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This review has been accessed times since January 31, 2005
Howard, Philip N. and Jones, Steve. (2004). Society Online: The Internet in Context. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
Pp. xxxiv + 350
$37.95 (Paperback) $84.95 (Hardcover) ISBN 0-76-192708-5Reviewed by John Rothfork
Northern Arizona UniversityJanuary 31, 2005
Commentary on this review by
Philip Howard is availableAudience
The title seems to address a wider readership and to promise less academically self-conscious articles than is the case. The back cover identifies the target audience for Society Online as “undergraduate and graduate students taking media studies courses” that might be offered by several disciplines. The anthology is a textbook that hopes to tell us as much about social science research methods as about the Internet. This is especially apparent in the first 50 pages that are devoted to discussing methodology. The editors maintain a Web site that, among other things, offers links to data sources; see <http://www.societyonline.net/reviews.html>. In responding to the review of the book by Mei Zhang, the editors explained their concern to avoid jargon, on one hand, and empty truisms on the other. Most of the articles rely on material from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which you will want to visit in association with reading the many chapters that use material found there <http://www.pewinternet.org/>. Society Online offers an interesting illustration of how to use the Internet to support and to creatively extend a textbook. The printed text is almost interactive. I found myself alternatively reading a bit of the text and then visiting Pew or some other Web site to look at the material that the various authors made judgments about. Whether or not these editorial decisions were designed to attract a wider audience, I think they succeed, if casual readers skip the first 50 pages and skim material dedicated to explaining social science research methods.
Religion
Readers cannot, however, afford to entirely ignore the methodology material. For example, Elena Larsen writes that “One in four adult internet users in the United States has sought religious material on the internet at one point or another” (p. 46). Because 25% sounded far too low to me, I backtracked to reread the material about methodology and to visit Pew to find Larsen’s “CyberFaith” report, which says that from mid-August to mid-September, 2001 “about 28 million Americans, or 25% of the Internet population, visit[ed] religious cyberspace” <http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_CyberFaith_Report.pdf>. The Pew “Faith Online” document of 7 April 2004 offers what seems to me a more plausible number, claiming that “64% of wired American have used the Internet for spiritual or religious purposes” <http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Faith_Online_2004.pdf>. The more recent Pew study also found that “the ‘online faithful’ are not using the Internet solely to learn about or interact with others within their own faith groups, nor are they using the Internet primarily to facilitate congregational business.” Instead many are incipient bloggers or journal writers “interested in using the Internet to express their own personal religious or spiritual beliefs.” For years I lurked in Asian religious and cultural newsgroups <http://groups.google.com/groups?group=soc&hl=en> and visited associated chat rooms. In both arenas the interests are very obviously in proselytism and argument. But I did not know about online prayer “teams” or that some people “volunteer their prayer time at Web sites” for the benefit of those who ask for their prayers (p. 48). Despite great commercial success in mass media, televangelism <http://religiousbroadcasting.lib.virginia.edu/televangelists.html> has not yet made a successful transition to the Internet (which might suggest a study on audience and media in regard to this culture). Nonetheless, I was dismayed to find that most of the prayer request sites I visited required visitors to create an account at the site and to provide very earthly information. Larsen says that “37% of religion surfers reported that they have given prayer or spiritual support online” (p. 49). She reports that “Our findings show that people take to religious life on the internet to augment lives that are already devout.” For example, “Fully 84% of religion surfers do belong to a congregation” (p. 51). I am not sure what she means by taking “to religious life on the internet” but it suggests a fairly high, and conventional (e.g., church-going), level of religiosity reflecting a situation in which “religion surfers” use the Net only or mainly to pursue religion instead of the more likely situation in which people surf for religious information along with looking for all kinds of other information as well.
