![Sample our Information Science journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5940/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Communication-Studies.jpg"})
This article provides a critical, cautionary stance toward the future structure of “Internet studies” as a field. A social constructionist reading of the process of organizing reveals the ways in which apparently obdurate structures are constructed and negotiated through everyday discursive practices. Subsequent structures and practices function ideologically to control organizational members in a concertive fashion by shaping and directing the conceptual frameworks for inquiry and action in a seemingly natural way. Definitions and metaphors construct conceptual boundaries of meaning for the field of inquiry, delimiting and protecting over time what counts as Internet and Internet studies. Over time, origins of knowledge are hidden within the structure of the organizations and a culture of unobtrusive control emerges. Unless radical measures are taken to reflexively interrogate everyday routines and habitual ways of talking in academic environments, the future field of Internet studies will not transcend the traditions of the academy but will be entrenched in and reproduce traditional structures and a traditional scholarly enterprise.
The author would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers, whose recommendations and resources improved the argument considerably.
Notes
1. CitationThomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) is perhaps the most prominent in pointing out that paradigms are shifted through a rhetorical process whereby the most persuasive scientists influence what we later take to be truth. Michel Foucault's work can be described as a project to study how social structures and practices become disciplined, over time, through discourse, power, and the objectification of knowledge. His notion of genealogy can be read as a means of moving back from the present to study the techniques and methods used by institutions to modify individual behaviors and to examine some of the traces of how subjects of thought become objects of knowledge. Applied to this context, one can begin to examine the extent to which current everyday discourse in emerging academic disciplines—in conjunction with the conscious or unconscious operation of power—has the potential to become historical monument or doctrine.
2. CitationFoucault's (1978a) notion of discipline and CitationGramsci's (1971) notion of hegemony help us understand controlling practices that are invisible or unconscious. CitationAlthusser's (1971) notion of interpellation or CitationDeetz's (1992) treatment of discursive closure might describe the more conscious connection between power and discourse, although the process of control is not described as such but rather taken for granted as the natural and neutral way of doing things.
3. Foucault's works, particularly History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish, provide an extensive treatment of how discursive practices become definitional and embedded in embodied routines. More specific to how academics construct normative definitional boundaries over time, see Tim Luke's analysis of the field of Environmental Science (1996), a special issue of the Journal of Communication entitled “Ferment in the Field” (1983, volume 33, number 3), a special issue of Communication (1999, volume 9, number 4), and an early 2005 mailing-list debate of the CitationSociety for the Study of Symbolic Interactionism (2005). Arguably, the field of communication in the United States provides an excellent example of the strengths and weaknesses of the argument that definition shapes practice. Certain scholars in the mid 20th century called their endeavor “communication research” to distinguish themselves from rhetoricians. The effort to define the field of study continued later in the century, when academic units made a point to distinguish communication from communications (plural), indicating human versus mass/media communication, respectively. Understanding of the communication process became standardized with the widespread adoption of Shannon's and Weaver's SMCR model of communication, which is now acknowledged as highly problematic yet is still offered as the initial definition of the communication process in most basic communication textbooks (CitationGriffin, 1997). The field continues to struggle with the issue of disciplinarity and has remained somewhat open to alternate visions. Inquiry in U.S. academic institutions remains bound by named and policed categories, a fact of life for many graduate students and junior-rank faculty who must work within these categories or risk delegitimation. One can see similar processes in other academic units that want to resist discipline status but nonetheless argue about intellectual boundaries and debate about what should be considered legitimate or appropriate inquiry and pedagogy.
4. Note, for example, that my use of the phrase “metaphors that are absorbed into everyday usage” uses a dead metaphor (absorbed) to describe language (implied by the context of the sentence, not stated directly) as an object or more precisely, a container (perhaps a sponge) that can hold something else. This metaphorical conceptualization of language as a container or communication as a conduit is common. See Reddy's analysis of the conduit metaphor in the English language (1979/1993).
5. For an excellent treatise on the relationship of power, ideology, and discourse in organizational communication theory, see CitationMumby (1988).
6. The popularity or perceived viability of research topics will differ depending on what one's specific affiliation or field of interest is, of course. The study of leadership in the management discipline illustrates one way this can happen. Because longitudinal studies were expensive and did not yield short-term findings and publications, the study of leadership as a trait dwindled significantly. Subsequently, trait theories were dismissed as a suspect explanation of leadership. Even as these theories are raised from the dead in the late 1990s, they are delegitimized by most in management fields (Steven Green, personal communication, Krannert School of Management, Purdue University, October 1996). In Internet studies, this phenomenon is more difficult to identify, as the process of organizing is younger. I have witnessed several mailing list or e-mail conversations wherein certain threads are discouraged (a recent thread where someone argued that cyberspace did not exist) or certain research areas are said to be no longer legitimate (study of text-based online interactions, study of online-only cultural spaces) or certain research projects are deemed too risky for the health of the group as a whole (study of ethically suspicious studies of Internet).