[Air-l] On stages in studying the Internet

[Barry Wellman]

Re the comments on stages of the Itnernet.
Yes, a two-stage theory is oversimplified. David Silver's stages certainly
are food for thought.
What we were trying to say in that intro chapter was a change in
the way people --especially social scientists -- thought about the
Internet.

Stage 1: Pre 1998 is what I think of as the _Wired_ stage. The Internet
was seen as a transcendent body to be utopianly praised or dystopianly
feared. Lots of attention paid to Internet-only apps. Fueled of course by
the dot.com boom. Much research came out of the CSCW world, with good lab
work on what Internet could (or could not) buy you. I think of the good
studies presented in the Sproull-Kiesler _Connections_ book as exemplary,
as well as the arguments about media presence.

Stage 2, from 1998 to about now has seen a lot more ethnographic and
survey research relating Internetting to the rest of folks' lives. The
Internet is now seen as imminent in people's lives, rather than
transcendatlly above them. I'd fit the Homenet study in this approach, as
well as the World Internet Project, and the ethnographic and survey
studies collected in our Internet in Everyday Life book, the archives on
John Robinson's U Maryland Webshop, plus many, many more.

To be sure, this is a crude typology, with lots of exception clauses.
For example, at Maastricht, I noticed some good Internet-only research
continuing, and I certainly don't want to discourage or disparage that.
And there was grounded research before 1998. Plus all the early activity
that David Silver mentions. (For example, I saw early email, "Project
MAC", between Harvard and MIT in 1967, and have been on an email system
more or less continuously since the Turoff-Hiltz EIES days of 1976).
Yet the two stage summarizing heuristic still makes good sensitizing sense
to me. However, not the last word or the last stage. I think we've reached
a plateau in documenting the first order questions about how email relates
to other forms of community and communication.

YMMV, Barry
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  Barry Wellman        Professor of Sociology       NetLab Director
  wellman at chass.utoronto.ca   http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman

  Centre for Urban & Community Studies        University of Toronto
  455 Spadina Avenue   Toronto Canada M5S 2G8   fax:+1-416-978-7162
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