Are Instant Messages Speech? -- From MUDs to MMORPGs: The History of Virtual Worlds -- Visual Iconic Patterns of Instant Messaging: Steps Towards Understanding Visual Conversations -- Research in e-Science and Open Access to Data and Information -- Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment -- From Reader to Writer: Citizen Journalism as News Produsage -- The Mereology of Digital Copyright -- Traversing Urban Social Spaces: How Online Research Helps Unveil Offline Practice -- Internet Aesthetics -- Internet Sexualities -- After Convergence: YouTube and Remix Culture -- The Internet in Latin America -- Campaigning in a Changing Information Environment: The Anti-war and Peace Movement in Britain -- Web Content Analysis: Expanding the Paradigm -- The Regulatory Framework for Privacy and Security -- Toward Nomadological Cyberinfrastructures -- Toward a Virtual Town Square in the Era of Web 2.0 -- “The Legal Bit’s in Russian”: Making Sense of Downloaded Music -- Understanding Online (Game)worlds -- Strategy and Structure for Online News Production – Case Studies of CNN and NRK -- Political Economy, the Internet and FL/OSS Development -- Intercreativity: Mapping Online Activism -- Internet Reagency: The Implications of a Global Science for Collaboration, Productivity, and Gender Inequity in Less Developed Areas -- Strangers and Friends: Collaborative Play in World of Warcraft -- Trouble with the Commercial: Internets Theorized and Used -- (Dis)Connected: Deleuze’s Superject and the Internet -- Language Deterioration Revisited: The Extent and Function of English Content in a Swedish Chat Room -- Visual Communication in Web Design – Analyzing Visual Communication in Web Design -- Feral Hypertext: When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control -- The Possibilities of Network Sociality -- Web Search Studies: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Web Search Engines.

This handbook, the first of its kind, is a detailed introduction to the numerous academic perspectives we can apply to the study of the internet as a political, social and communicative phenomenon. Covering both practical and theoretical angles, established researchers from around the world discuss everything: the foundations of internet research appear alongside chapters on understanding and analyzing current examples of online activities and artifacts. The material covers all continents and explores in depth subjects such as networked gaming, economics and the law. The sheer scope and breadth of topics examined in this volume, which ranges from on-line communities to e-science via digital aesthetics, are evidence that in today’s world, internet research is a vibrant and mature field in which practitioners have long since stopped considering the internet as either an utopian or dystopian "new" space, but instead approach it as a medium that has become an integral part of our everyday culture and a natural mode of communication.