| Abstrakt: |
In this paper, three features of the Internet/new media that have developed over the last decade are discussed: the relational Internet, the enclosed Internet, and the ‘mean world’ Internet. These features correspond to the three interrelated elements of new media infrastructure: the practices in which people engage to interact and share information and meaning; the tools, devices, or artifacts that people create and use in order to do so; and the social arrangements or institutional forms that develop out of and around those practices and tools. Together, the three features have had an important influence on the ways that new media are understood and used and have helped shift popular discourses and the study of new media from an emphasis on possibility, novelty, adaptability, and openness toward greater preoccupations with risk, conflict, vulnerability, routinization, stability, and control. Given these conditions, the author proposes that three problem areas – again corresponding to practices, tools, and social arrangements – may be important directions for new media studies over the ‘next decade in Internet time’. Network literacies and pedagogies that prepare individuals to be full and effective participants in society, politics, and culture must be developed and implemented. Dead media may pose increasing challenges to sustainable cultural heritage as well as to ever more intrusive regimes of total surveillance and capture of personal information, enabling a ‘right to be forgotten’. Commons knowledge projects may challenge and even reconfigure the foundations of institutional authority, expertise, legitimacy, and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
