Dear AoIRists, On behalf of the co-editors and the authors whose work is gathered in this special issue of new media and society, I'm very happy to call your attention to the recent online publication of the Introduction: Internet Studies: Perspectives on a rapidly developing field Charles Ess, William Dutton doi: 10.1177/1461444812462845 New Media & Society, April 29, 2013 <http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/04/24/1461444812462845.full> To quote from the introduction - which is available as a free download - We have organized the contributions to this issue such that they flow across four general areas. The first focuses on the field as a whole, and is filled by our lead article, by Tai-Quan Peng, Lun Zhang, Zhijin Zhong and Jonathan JH Zhu, Mapping the landscape of Internet Studies: Text mining of social science journal articles 20002009¹. We then shift focus to specific Perspectives from Different Arenas, beginning with Jingyan (Elaine) Yuan¹s A culturalist critique of ³online community² in new media studies¹, followed by Heidi Campbell¹s Religion and the Internet as a microcosm for studying trends and implications within Internet Studies¹, then an article by Jessie Daniels, Race and racism in Internet Studies¹, and Michel van Eeten and Milton Mueller¹s Where is the governance in Internet governance?¹. The next set of articles focus more on Methodological Perspectives, beginning with Juliette De Maeyer¹s Towards a hyperlinked society: A critical review of link studies¹, followed by Niels Brügger¹s Web historiography and Internet Studies: Challenges and perspectives¹. The two final articles are both tied to Critical Perspectives on User Empowerment, a cross-cutting theme of Internet research across various research arenas. Anja Bechmann and Stine Lomborg¹s article is entitled Mapping actor roles in social media: Different perspectives on value creation in theories of user participation¹, and this is followed by Christian Fuchs and Nick Dyer-Witheford¹s challenge to Internet Studies, entitled Karl Marx @ Internet Studies¹. We conclude 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. Several of the articles are already published online; the print version of the complete issue will appear later this year. We would also like to express our gratitude to numerous reviewers and to editors Steve Jones and Nickolas Jankowski for their constant support and assistance in developing and bringing this special issue to fruition. Enjoy! - c. Associate Professor in Media Studies Department of Media and Communication Director, Centre for Research on Media Innovations <http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/research/center/media-innovations/> University of Oslo P.O. Box 1093 Blindern NO-0317 Oslo Norway email: charles.ess@media.uio.no