Where is internet studies

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The three ages of internet studies: ten, five and zero years ago. The Information Society 21 : — Why communication researchers should study the internet: a dialog. It was a new program enrolling its first students in a graduate course in Internet Studies, with a staff of one me and a postgraduate student, an energetic and cheery person called Mike Kent who, after a brief sojourn at Murdoch and Brighton has successfully found his way home to Curtin and is thus the only remaining original Internet Studies person.

I will discuss how this institutional commencement came to be in more detail in a moment. But perhaps we might also point to the day in late when the faculty systems administrator came into my office, distracting me from the mundanity of teaching critical thinking to accounting students the reason for my initial employment at Curtin with news of an exciting development: the availability of Mosaic and the coming of the World Wide Web Andreessen and Bina As someone then in the process of becoming a media studies scholar history having proven a highly insecure field of professional employment since my first job as a tutor in , I can still remember my amazement, even though not very much was there on the screen.

As an emerging internet scholar, I had spent much of investigating telnet, FTP and so on and had come to see the potential of the internet for information distribution, but in ways that did not seem coherent with television, not least because of the frustrating limitations of command-line networking and overreliance on text.

The internet is more like a social space than a thing so that its effects are more like those of Germany than those of hammers. The effects of Germany upon the people within it is to make them Germans at least for the most part ; the effects of hammers is not to make people hammers. Poster This distillation also had a profound effect on me, reminding me that, at the heart of this new web, was not technology but people and the social systems which make them who they are.

I soon experienced something of what Poster meant in using the internet to teach distance-education students and saw well past the shallow screens to the deep possibilities of community thereby enabled.

As a new academic, still without tenure, I had to continue to justify my existence with colleagues, to evade what appeared then to be the inevitability of unemployment at a time of financial pressure on university budgets, and to be more than the person who was just here to teach that critical thinking program to accounting students which had brought me to Curtin. I added my rapidly developing knowledge of how, at the end of the 20th century, our society seemed to be in the hypnotic grip of visions largely associated with virtual reality, e.

Heim of a future that seemed to determine what was going to happen now , before it had even arrived. Along the way I learned that, when few in Australia knew what the internet was, librarians had played vital roles in its development Clarke These three stories are, of course, origin myths: they serve as post-facto explanations which, in the time of telling, slyly suggest the higher purpose of decisions made earlier for many reasons, poorly understood and without clear intentions, and thus distinguish those few successful decisions we make from all the other unsuccessful ones that are soon forgotten.

They are of their time of writing, not the time they claim to recover. But this myth gained much stronger truth effect from how it served the interests of libertarians, such as John Perry Barlow , in their desire to claim for the internet a freedom from governance inherent in that technology.

That its design might theoretically but not actually prevent censorship only added to the liberation from control which the internet seemed to provide. It also conformed to a general sense of excitement and change, at the end of the Cold War, with the internet seemingly being a peace-time dividend for the long years of militarized fear. White , had planned to deliver.

The virtues of a packet-switched, free information and communication service became evident to many people, very quickly. Indeed this dramatic rise in use destroyed the easy expectations of media and telecommunications companies as to how they would profit from the future of broadband, while preventing them from using consumer payments to fund the infrastructure Australia needed. In this confusing space, where the predetermined expectations of broadband were rapidly replaced by the present success of the internet, there was a need to make sense of this unexpected irruption into the present of what seemed, in the early s, to be a far-off future possibility.

Internet Studies, as I signaled before, commenced in named, identified, and thus existing in a different way to the ongoing everywhere study of the internet. Institutionalization, carried out within a system of rules and moves, created Internet Studies, with both limits and advantages, and with a character that reflected the games at play at that time. Central to the history of Internet Studies are the economic conditions of Australian universities and the people within them myself included.

Costs were rising; and government subsidies for students were shrinking in real terms. Furthermore, a tectonic shift was occurring within higher education: until a smaller number of traditional universities received disproportionately higher funding to pay for research activities, and a larger number of colleges received funding principally to educate students. After , this binary system ended and all universities new, old, and amalgams of both were expected to conduct both research and teaching, with funds distributed more equitably but at levels which enforced new kinds of efficiencies see among others Bessant and Pick The financial pressures of this system were more than evident by the mids when I began to conceive of Internet Studies as something bigger than just my personal scholarly response to socio-technical change.

They were directly affecting my own employment circumstances and were driving institutional behaviours, leaving little space for innovation unless it was directly linked to income generation. The future was here, I thought, but was so unevenly distributed that it could not be seen, at least not inside the Australian academy to paraphrase the aphorism often attributed to William Gibson. As I read more, I realized that international scholars, including such leaders as Steve Jones and Nancy Baym to name just two were writing on this topic already.

Further, there was a history, back into the s and s, of theorization and investigation of things internet, including works such as The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer Hiltz and Turoff which explored through future fore-telling a world that 20 years on was seemingly coming true.

Just as Australia was lagging behind in the social emergence of the internet, compared to America, so too it seemed there was a lag in established, identified research into this phenomenon.

For every ground-breaking work from overseas, there was an absence here in Australia. It seemed an opportunity for my own personal career prospects but also more generally as something which the academy needed to do for the society it served. While research grants appear often to be central to the processes of scholarly innovation, in fact much research and most of it in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences is funded from student enrolments, especially at newer universities like Curtin more generally see Turner and Brass on where and how humanities research occurs.

