[Air-L] CFP Histories of Internet Studies: Status and Perspectives

[Smiljana Antonijevic]

*Call for Papers*


*Special Issue Sociologija (4/2019)"Histories of Internet Studies: Status
and Perspectives”*

*Guest co-editors: Smiljana Antonijević and Dalibor Petrović*





*Sociologija**,* a peer-reviewed journal of the Sociological Association of
Serbia and Montenegro and the Institute for Sociological Research,
University of Belgrade, invites submissions for a special issue on
Histories of Internet Studies: Status and Perspectives. The editors are
particularly interested in submissions focused on national, regional, and
other geographically specific histories of the global network.



This year marks twentieth anniversary since journal *Sociologija *published
its first article focused on social aspects of internet use. We find this
anniversary a good opportunity to reflect on some of the social changes
that have occurred over the past twenty years, largely as a result of
integrating ICTs into various aspects of our lives. Equally important are
the transformations that affected the internet itself, changing it in the
ways that in retrospect might seem more or less predictable, but which
twenty years ago belonged to an uncharted future.



As a result of these transformations, certain topics that constituted
analytical locus of early internet studies are either fading into obscurity
or becoming interpreted in different ways, while new areas of inquiry are
gaining prominence. For instance, virtual communities, which Howard
Rheingold so inspiringly described in the early 1990s, are predominantly
seen today through the lens of social networks as the form of sociality
that preoccupies internet researchers. Similarly, twenty years ago, when
internet users carefully hid their identities behind nicknames and when “on
the internet, no one knew you were a dog,” it was difficult to imagine a
sea-change in online behavior, with users voluntarily rushing to share
their most intimate information and thoughts with acquaintances and
strangers alike under their own true names. Online anonymity has been
chased into the dark web, while various new forms of surveillance
capitalism have imposed publicity and public performance as “the new
normal.” The internet thus became a goldmine of data utilized by various
parties, from political campaigners to scholars, concurrently feeding
algorithms that—without explicit and direct feedback from users—determine
which information they will see and in which order, who will be hired and
who fired, and so on.



These are only some manifestations of real virtuality, as Manuel Castells
prophetically called the blending of real and virtual life into an
inseparable totality. Such transformations, brought about or enhanced
through the use of ICTs over the past twenty years, are the topic of this
special issue, from the micro to the macro level, and from intimate and
personal relationships to commerce and socio-political systems.


We invite conceptual, methodological, and empirical papers (6,000-8,000
words), as well as shorter position papers (3,000 words) focusing on topics
that include, but are not limited to:

·      Histories of internet studies: key topics and transformations

·      Visions of the internet in the next twenty years

·      Social media and mediatization of society

·      Patterns of online sociality

·      Family, youth, and the internet

·      Online activism

·      Information warfare and online extremism

·      Internet and transformation of labor

·      Culture(s) of the internet

·      Surveillance capitalism

·      Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algoritmization of
society

·      Body and identity in the age of virtuality

·      Internet as a scholarly resource, from ethnography to big data

·      Migration, Diaspora, and the internet

·      Digital archives and sites of memory



*Submission guidelines*

Submit a title and a 300-word abstract to Smiljana Antonijevic (
smiljana at id.iit.edu) and Dalibor Petrovic (dalibor.petrovic at f.bg.ac.rs) by
July 1, 2019. After this first round of review, authors will be invited to
submit full papers by September 30, 2019.



Submissions, written in Serbian or English, should be original works not
previously published nor undergoing review for publication in another
journal at the time of submission. All articles submitted will be subject
to double-blind peer-review.



*Important dates*

Abstract submission: July 1, 2019

Notification to authors: July 20, 2019

Full text submission: September 30, 2019

Review results returned: October 20, 2019

Revised text submission: November 15, 2019

Online publication: December 2019


*About the journal*

*Sociologija *is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes theoretical,
empirical and methodological papers in the fields of sociology, social
psychology, and social anthropology. It is published by the Sociological
Association of Serbia and Montenegro and the Institute for Sociological
Research of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. The journal
is published quarterly since 1959. Papers are published in Serbian, English
or other international language after independent and anonymous peer review
process.


Editor in-chief: Slobodan Cvejić, University of Belgrade, Serbia


Advisory board:
Maurice Blanc, Universite de Nancy II, France; Xavier Bougarel, Centre
national de la recherché scientifique, Paris, France; Nina Kaspersen,
University of Lancaster, United Kingdom; Gyorgy Lengyel, Corvinus
University of Budapest, Hungary; Stef Jansen, University of Manchester,
United Kingdom; Srna Mandić, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; Ratko R.
Božović, Univerzitet Crne Gore, Nikšić, Montenegro; Marija Bogdanović,
University of Belgrade, Serbia; Ksenija Petovar, University of Belgrade,
Serbia; Božo Milošević, University of Novi Sad, Serbia