[Air-L] First AoIR ICS special issue

[Caroline Haythornthwaite]

AoIR-ICS special issue
Information, Communication & Society, Volume 11 Issue 2 2008

Editors Barry Wellman and Caroline Haythornthwaite are pleased to announce 
the publication of the first AoIR-ICS collaboration issue of papers selected from 
the 2007 AoIR conference.

As noted in our introduction: 

The contents of this issue may well surprise those who think that the 
Association of Internet Researchers looks only at the Internet. 

Two articles (DeNel Rehberg Sedo; Ralph Schroeder & Matthijs den Basten) focus 
on readers’ responses to “old” media (radio, television and books) and 
discussion of books on websites and wikis. Another article looks at mobile 
phones (Hijazi-Omari & Rivka Ribak) describing how Palestinian Israeli young 
women carry on clandestine conversations with their boyfriends on mobile 
phone.  

New forms of creative production online are addressed in three papers: Eszter 
Hargittai & Gina Walejko describe how male and female young adults create 
video, music, writing and artistic photography; Smiljana Antonijevic does an 
ethnography of non-verbal communication on Second Life; and Lori Kendall 
takes us to the wonderful, imaginative world of animutations. 

Some mentoring rounds out the issue. Michelle Kazmer & Bo Xi evaluate using 
four different ways of collective semi-structured interview data: face-to-face, 
phone, email, and IM; Dan Li & Gina Walejko show how to sample the vast, 
disorganized world of blogs; and Antonijevic’s article provides a useful guide to 
the microethnography of nonverbal communication, such as gaze and arm 
movement.

No one journal issue can do everything, and we note that some hot topics did 
not make it into this year’s collection. We look to this year’s conference 
submissions for more on the new and old world of media and the Internet as 
Caroline Haythornthwaite and Lori Kendall take on the task of editing the 
second annual collaboration of AoIR and ICS.

/Barry Wellman & Caroline Haythornthwaite


TABLE OF CONTENTS


EDITORIAL COMMENT
143 – 148
Authors: Barry Wellman; Caroline Haythornthwaite

ORIGINAL ARTICLES 

PLAYING WITH FIRE: On the domestication of the mobile phone among 
Palestinian teenage girls in Israel
149 – 166
Authors: Hiyam Hijazi-Omari; Rivka Ribak

LITERARY SLEUTHS ONLINE: e-Research collaboration on the Pynchon Wiki
167 – 187
Authors: Ralph Schroeder; Matthijs Den Besten

RICHARD & JUDY'S BOOK CLUB AND 'CANADA READS': Readers, books and 
cultural programming in a digital era
188 – 206
Author: Denel Rehberg Sedo

BEYOND MEDIA PRODUCERS AND CONSUMERS: Online multimedia productions 
as interpersonal communication
207 – 220
Author: Lori Kendall

FROM TEXT TO GESTURE ONLINE: A microethnographic analysis of nonverbal 
communication in the Second Life virtual environment
221 – 238
Author: Smiljana Antonijevic

THE PARTICIPATION DIVIDE: Content creation and sharing in the digital age
239 – 256
Authors: Eszter Hargittai; Gina Walejko

QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWING IN INTERNET STUDIES: Playing with the media, 
playing with the method
257 – 278
Authors: Michelle M. Kazmer; Bo Xie

SPLOGS AND ABANDONED BLOGS: The perils of sampling bloggers and their 
blogs
279 – 296
Authors: Dan Li; Gina Walejko




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Caroline Haythornthwaite
Associate Professor
Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
501 East Daniel St., Champaign IL 61820