Dear AIR colleagues, In the spirit of the amazon.com "customers who bought this book also bought...", if you liked the Lucy Suchman keynote in Toronto about ethnographies of Internet use, you may also like the following special journal issue that came out in print TODAY: "Policy, Politics, and the Local Internet" The Communication Review, Volume 6, Number 3 (2003). More details: http://research.niftyc.org/cr The basic idea behind this project is simply that the practice of public policy could be improved by considering problems of Internet policy and regulation using *ethnographic* research. (This is something that is almost never done in the policy world.) The articles here started at the conference "Ethnographies of the Internet: Grounding Regulation in Lived Experience" discussed previously on this list (http://aoir.org/pipermail/air-l/2002-April/001782.html). All of that was inspired by Daniel Miller & Don Slater's book _The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach_ which was featured prominently in Lucy's talk (and in fact Don was on the program committee for our meeting). Christine Hine -- whose _Virtual Ethnography_ was also put to good use by Lucy at AoIR 4.0 -- participated in the meeting as well. I can't claim that the meeting influenced their thinking on Internet ethnography but I know the reverse is certainly true. So, continuing this post somewhat in the genre of the amazon.com sales pitch: Editor's Review: All of these articles are about the Internet. But even better, if you read this special issue from cover-to-cover, you'll also receive (1) a Russian Tomagotchi joke (2) explanations of the secret software that political consultants use to translate Web banner ad buys into congressional votes (3) the real reason that banks in Singapore were once allowed to receive satellite TV when schools were not, and (4) a superficial discussion of automatic egg incubators in the 16th century. Most memorable informant lines include: "by 2050 a piece of software will be a [political] candidate", "scientists have proven that the Information Society is the next step in economic development", and the Internet is a big city "but we cannot not visit a city just because there are parts of it we do not like." On a more serious note, I've posted the full text of my essay about the issue (see http://research.niftyc.org/cr) if you would like a more serious essay. I've also posted how to get the issue. Regards, Christian -- http://www.niftyc.org/