At 07:53 PM 2/9/2004 +1030, you wrote:
thanks for that Denise, very interesting.
my gut feeling of all this, the pocket sized edition would be...
... that internet studies/research needed a home and was able to slot itself into the Arts/ Humanities area in some universities. With very little real information to go on, because it was a field of study in its infancy, the focus needed to be more philosophical, looking at concepts rather than data. This is where we find many Internet Studies courses today. ( I realise this is not universal)
But there does appear to be rebellion afoot if my own class is any indication. We want numbers to research, we want to look at data - not read about someones fantasy/ guess in 1990. And I suspect that in order to be relevant, and I do believe in the need to be relevant in scholastic endeavour (even though others dont agree), this field of study will turn more towards real number crunching, rather than worrying about "cyberspace" and "cyber communities".
Ah how familiar this sounds - not enough people in your class, obviously, understand the importance of debate, analysis and being informed of how many social , political, historical, cultural and epistemological (and I dont even need to see Ontological...;-)) issues mediate the "data" - the design of the numbers that emerge. The question is who's fantasy to these numbers emerge from? Numbers and "fantasies" are not mutually exclusive by any means. Relevant to who? r