Internet Studies: Perspectives on a rapidly developing field

The genealogy of this special issue begins in the fall of 2009, with a panel organized by Mia Consalvo and Charles Ess for the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on 8 October. The panel was constituted by a selected set of contributors to The Handbook of Internet Studies (Consalvo and Ess, 2011). The presentations and ensuing discussion, joined by contributors to another synthesis effort (Hunsinger et al., 2010), focused on the contours of Internet Studies as an emerging field. The panel inspired Bill Dutton – then working on The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies (Dutton, 2013) – to propose a workshop for the following spring. Its purpose was to build on the work launched by the handbooks to capture key patterns in the development of this rapidly developing field. The immediate upshot was a productive and enjoyable workshop co-sponsored by the Oxford Internet Institute and the Information and Media Studies Department of Aarhus University, held at Aarhus University on 19 March 2010. Following the workshop, the editors of New Media and Society, Steve Jones and Nick Jankowski, agreed with our proposal to build on the momentum of this workshop with an open call for papers that would be published in a special issue of the journal as one more step in support of an array of efforts to catalyze discussion of the state of the art of this developing field. The primary goals of our special issue were, first, to articulate significant bodies of findings and begin to identify an evolving set of constitutive domains within the field. Secondly, with these as primary starting points, both our contributors and we, as editors, sought to identify developing trajectories of future research. We intended to demarcate areas of likely importance, while not prematurely defining and thus closing off what is manifestly an expanding and changing field of Internet Studies. What do the articles reviewed and selected for this special issue say about the development of Internet Studies? We begin to answer this question with an overview of the contributions to the special issue, noting along the way a few selected cross-references to both the articles collected here as well as the larger relevant literatures. We close with a more general account of what we have learned about this evolving field from this special issue in light of work on our respective handbooks. 462845 NMS15510.1177/1461444812462845new media & societyEditorial 2013