it might be interesting to put forth some positions here on a variety of topics. we have by my reckoning within the last year in various places some assertions that internet studies or internet research is: a discipline an interdiscipline a transdiscipline a postdiscipline (warning sts rant ensues) i'm pretty sure it is some of the last 3, primarily because of certain overlaps, but i a certain that it isn't the first, but i'm hoping it never becomes that centralized. so what are these categories, if anything,...? well it very much depends on your own personal context. for me, they are primarily terms of analysis, i look at say the disciplinisation of the social sciences, communication studies and other 'special sciences' within a historic framework that depends very much on a highly contingent set of historical facts, such as the reaffirmation of social science post wwiii, etc. etc. etc. you can't have a discipline for me without this set of historical contexts, but what has to happen for a discipline to really occur is the decontextualization, the dehistorization of the research in the field at a certain level, a transformation of the field from a subject of study to an object of study, and with that objectification, you usually have a tendency for the rise of predominant methodologies or minimally a set of methods that are accepted as 'scientific', even if they only are manifestations of the fetish of objective science, or scientism. now, for me, what this means is that as internet studies advances, while there will be a tendency to say unify in one sense the tendency to pluralize should help us overcome this, i think this is in part due to the transdisciplinary subject, which in the guattarian sense has a globality that transcends disciplines, making any method or approach meager before it, except as a way of adding to the body of knowledge, as an interdiscipline, which we also surely are, we are a whole that is greater than the parts, each person bringing their own disciplinary perspective to the knowledge game, and as a post discipline, well. that is all there really is in the profit driven academia of the future perhaps, and i think there are tendencies to put our research to such applications. nonetheless, as the peripheries become the core in things like internet studies, i prefer to follow the mantra of plurality, interdisciplinarity, within a deeply contextual understanding of the histories and technologies involved, including their inherent subjectivity in relation to us, for many of us aren't only researching the internet through our actions we are actively creating it on many different levels now it is bedtime, rant time is over;) jeremy hunsinger jhuns@vt.edu on the ibook www.cddc.vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments