<nettime-ann> [call] Internationalising Internet studies

'Internationalizing Internet Studies'

Call for papers for a edited collection by

Gerard Goggin (University of Sydney) & Mark McLelland (University of Wollongong)

From the mid-1990s onwards, the Internet has shifted fundamentally from its co-ordinates in English-speaking countries, especially North America, to become an essential medium in a wide range of countries, cultures, and languages. According to October 2005 statistics, Chinese language now represents 14% of all Internet communication and media use, Spanish 9% and Japanese 9%. At 35% and falling, English use is now a minority in terms of overall online language use. However, communications and media scholarship, especially in the Anglophone world, has not registered the deep ramifications of this shift - and the challenges it poses to the concepts, methods, assumptions, and frameworks used to study the Internet.

The vast body of Anglophone scholarship into 'the Internet' is predicated on research on and about English-language websites by academics and other researchers working and publishing in English. Despite the fact that there is also a large body of work being produced by scholars in non-English-speaking cultures and locales, hardly any of this work is being translated and it has had little impact on theorization of the developing fields of Internet and web studies.

The purpose of this anthology, 'Internationalizing Internet Studies', is to acknowledge that Internet use and Internet studies take place 'elsewhere' in various national and international contexts. We seek to uncover how non-Anglophone uses of the Internet might challenge certain preconceived notions about the technology and its social impacts as well as the manner in which Internet studies is taken up, valued and taught outside the circuits of understanding prevalent in Anglophone academia. Through bringing together researchers whose daily experience of the Internet is mediated through non-Anglophone languages and cultures as well as researchers situated within the Anglophone academy whose work focuses on cultures outside North America and Europe, we hope to promote the visibility of work already being done outside the Anglophone world. We also aim to encourage new work that critically engages with Anglophone Internet scholarship that is based on research into diverse locales and draws upon a range of intellectual traditions.

Accordingly, we wish to gather together a distinctive collection of contributors who can illuminate the key features of the Internet's internationalization, surveying exemplary Internet language groups and cultures. We hope to encourage explorations of the distinctive features of the consumption and use of the Internet by various language groups, and how this expands and questions taken-for-granted notions of Internet studies.

We are also interested in contributions that reflect upon this cosmopolitan turn in the Internet, and what it signifies for our methods, tools, and concepts of Internet studies - and for media, communication, and cultural theory themselves. Here we are concerned with the debate - yet to emerge - on the internationalization of 'Internet studies'.

Contributions would be welcomed, but are not restricted to, the following topics:

* non-anglophone language communities use of the Internet

* Asian countries and communities use of the Internet (especially Chinese, Japanese, and Korean)

* mobility and the Internet: how the Internet is deployed by people on the move across borders
* use of the Internet by diasporic communities
* Internet use by minority language speakers in majority Anglophone and other language contexts
* Indigenous use of the Internet
* how particular Internet technologies (websites, peer-to-peer technologies, blogs, social software, mobile Internet) have been shaped and are used by different language and cultural groups
* cell phone, mobile and wireless technologies and the internationalizing of the Internet

* how does this change our understanding of Internet cultures and cultural histories?
* what the implications of internationalizing of the Internet for debates concerning cultural citizenship and media diversity? (not least Internet governance, open source and commons debates)
* what are the implications of increasing 'global governance' of the Internet for local and countercultural communities?
* how is Internet studies responding to the internationalizing of the Internet - what new concepts, methods, locations and relationships does it need?

Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words to both editors outlining your proposed contribution to the edited collection by 31 January 2006. We will advise acceptance by 1 April 2006.

We will be holding a workshop on 'Internationalizing Internet Studies' in Brisbane on 27 September 2006 immediately before the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Annual Conference 7.0, and hope that we will be able to invite some contributors to attend and present drafts of their full papers. (We expect limited travel bursaries will be available for those attending from outside Australia).

From January 2006, Dr Gerard Goggin (g.goggin@uq.edu.au) will be an ARC Australian Research Fellow in the Department of Media and Communication, the University of Sydney. He has published widely on Internet and new media, including Digital Disability (2003), Virtual Nation: The Internet in Australia (2004) and Cell Phone Culture (forthcoming 2006).

Dr Mark McLelland (m.mclelland@uq.edu.au) is a Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication at the University of Wollongong. Recent Internet-related publications include Japanese Cybercultures (2003) and Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age (2005).