1996 to 160 today.

And courses devoted to the Net have blossomed across the country even where no degree program exists, says David Silver of the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies. When he founded the center at the University of Maryland at College Park five years ago, while a graduate student in American studies, Mr. Silver searched nationwide for courses on the topic. He found only five. Today, his site lists some 400. This semester's offerings include "Sociology and the Internet" (at Rutgers University at Camden), "Cyberculture and Virtual Community" (George Mason University), and "Digital Narrative" (Emerson College).

But perhaps the most telling sign of the field's momentum is the recent history of the Association of Internet Researchers -- which was born in October 1998. Steve G. Jones, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, brainstormed with a couple of graduate students to form the group. He recalls hoping that it might draw 100 scholars, eventually. But more than 300 participants turned out for the association's first conference, in September. He now counts about 750 members, many of them scholars from abroad. This year's meeting, to be held at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in October, drew 450 submissions for papers and panels. More than one publisher has approached the group about starting a journal.Yet another place to publish is arguably the last thing Internet researchers need. Besides the Journal of Online Behavior and New Media & Society, they have CyberPsychology & Behavior, Convergence, and The Journal of Virtual Environments.

Mr. Jones has edited several anthologies that turn up in everyone else's bibliographies -- including Doing Internet Research (Sage Publications, 1999), perhaps the first volume to consider the methodological problems of the field. He is also in charge of Digital Formations, a book series forthcoming from Peter Lang Publishing. So just what do Net researchers actually study? Skeptics might wonder how intellectual inquiry can keep pace with the technology. The field has already produced some landmark works -- including Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Touchstone, 1995) and three imposing volumes of economic and sociological analysis in The Information Age (Blackwell Publishers, 1996-98), by Manuel Castells, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of California at Berkeley. But a glance at recent papers suggests that not many scholarly works published before about 1999 qualify as formative.

Still, the field does cohere around a few key issues. One is the topic of community -- the way people use the Web to locate and interact with others who share similar backgrounds or interests. If you really want to discuss, say, the synthetic unity of apperception, you can find Kantians online, arguing at any hour. Likewise with any other concern, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Scholars are investigating how such groups form and what combination of formal rules and informal understandings govern their conduct. What generalizations can be made about "computer-mediated communication" (often abbreviated C.M.C.)? What patterns of conflict and consensus emerge?

In the pioneering days of C.M.C. research, back in the early 1990's, scholars concentrated on "virtual" communities, in which participants only interact while online, not in R.L. (real life). That focus has shifted, according to Martin J. Irvine, executive director of Georgetown's program in technology and culture. "We're seeing much more of a continuum," reports Mr. Irvine, ranging from people who have never met each other, to groups who use the Net to reinforce their connections offline, to groups who merely share a demographic profile and a certain level of purchasing power. "'Community' has become a pretty fuzzy term," he says.

Besides work on how people communicate and behave online, scholars are studying discourses about the Internet. How does its reception compare with that of earlier communications media, such as radio or television? When the Internet is treated as a panacea -- or as grave moral danger -- what nontechnological issues are being confronted or avoided? After several years of scholarly work on Web culture, Theresa Senft, a doctoral candidate in the department of performance studies at New York University, thinks of Internet research as offering the same critical perspective on everyday life as queer theory. "Both," she notes in an e-mail message, "purport to be about 'unnatural' states (homosexuality, virtuality). Yet both are most effective when they help us to question just what 'natural life' is." Today, of course, there is yet another form of speculation for Net researchers to investigate: the vexing question of e-commerce. "One topic I'm very interested in," notes Maryland's Mr. Silver, "is how newspapers are covering the failure of the dot-coms. And there's work to be done on the sociology of pink-slip parties, where you have all these talented and ambitious young people trying to figure out what to do next."

Whatever the condition of the economy outside academe, Internet studies is clearly making itself felt on the academic job market. In recent months, the e-mail discussion list sponsored by the Association of Internet Researchers has announced openings for Net-oriented positions in sociology, literature, public policy, and communications.

"This is the first year of those who identify themselves as Net researchers looking for their first jobs," says Mr. Silver. After finishing his degree at Maryland -- and a brief stint as an adjunct in the Georgetown program, he received a half-dozen offers from top-tier research universities. This fall he will be an assistant professor at the University of Washington.

The boom is, in part, a product of demand. "Students can't get enough of this subject," Mr. Silver says. "Classes get filled immediately, and they come to the table with considerable knowledge and experience."

That may make classes devoted to the Internet vulnerable to the same complaint sometimes lodged against popular-culture courses: They attract students by flattering them for being au courant. Mr. Silver denies it's a matter of giving credit for what students already know. "Focusing on the Internet in the classroom helps create a critical awareness of the medium," he says. "This is a way of getting them to analyze something they take for granted." Steve Jones explains the field's relatively swift and uncontroversial emergence within academe this way: Tools such as e-mail were a familiar part of campus life well before they caught on in society at large. Many of the original servers were located at universities -- and ".edu," after all, was among the earliest domain-name suffixes. "Internet research is now a basic part of what it means to be self-reflective about academic work," says Mr. Jones, who will be heading a new program for new-media studies at Illinois-Chicago this fall. (The program will offer undergraduate courses as well as a curriculum leading to the Ph.D.) "To a degree, we created this medium. It behooves us to study its impact."

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