[Air-l] Re: UCLA Internet Use Report

[RG Lentz]

Re Willard's Uncapher's post:

"The report obviously sticks to a rather instrumentalist view of the
Internet, tailored to e-commerce, and doesn't appear to venture, if the
pre-reports are accurate, to raising issues of surveillance, sharing of
data, encryption, and other such aspects of Net use."

Seems there is now a constant stream of cyber/Internet tracking studies 
(Pew, NTIA, UCLA, etc.) with a (and a growing enterprise for academics to 
add to this) available that focus mostly on household research with little 
attention to questions related to institutional disadvantage, e.g., 
national surveys/tracking studies (census not random sample studies) on 
libraries, schools, etc. where the policy remedies are focused (e.g., 
e-rate)? Also, these studies are so absent 'context' that it begs the 
question: why are Internet researchers focusing on this? Where's the beef? 
Soapbox here, but does it not bother anyone that there is so much 
money/effort going into such tracking studies? To what end? I'll risk 
posing the 'so what' question to get some discussion going.

B. Lentz, UTAustin