Internet Research Annual Selected Papers from the Association of Internet Researchers Conference 2003, Volume 2 Digital Formations Series, Vol. 20

This collection brings together the most interesting and outstanding papers from the Internet Research Conference held in Toronto in 2003. Taken individually, each paper makes an important contribution to the emerging field of Internet research, but the collection as a whole presents key perspectives on the most significant directions in the field. In particular, the papers discuss how we must now consider the relationship of Internet-based activities to those «offline», rather than concentrating exclusively on the virtual. Papers advance important ideas and present research findings in relation to information theory, the Internet at home, theorizing time and the Internet, online activism, the digital divide, and more. This annual, the second in the series, demonstrates the vibrant and diverse nature of Internet scholarship fostered by the Association of Internet Researchers.

Mia Consalvo: Like City Lights, Receding: Internet Research Past and Present – Steve Jones: AoIR 2003 Keynote: Notes Toward an Engaged Association – Susanna Paasonen: Net Years, Pioneers, and Flat Perspectives: Temporality and Internet Research – Grant Kien: Internet Time: Socio-Spatial Coordination Online – Steve Bailey: Identity, Intersection, Irony: Doubling the Self in the Digital Age – Lori Kendall: Diary of a Networked Individual: System Design’s Effects on Online Relationships – Nancy K. Baym: Online Communication in Close Relationships: Revealing What Surveys Obscure – Claudia Ivón Rivera de Blanco: Foreign Selves in Foreign Online Environments: the Lack of Anonymity for Non-native Speakers – Randolph Kluver: Political Culture in Online Politics – Erika Pearson: Trust: Is Social Capital a Precondition for Democratic Activity Online? – Sherida Ryan: Don’t Trust Anyone Outside Your Pack: Initial Trust Formation in an Online Social Activist Network – Ted M. Coopman: Dissentworks: Identity and Emergent Dissent as Network Structures – Craig Watters: Infrastructure, Technology, and Rural Communities: Spatial Issues Lost in a Rural County’s Regional Development – Alison Powell: E-Life and Real Life: On- and Off-line Social Life in an Internet Café – Elaine Lally: At Home with Informtion: The Informatization of Domestic Life – Lance Hayden: High-Risk Information (HRI): A Proposed Theoretical Framework – Pauline Hope Cheong/Holley A. Wilkin: Digital Divide(s) among Hispanic Immigrants and Implications for Health Information Seeking – Cecelia Merkel: Beyond Deficit Models of Technology Use: Viewing «Have-Nots» as Active Technology Users.

The Editors: Mia Consalvo is Assistant Professor in the School of Telecommunications at Ohio University. She is the executive editor of the AoIR Internet Research Annual series, and she has also edited the volume Women and Everyday Uses of the Internet: Agency and Identity (Lang, 2002) with Susanna Paasonen. She is currently writing a book on the role of cheating in the digital game industry. Matthew Allen is currently Associate Professor of Internet Studies at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia. Program Chair for the 2003 AoIR conference from which this collection was drawn, Dr. Allen has most recently written about Internet policy in Australia and the development of broadband. He established the Internet Studies Program at Curtin and is now active in supervising doctoral students in this exciting transdisciplinary area.