I just taught a day of my grad cmc seminar yesterday in which we read the results of a number of these studies (the homenet stuff too, old and new), and my students had much the same reaction as yours, Becky. "Why ask the question?" cried one particularly exasperated person. Your call for analyses of context is right on. I'd also like to see more analyses of different uses of the internet, different kinds of internet users, and in general more analysis of differences instead of looking for unilateral effects (or the lack thereof) caused by The Internet. On the other hand, I find these tracking studies really interesting and useful for getting a snapshot overview. Nancy
Re Willard's Uncapher's post:
"The report obviously sticks to a rather instrumentalist view of the Internet, tailored to e-commerce, and doesn't appear to venture, if the pre-reports are accurate, to raising issues of surveillance, sharing of data, encryption, and other such aspects of Net use."
Seems there is now a constant stream of cyber/Internet tracking studies (Pew, NTIA, UCLA, etc.) with a (and a growing enterprise for academics to add to this) available that focus mostly on household research with little attention to questions related to institutional disadvantage, e.g., national surveys/tracking studies (census not random sample studies) on libraries, schools, etc. where the policy remedies are focused (e.g., e-rate)? Also, these studies are so absent 'context' that it begs the question: why are Internet researchers focusing on this? Where's the beef? Soapbox here, but does it not bother anyone that there is so much money/effort going into such tracking studies? To what end? I'll risk posing the 'so what' question to get some discussion going.
B. Lentz, UTAustin