AoIR-ICS special issue Information, Communication & Society, Volume 11 Issue 2 2008 Editors Barry Wellman and Caroline Haythornthwaite are pleased to announce the publication of the first AoIR-ICS collaboration issue of papers selected from the 2007 AoIR conference. As noted in our introduction: The contents of this issue may well surprise those who think that the Association of Internet Researchers looks only at the Internet. Two articles (DeNel Rehberg Sedo; Ralph Schroeder & Matthijs den Basten) focus on readers’ responses to “old” media (radio, television and books) and discussion of books on websites and wikis. Another article looks at mobile phones (Hijazi-Omari & Rivka Ribak) describing how Palestinian Israeli young women carry on clandestine conversations with their boyfriends on mobile phone. New forms of creative production online are addressed in three papers: Eszter Hargittai & Gina Walejko describe how male and female young adults create video, music, writing and artistic photography; Smiljana Antonijevic does an ethnography of non-verbal communication on Second Life; and Lori Kendall takes us to the wonderful, imaginative world of animutations. Some mentoring rounds out the issue. Michelle Kazmer & Bo Xi evaluate using four different ways of collective semi-structured interview data: face-to-face, phone, email, and IM; Dan Li & Gina Walejko show how to sample the vast, disorganized world of blogs; and Antonijevic’s article provides a useful guide to the microethnography of nonverbal communication, such as gaze and arm movement. No one journal issue can do everything, and we note that some hot topics did not make it into this year’s collection. We look to this year’s conference submissions for more on the new and old world of media and the Internet as Caroline Haythornthwaite and Lori Kendall take on the task of editing the second annual collaboration of AoIR and ICS. /Barry Wellman & Caroline Haythornthwaite TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITORIAL COMMENT 143 – 148 Authors: Barry Wellman; Caroline Haythornthwaite ORIGINAL ARTICLES PLAYING WITH FIRE: On the domestication of the mobile phone among Palestinian teenage girls in Israel 149 – 166 Authors: Hiyam Hijazi-Omari; Rivka Ribak LITERARY SLEUTHS ONLINE: e-Research collaboration on the Pynchon Wiki 167 – 187 Authors: Ralph Schroeder; Matthijs Den Besten RICHARD & JUDY'S BOOK CLUB AND 'CANADA READS': Readers, books and cultural programming in a digital era 188 – 206 Author: Denel Rehberg Sedo BEYOND MEDIA PRODUCERS AND CONSUMERS: Online multimedia productions as interpersonal communication 207 – 220 Author: Lori Kendall FROM TEXT TO GESTURE ONLINE: A microethnographic analysis of nonverbal communication in the Second Life virtual environment 221 – 238 Author: Smiljana Antonijevic THE PARTICIPATION DIVIDE: Content creation and sharing in the digital age 239 – 256 Authors: Eszter Hargittai; Gina Walejko QUALITATIVE INTERVIEWING IN INTERNET STUDIES: Playing with the media, playing with the method 257 – 278 Authors: Michelle M. Kazmer; Bo Xie SPLOGS AND ABANDONED BLOGS: The perils of sampling bloggers and their blogs 279 – 296 Authors: Dan Li; Gina Walejko ---------------------------------------- Caroline Haythornthwaite Associate Professor Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 501 East Daniel St., Champaign IL 61820