[Air-l] Re: first post (An Internet Without Space)

[Holly Kruse]

>> Thus, when the internet dies and is replaced by something else there is
>> still a home for those who want to study the new emerging technology.
> 
> there are list-folk who're on their third and fourth 'careers' - people
> always find something useful to do with themselves as their interests
> change or evolve.  :)

...and this is why there is a great body of scholarship on
the emergence, adoption (or lack thereof), integration,
etc. of communication technologies within specific social/
cultural/economic/historical conjunctures.  The research
that's been done, and continues to be done, on the telephone,
the telegraph, writing, printing, television, radio, the
phonograph, various portable personal communication devices,
and on and on is absolutely crucial material for those working
in various areas of internet studies.  This research tradition
might also be seen as including, in the U.S., the Payne Fund
Studies on the emergent technology of motion pictures in the
late 1910s-early 1920s and Carl Hovland et al's study on
different listener reactions to the radio broadcast of
"War of the Worlds" in the late 1930s.  Or what about Lazerfeld's
"People's Choice" study in which the groundwork for the
idea of "opinion leaders" and the theory of two-step flow
was laid?  That was done at a time when people's primary
news media in the U.S. were radio and newspapers, before
TV and the internet, but I just saw a newspaper story in the
last week about a study on Net opinion leaders.

There is a significant history of researchers having the
understanding and tools to address emergent technologies,
and to make connections -- examining both differences and
similarities among technologies -- between those technologies
and what we know or don't know about other communication
technologies and complex societal relationships.  I would
think that much of the research now being done on the
internet will be an incredibly useful contribution to
understanding whatever forms of communication technologies
follow, and that this will shift in research, if it
happens, will represent as much a kind of continuity as
it will a rupture.

Holly


-- 
Holly Kruse
Faculty of Communication
University of Tulsa
600 S. College Ave.
Tulsa, OK 74104
918-631-3845
holly-kruse at utulsa.edu