Society Online

"These editors have the respect, visibility, and track-record to make this volume a contribution to the field of Internet studies. It will be adopted as an upper-division text and can also serve as a valuable reference work for doctoral students. Given its broad mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches, this work should have wide appeal across the Social Sciences and Information Studies." 

-- Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern
                                                                                                                            California

Within the developed world, much of society experiences political, economic, and cultural life through a set of communication technologies barely older than many citizens. Society Online: The Internet in Context examines how new media technologies have not simply diffused across society, but how they have rapidly and deeply become embedded in our organizations and institutions.

Society Online is not exclusively devoted to a particular technology, or specifically the Internet, but to a range of technologies and technological possibilities labeled "new media." Rather than trying to cover every possible topic relating to new communication technologies, this unique text is organized by how these new technologies mediate the community, political, economic, personal, and global spheres of our social lives. Editors Philip N. Howard and Steve Jones explore the multiple research methods that are required to understand the embeddedness of new media.

Society Online discusses the findings of the Pew Internet and American Life Project and is the first book to bring together leading social scientists to provide the most comprehensive and far-reaching Internet research data sets and to contextualize Internet use in modern life. The book features contributions by leading scholars from across the social sciences using a range of research techniques including systematic content analysis; comparative methods; quasi-experimental methods; probit; ordinary least squares and logistic regression analysis; small focus groups; historical, archival, and survey methods; ethnographic and auto-ethnographic work; and comparative analyses of policy traditions to probe, analyze, and understand the Internet in the context of everyday life.

Society Online is designed for undergraduate and graduate students taking media studies courses in the areas of Communication, Sociology, Political Science, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Information Sciences, and American Studies.

For more information about Society Online, please visit www.societyonline.net.

Philip N. Howard is an assistant professor in the Communication Department at the University of Washington. He has published several articles and chapters on the use of new media in politics and public opinion research, was the first politics research fellow at the Pew Internet & American Life Project and currently serves on the advisory board of the Survey2001 Project. He teaches courses in political communication, organizational behavior, and international media systems, and is currently preparing a book-length manuscript called Politics In Code: Franchise and Representation in the Age of New Media. Steve Jones is UIC Distinguished Professor of Communication and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago, USA and Adjunct Research Professor in the Institute for Communications Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is editor of New Media & Society and co-editor of Mobile Media & Communication. His research interests encompass popular music studies, music technology, sound studies, internet studies, media history, virtual reality, human-machine communication, social robotics and human augmentics. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute, Centers for Disease Control and the Tides Foundation.