Where Are We Now? Contours of the Internet in Canada
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 14784176 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Crowley (0000-0001-5238-4569, McGill University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2002 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 469-508 |
| Publication date | 2002-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Journal of Communication (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0705-3657 • E-ISSN: 1499-6642 |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.22230/cjc.2002v27n4a1323 |
| OpenAlex | W1581043235 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 7 |
The rise of a global Internet poses a diversity of opportunities and challenges for Canadians. Predictably it also elicits rhetorical excess: that the Net will annihilate the barriers of geography and historical circumstance, or that the Net’s borderless architecture manifestly plays into the hands of global actors; that the messaging capabilities of new media will make the Internet a seamless part of enhanced social life, or that it marks the rise of new forms of deception and social alienation; that the Web supports new forms of civic engagement allowing us to talk with anyone anywhere, or that it will privatize the public sphere, removing us further from our traditions of public participation. Such rhetorical dualisms, Steven Woolgar (1999) says, help to explain why as consumers and users we are so frequently confused and disappointed by sociotechnical change. Canadian communication researchers and educators should welcome the new communicational environment and the opportunity to play a role in its public understanding and further development. Recent data collected through a variety of national and international research projects is giving us a better sense of the trend lines in Internet development. We are beginning to get some purchase on the forces at work in shaping the Internet, the players and the backstage machinery, and how these compare and contrast across geographical and historical circumstances. A growing body of evidence on public concerns gives us some sense of what might undermine the Internet’s broad base of support. Finally, there are provisional optics for looking at some of the content characteristics of the Internet, data that profile actual user activity indicate to some extent the scope and scale of content flows and audiences. Reflective practitioners are beginning to make us aware that research on human subjects has a complex ethical relationship to the virtual, especially as case-based studies and participant inquiries give us some feel for how the Net looks from the inside out. Two complementary types of data bookend current quantitative research, on which the present meta-analysis is based: media use surveys, specifically focused on the Internet, and Internet audience research, which generally produces ranking scales for the popularity of content categories and site sources. These research
Alienation · Diversity (politics · Internet privacy · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Public sphere · Rhetorical question · Sociology · The Internet · Variety (cybernetics · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Information Systems Theories and Implementation · Law · Media Studies and Communication · Social Media and Politics
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,1 |
| Citation span | 2006 - 2008 (3) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |