Key Themes in Social Science Internet Research

Hong Kong.
It's Thursday, so this must be Hong Kong - and I'm at the "Internet Turning 40" conference celebrating the 45th anniversary of the School of Journalism and Communication at Chinese University Hong Kong, and maping out future directions for new media research. We start with Ronald Rice, who maps out the development of social science approaches to studying the Internet over the past decade.

Some 20 years ago, the term 'Internet' appeared in social science-based communications research articles - especially also from libary and information research fields; the 'World Wide Web' as a distinct theme appeared around ten years ago. Areas like privacy, sharing research information, social isolation, work uses, citizen networks, and country-specific research appeared around that time. Occurrences in abstracts almost tripled between 2001 and 2004, in particular. More recently, such terms may have been replaced by more specific terms - 'blogs', 'wikis', and now 'Facebook' and 'Twitter' are becoming more prominent instead.

The data for this study come from online and print searches in relevant citation indices and journal databases - ultimately, some 260 especially relevant articles were identified and coded into different categories - the two key types here included articles which compared existing theories or developed new ones (establishing meta-theories), and articles which conducted empirical studies testing existing theoretical models.

These articles were then coded to identify the fundamental themes which occured in them: theory frameworks, media attributes, media effects, participation, social relations (the largest category), and societal issues. Theory framework articles would outline and critique existing theories and recommend new approaches and research agendas, or outline entirely new theoretical models; media attributes articles would explore specific affordances of media forms (such as interactivity) and place this in a media ecology context; media effects articles focussed on a variety of questions such as credibility or the diffusion of innovation, or more generally explore media effects as such or uses and gratifications; participation articles addressed topics like the changing nature of the public sphere; social relations articles dealt with (especially online) communities, group processes, identity, social capital, and social networks; and societal issues articles explored cultural differences and identities, flagged the digital divide as a problem, examined media literacy, or applied larger societal models.

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