ABSTRACT
As new media gain in cultural and economic significance, various academic disciplines have searched for new concepts, methods, frameworks and insights to understand the nature of the internet and associated developments such as the convergence of media applications, the rise of the mobile phone, as well as mobile and wireless media in general. New interdisciplinary undertakings have emerged, dedicated to aspects of
new media. We now have, for instance, a fairly well-established field of internet studies, represented by the Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR, aoir.org; see Goggin, 2004; Nissenbaum and Price, 2004; Wellman and Haythornwaite, 2002), as well as the prior formation of critical internet culture (Lovink, 2002 and 2007). There is also an overlapping but distinct group of researchers centring on the mobile phone embodied in the Society for the Social Study of Mobile Communication (www.sociomobile.org; see also Katz, 2007; Nyíri, 2007). Established disciplines such as media studies now need not only to grapple
with the internet as another object of consideration, but also to rethink their approach to traditional media in today’s era of rapid technological and cultural globalization and convergence. In the context of the imperative to internationalize media studies, the case of the internet offers a number of useful considerations. First, the nature of the internet as an international medium underlines the
way that contemporary media need to be grasped by genuinely international approaches. Indeed we often see within media studies that the internet is presented as a pre-eminent case of media globalization. However, this is only a starting point, and often the internet is misconstrued in such framing. So the second consideration is that discussions of the internet within media
studies – or indeed within the specialized field of internet studies – are not actually informed by a recognition of the implications of acknowledging the internet as international. In our minds, the problem here is that dominant notions of the internet, like those of media or culture generally, are still modelled on a limited range of experiences, deployments and conceptions of the internet.
