Funferal

Steve Jones on internet research

Steve Jones, communication professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers, recently gave a talk at Northwestern University about the state of internet research. The following sums up his points of the talk and raises questions about internet research.
(by guest author Sabryna Cornish)

It is often difficult to define exactly what internet studies encompasses, especially because academic programs that offer degrees in ‘internet studies’ are almost nonexistent. Why is this medium not more of a priority (research funding figures alone tell us how important internet research is) in academia?
Past research (and I think current as well) focuses mainly on the sociological aspects of the internet but tends to neglect dimensions that would depth and breadth to the emerging field. Jones is hesitant to refer to internet studies as a discipline and rightly so. Internet studies does not mirror any characteristics of a discipline, although it seems to be on the right path. Jones says that disciplines have departments, curricula, a canon. Fields have institutes, centers, associations. Indeed, internet studies leans toward being a field. But this does not mean that it cannot eventually flourish into a discipline. Perhaps it needs time to cultivate itself.
Despite the sometimes-limited methodologies and ideologies in relation to internet studies, Jones does believe that the multidisciplinary approach to the internet is working. “We’re getting a pretty good understanding of what’s happening online,” he said.
So where is internet studies truly lacking? One such area Jones points to is history. “We have a real opportunity to study the history of the internet.” Jones is a fan of ethnographic studies on the internet. It is true that while many scholars have concentrated on Internet community formation, few have chosen to look at individual use. Annette Markham, assistant professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago penned a good book looking at a few users, tracing their personal growth via the internet. Jones would like to see more of this sort of research being taken seriously (ethnographies in reality sometimes are not).
There are several untapped areas of the internet that Jones said scholars should tackle such as sound, image, context and infrastructure.
“This is where internet studies must go to move out from under the various disciplines in which it now resides.”