[Air-l] Re: UCLA Internet Use Report

[Nancy Baym]

I just taught a day of my grad cmc seminar yesterday in which we read 
the results of a number of these studies (the homenet stuff too, old 
and new), and my students had much the same reaction as yours, Becky. 
"Why ask the question?" cried one particularly exasperated person. 
Your call for analyses of context is right on. I'd also like to see 
more analyses of different uses of the internet, different kinds of 
internet users, and in general more analysis of differences instead 
of looking for unilateral effects (or the lack thereof) caused by The 
Internet. On the other hand, I find these tracking studies really 
interesting and useful for getting a snapshot overview.

Nancy

>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