guest blogger Matthew Allen: internet research

The following entry was written by guest blogger Matthew Allen of the Internet Studies Program, Curtin University of Technology. Matthew has been teaching and researching the Internet since 1997 and was using rudimentary online learning techniques from 1995 onwards. Most recently, as well as suffering the curse of working in an illfunded university system in perpetual government-induced crisis, he’s been developing ideas about the meaning of discourses and practices of Internet regulation. One example of this material, on broadband adoption policy, will be published later this year in the International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments. He is currently President of the Association of Internet Researchers. Matthew has also succumbed to the lure of blogging and is now inflicting his Internet Musings on the world. [you can now listen to this post]

My first comment in response to Robin’s kind invitation to write about the topic of ‘Internet research’ will probably read somewhat oddly given that I am the current president of the international Association for Internet Researchers, a group dedicated to specific, scholarly inquiry into the Internet.

But what I must first do is question whether ‘Internet research’ as a scholarly endeavour, separate to or at least reasonably distinct from, other kinds of research, is actually possible. Perhaps we might judge that research carried out under more traditional labels, be they drawn from the humanities and social sciences such as political science, sociology, mass communication, or whether from more scientific disciplines concerned with information and computing has now comfortably accommodated a decade’s worth of rapid change and development in the applications and consequences of the Internet, just as – in some parts of the world and for a significant minority of the world’s population, the Internet itself is now bound inextricably with everyday life.

Even if we continue to identify something distinctive about the network itself, we might ask whether ‘Internet’ is an entirely satisfactory term for it, given – for example – the extraordinary new significance of third generation, multimedia-capable mobile telephones which, while ‘Internet capable’ hardly deliver the same kind of Internet experience as had previously been experienced. The same comment might be made in relation to the growth of the increased use of voice-over-IP fixed telephony, the looming interrelationship of television ‘broadcast’ via Internet connections and other examples of the long-touted, but only just visible convergence of certain media forms.

The challenge I set here is to ask whether ‘Internet research’ means anything other than the kinds of research being conducted in any case, without a particular fascination for the Internet, focused on other priorities, more in tune with the objectives and activities of humans, as opposed to the network itself. Many scholars more skilled and knowledgeable than myself explored just this challenge in 2005, notably in a special issue of The Information Society, entitled ICT Research and Disciplinary Boundaries.

The answer that I proffer, looking back on those debates is that, indeed, Internet research is still a crucial, distinctive field of study, more than capable of withstanding the enthusiasm within more traditional fields of study for research on Internet-relate topics within their own domains, and actually very much in tune with the increasing everyday invisibility of the Internet in many people’s lives. However, as has become apparent in recent years, Internet research has changed character along with its object of study, retreating somewhat from the wave of breathlessly enthusiastic studies of exciting, novel online behaviours and norms that characterised the first several years of Internet research, and attending more closely to the particular subtle differences that the Internet is making in people’s lives (whether those differences be for good or ill). At the same time, of course, the Internet has a peculiar capacity to generate novelty which, inevitably, attracts eager scholars seeking to pick over this or that new phenomenon for what it says about people, the Internet or the combination of the two.

What then are some of the key trends in Internet research currently? Firstly, in 2005, I would point to the significant interest in the World Summit on the Information Society. WSIS has a history of tortured processes and complex non-outcomes, reflecting its status as, effectively, a site of contestation between developing and developed nations (rather like world trade negotiations). However, it has generated renewed interest in research into the public policy aspects of networked societies in a mixed local / global environment. While Internet research must concern itself, properly, with technologies and uses, scholars also need to remain firmly focused on the broader political aspects of the Internet. Fundamentally, global governance, control and promotion of the Internet (as embodied in WSIS) is a key arena for argument and analysis that not only helps us understand the impact of the Internet on human affairs but, also, how the structures of domination and subordination that are mapped out in the world’s current array of nation-states and transnational activities constitute a key determinant of how technologies come to be. For all that the Internet is often imagined (falsely) to imply or bring about the end of nation-states, we see in the WSIS process something similar to what Jerry Everard proposed in 2000 – that nation-states become most obvious and powerful in arenas that, in some way, posit an end to, or limitation on, national sovereignty (Virtual States: The Internet and the boundaries of the nation-state, esp. pp.3-10)

While hardly ‘new’ in 2005, scholarly research into blogging continues to be significant, reflecting the extraordinary popularity of ‘the blog’ in online consciousness. Yet blogging as a definitional term remains complex. Some – perhaps many – blogs remain relatively similar to the original form and function of the web log from which blogging emerges and consist in a personal, amateur easily published account of events, activities, ideas and the like over a period of time – classically, a private journal made public. Yet the technology of blogging – very easily established and maintained websites – has also seen blogs develop that serve more like ‘websites’ in the more traditional sense of the term. Equally, blogs might be personal, identity-oriented accounts (like public diaries), or they might be something more akin to popular magazines, newspapers and so on. Many blogs combine various aspects. What perhaps needs to be distinguished here is the manner in which ‘blogging’ describes both a functional quality of the Internet and, at the same time, various modes of publishing identities and ideas, and also, collectively, a sensibility about the Internet.

Perhaps research on blogging might consider the following interesting event in 2005. One of the first and most detailed analyses of blogging was the fully online, scholarly collection Into the Blogosphere. Like the object of its study, this collection had comments section, bringing to the fore the notion of an interactive text in which readers and authors engage in ongoing dialogue (one of the key purposes of online publication of this kind). In April 2005, with a lack of comments and an increase in spam comments, this comment facility was closed. We might well ask what the actual (as opposed to ideal) possibilities are for ongoing textual engagement of this kind – essentially asking what the long-term future of the blog might be. In doing so, we might seek to explore the linkages between some other key internet developments around social networking (orkut.com), organic ‘tagging’ of content (http://del.icio.us/), aggregated image sites (http://flickr.com) and the like to explore the notion of a life that is not ‘lived’ online but somehow distributed online in a connected manner.

In 2004, the AoIR Conference was themed ‘Ubiquity?’, pondering the degree to which network access might be everywhere, all the time and the consequences thereof. I think that 2005, Internet research was marked by increased acknowledgment that the reality of ‘Internet everywhere’ is different to what some corporations might have us believe. Ubiquity is not a case of wireless technologies (even though, in many parts of the world wireless access is now much more significant, either directly or through mobile telephony networks), nor of the multiplication of devices that hook up to the Internet (even though manufacturers continue to develop such products). Rather, as is emerging in many scholars’ work, the Internet is everywhere because of the interaction between the social connectivity of the world offline and the world online. In other words, the Internet is everywhere precisely because it is not artificially distinct from the everyday places in which people live. Put bluntly, there is no ‘cyberspace’. No doubt, over the next year, research will continue that, rather than locating people in or not in cyberspace, imagines the Internet as simply a visible sign of, and perhaps a key motive force behind, the increasing networking of society. Cyberspace might then again become a term, rather like Haraway’s long-established notion of the cyborg (A Cyborg Manifesto, 1991), which focuses our attention on the instability of essential human identities in a world of network informatics

Perhaps it is in this direction that Internet research has the most to offer. As is clear from recent works such as Hassan’s Media, Politics and the Network Society, as well as new works by Manuel Castells (such as the edited collection The Network Society: From Knowledge to Policy), the network society is a key organising concept for contemporary research and applications of that research. Because Internet research attends so closely to the technologies of the network while not granting them deterministic privilege, and foregrounds those technologies and their most visible consequences, this research field is a point of convergence for scholars and researchers across many disciplines, with many distinct objects of inquiry. Rather like the Internet itself, Internet research is scalable and adaptable, coming into being through interconnection rather than through the establishment of boundaries and demarcatory signage.