The surplus between the cost of teaching and the student income pays the time of staff to do research, noting that each student generates the same income per head but, if they learn en masse , most of those students can be taught at marginal cost only, creating surpluses.

Thus, I reasoned, the only way to generate enough income to build a new research focus on the internet was to tie research to the generation of income, enabling the employment of new academics who could join me in developing the deeper project of studying the internet.

It is for this reason that I sometimes describe Internet Studies as something of a dot. But where might such students come from? Within the steady-state of permitted student enrolments at undergraduate level, new bachelor degree courses would only redistribute income within the university.

Such a move would undoubtedly be resisted by the academic areas already established, whose intellectual identities and successes required conservation not innovation.

As a result of this conundrum, I learned to play the institutional bureaucratic game and to identify the way in which some moves are permitted, while others are not. These courses also did not compete for existing students and did not make colleagues nervous as to the effect of innovation on current enrolments. Postgraduate course offerings did not require negotiation for the way they might fit as components within larger undergraduate programs, enabling them to be developed autonomously.

I could retain control of the curriculum and the ideas behind it, preventing interference from those who did not understand the internet or saw it through an older, conservative lens.

This move, while probably justified now in our automated, algorithmically shaped networked society Meyer et al. So was born Internet Studies: a name deliberately vague to mobilize both the popularity of the internet among intending students and, also, to defer decisions as to the precise nature of the curriculum. In , we enrolled our first students in the Graduate Diploma of Internet Studies. The future had arrived. Of longer-term significance, however, was a much more substantial organizational change which was in the offing in and, without which, Internet Studies may well not have survived its early emergence.

This change was the establishment, at the intersection of the older schools of Social Sciences, and Communication and Cultural Studies, of a new school, the School of Media and Information. The move involved complex bureaucratic political work and was the result of two motive forces. Yet this forward-thinking move concealed a deeper and more complex conservatism, largely borne of the frustrations of traditional film, television and journalism academics and educators in the School of Communication.

Together, they mostly were the income-generating engine for that school, cross-subsidizing traditional humanities areas and, in their view, unrecognized and overworked. For them, the new school was a chance to achieve status, power and long-held desires for autonomy for their traditional approaches, focused largely on professional training rather than research.

Thus, the new school of which Internet Studies was to become a part, looked backwards as much as it looked forwards. This uncomfortable mingling of identities and knowledge formations created an at-times awkward mix, though also the potential for positive change, and took some years to stabilize. It reflected perfectly the vastly more profound games of power and money being played within the media industries which the new school was in theory to serve and study to shape convergence to their own corporate financial ends, to create a future which did not disrupt but in fact reinforced their dominance.

I explored this topic in detail in my work on Web 2. The change was, nevertheless, a boon for Internet Studies. New staff were appointed and an undergraduate degree in Internet Studies was introduced. This degree, in conformance with revised library, journalism, film and similar degrees, was constituted from the start as a professional education, not a major in a generalist degree.

Its curriculum served student, employer, and social needs first, including knowledge applicable to a career, rather than reflecting the research agendas of scholars in a liberal arts manner. This change was significant at a time when the vocational requirements of university study in Australia, particularly at newer universities such as Curtin, were becoming a key requirement for success in attracting students, especially from overseas, and it established Internet Studies as a distinct field of practice rather than a topic within existing disciplines.

That said, the Internet Studies course did subtly promote a more traditional humanities agenda, which might be summed up as enabling students to learn critical thinking, creative expression, ethical and political behaviour and a wider grasp of social problem-solving. Futuricity left its mark here, too, not just in how the internet came to be conceived, but also in the birth of a course which imagined its own future success, coming into being before its time.

I could spend much more time on the complexities of the on-going struggles to sustain and grow Internet Studies. There were disputes with colleagues. Since I had the opportunity to attend both events, I will discuss them in comparative fashion in terms of background, organisation, and ideology.

For Google, the point at which the Internet and society intersect is fascinating. Seeing different perspectives and understanding cultural nuances is critical to how we develop our services. Whatever the case may be, it does not detract from the assembled research capacity. What is the relationship between production and consumption and between commodification and ideology in the realm of digital media today? Is play labour exploited even if it is fun? The terrace overlooked the Spree and what appeared to be artistically decorated blocks of the Berlin Wall.

The traditional part of the Symposium took place on the ground floor, in a modular space that could be divided into three large rooms. The lunches, Open Science Forum and evening revelries occurred in an upstairs area, above the art gallery, which had a bar and an unfinished, rough, loft-type atmosphere. The website enabled all participants and attendees to list their identities and interests.

Upon registration, everyone received a bag comprising the usual conference kit the program, a nice booklet to write in, and since we were at the Nhow the gift pen was pink as well as a mysterious flat metal object and a series of cards with attendees' names and those geometric black and white squares that appear on every ad and artwork these days. The mysterious object turned out to be an ultra-flat USB stick with all the conference papers and research questions in PDF format all the papers were of impressive quality.

As for the flashcodes: when you wanted to say something in a session, you were supposed to alert helpers, who would scan your card with their phone so that when it was your turn to speak, your name, affiliation and interests were projected onto a screen. A different screen featured a blow-by-blow collaboratively produced summary of interventions. In addition, every session comprised an artist who drew in real time a large illustration of what people were talking about. People were also encouraged to write ideas on cards and panels outside the sessions but I did not notice that these were used much.

This was intended to determine some of the dominant themes to be discussed. The conference was held in the Ekonomikum, a maze-like structure with nicely high wooden desks in the amphitheatre, definitely a plus for tall folks.