Hello All, As usual I come late in the day into this - I think it's the time zone difference and the fact I get this in 'digest form'. Anyway... Definition of the internet, I once tried this and came up with four elements rather than a definition as such: 1) The physical network of cables, servers and hardware 2) Email, chatrooms, and other types of person-to-person text based computer mediated communications (CMC). 3) The World Wide Web (WWW): the collection of online electronic documents and databases held in Internet servers mostly in the form of websites. 4) Software: the browsers, programmes and protocols that enable the transmission and retrieval of electronic data in formats that permit the accessing and operation of elements 2 and 3, above. * This seems similar to Robert Cannon. Also: the idea of it being an agreement is very interesting. And I would very much agree with Christian Fuchs who said " Without meaningful human knowledge and social activity the internet is a dead block, useless." 'Internetting'? I would suggest 'internet practices'. Overall an Internet practice may be identified as any activity related to the Internet however, analytically, it is important to isolate particular aspects that are differ in kind from other similar types of activities, which I shall try to do now - what I mean by that is - for example - an email is essentially the same as a letter, but the consequesnce of the speed, one-to-many possibilitiess, etc. are the differences that makes it relevant to call it an 'internet practice'. ANT: Miller & Slater affirm the Internet as an actant, allowing for ways in which the Internet has agency. However, one criticism that might be made of the authors is that they have failed to properly explore the possibility that a 'meta-culture' [this is from an old piece, I was imagining some kind of culture/social realm defined by internet-specific practices] and the local culture proper to the persons lived offline life articulate and dynamically construct each other. We can see another aspect of this in the way in which companies have to integrate the front office with the back-end of the company, or in cybercafés: people present at such intersections should be the focus of detailed investigation. Miller and Slater. The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 2000 Regards, Julian ++++++++++ Julian Hopkins Senior Lecturer HELP University College - ADP Kuala Lumpur tel: +60 3 2095 8791 x2913 email: julianh@help.edu.my web: http://www.help.edu.my