Jillana Enteen <jillana@jillana.net>:
This is not to discourage specific considerations--which should use terms as specifically as possible. At this point, studying "internet use" may be too broad--www or IRC or mobile-to-mobile SMS, located in a particular moment and among specific users speaks more to the point.
Indeed, "Internet use" would have to exclude mobile-to-mobile SMS, for most current implementations of "Internet" and "mobile", and so it might not be broad enough. Similarly, the conflation of computers and networks and Internet would probably mean leaving things like non-networked PDAs, and digital books, and things of that ilk behind. Perhaps on that broader stage we are talking about, erm, "media", and especially digital media. I had remembered CMC, on the other hand, as especially about what used to be (still is?) called interpersonal communication. I confess I usually slip into "social software" for that range of the online world, although it doesn't conventionally catch, say, SMS either. ("Conventionally" because, if we thought too much about software on mobile phones, it'd surely lead us into wishing more mobile-service-provider-offered phones were designed to let us load our own software, and that would surely be astray.) Interpersonal media? Person-to-person communication -- a hijacking of P2P? Our terminological future is full of possibilities... Betty Hanson <betty.hanson@uconn.edu>:
I am searching for a label for ethnic communities that are created by either the Internet or satellite television.
That -- ethnogenesis as singly or primarily the result of Internet and satellite television participation -- sounds intriguing, and I'd love to hear more. But Stuart Hall talked about "new ethnicities", and a lot of interesting work has been done under that rubric. It doesn't foreground communications medium as you seek, but perhaps it is worth considering, or incorporating. cheers Bram