Thus, when the internet dies and is replaced by something else there is still a home for those who want to study the new emerging technology.
there are list-folk who're on their third and fourth 'careers' - people always find something useful to do with themselves as their interests change or evolve. :)
...and this is why there is a great body of scholarship on the emergence, adoption (or lack thereof), integration, etc. of communication technologies within specific social/ cultural/economic/historical conjunctures. The research that's been done, and continues to be done, on the telephone, the telegraph, writing, printing, television, radio, the phonograph, various portable personal communication devices, and on and on is absolutely crucial material for those working in various areas of internet studies. This research tradition might also be seen as including, in the U.S., the Payne Fund Studies on the emergent technology of motion pictures in the late 1910s-early 1920s and Carl Hovland et al's study on different listener reactions to the radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" in the late 1930s. Or what about Lazerfeld's "People's Choice" study in which the groundwork for the idea of "opinion leaders" and the theory of two-step flow was laid? That was done at a time when people's primary news media in the U.S. were radio and newspapers, before TV and the internet, but I just saw a newspaper story in the last week about a study on Net opinion leaders. There is a significant history of researchers having the understanding and tools to address emergent technologies, and to make connections -- examining both differences and similarities among technologies -- between those technologies and what we know or don't know about other communication technologies and complex societal relationships. I would think that much of the research now being done on the internet will be an incredibly useful contribution to understanding whatever forms of communication technologies follow, and that this will shift in research, if it happens, will represent as much a kind of continuity as it will a rupture. Holly -- Holly Kruse Faculty of Communication University of Tulsa 600 S. College Ave. Tulsa, OK 74104 918-631-3845 holly-kruse@utulsa.edu