Sex
In addition to religion, Society Online contains essays on politics and the economy. So, where is the sex? The editors say that “Even though this volume is about society online, there is nothing about pornography in this collection,” but they offer no explanation for this colossal omission other than a nebulous comment about the Web site <http://www.teensite.com/>, which, contrary to expectations, is at present an innocuous real estate and personal site (p. ix). Various family Web sites offer porn statistics from 2003 gleaned, they say, from “reputable sources including Google, WordTracker, PBS, MSNBC, and Alexa research” (an Amazon affiliate) <http://www.familysafemedia.com/pornography_statistics.html> to claim that 12% of all Web sites are pornographic, that 35% of all downloads are porn, and that the Internet share of the annual $12 billion U.S. porn market is $2.5 billion. In Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age (2000) Frederick Lane gives these figures for the U.S. porn market in 1999: $5 billion to rent adult videos (roughly a quarter of all video rental sales), $150 million for adult pay-per-view movies, and $1-2 billion to access “sexually explicit materials on the Internet” (pp. xv, 145). Lane estimated that in 1999 the porn market was “more than $10 billion (and possibly as much as $20 billion)” (p. 110). Lane’s judgment is that “Without question, pornography has been the World Wide Web’s major economic success” (p. 34). In April, 2004, USA Today published an article on how “Online Porn Often Leads [the] High-tech Way,” mentioning the well known story about how “middling VCR sales soared with the advent of adult videotapes” <http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2004-03-09- onlineporn_x.htm>. The article claims that the “sex-tech combination went into hyper-drive with the emergence of the Internet.” In 2003, “About 35 million people visited porn sites in December—or one in four Internet users in the USA, says Nielsen/NetRatings.”
Even though sex is a huge and important part of the historical development of the Internet and continues to be a large part of Internet culture today, Society Online ignores it. There is even an out-of-date Complete Idiot’s Guide to Sex on the Net (1998). Society Online is primarily a textbook and apparently some social science research territory is not polite enough to mention. This timidity includes the Pew study, which has little to say about Internet pornography except for the obvious. For example, when asked “How concerned are you about […] child pornography,” 80% of the respondents said “very concerned” and only 4% said “not at all concerned” <http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Crime_questionnaire.pdf>. One survey asked if respondents “ever do any of the following” when they go online: send or read email (93%), get news, check the weather, look for health information, make an online purchase (55%), participate in an auction, play a game, take an online college class (7%), look for employment information, look for a place to live, look for government information, do online banking, buy stocks (13%), or “look for information about movies, music, books, or other leisure activities” (73%). Unless the last question is hiding something, no one apparently surfs for porn! Pew asked why some former Internet users stopped using the Internet. Only 1% said it was because they were “disturbed by content (porn).” Among those who have no access to the Internet, 43% said that a major reason they did not use the Net had to do with their worry “about online pornography, credit card theft, and fraud.” Isn’t that question unprofessional? Because the question really asks about three things, it is too vague to reveal anything specific about Internet porn. Nearly as many respondents (37%) said that these were “not a reason at all” for why they were not online (“Daily Internet Tracking Survey, 5 May 2002” <http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Shifting_Net_Topline.pdf >).
Women and Race
Does the Internet provide a bridge to reach a wider array of contacts or does it deepen the bonds among existing family and friends? One study “suggests that the internet generally serves both functions” (p. 40) while another study suggests that gender may explain the difference: “women are using the internet to reinforce their private lives and men are using the internet more for engaging in the public sphere” (p. 63).
Leslie Regan Shade that tells us “the most popular use of the internet for women was e-mail, which was used to keep up with distant family and friends.”Women surfed the Net for health, employment, and religious information, as well as to play games. With the glaring omission of not mentioning porn (about 70% of visitors to porn sites are male), men said they used the Internet to find sports, financial, and product information, as well as to bid at eBay (p. 61). I was not surprised that “more women than men use e-mail on a daily basis,” but I was surprised at the low numbers: “19% vs. 5%” (p. 62). Recent numbers indicate that “More than nine out of ten Internet users, or approximately 102 million Americans, use email, and half of the online population is sending or reading email on an average day” (“America’s Online Pursuits,” 22 Dec. 2003 <http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Online_Pursuits_Final.PDF>). Shade believes that “Women are not using the internet for the purpose of civic participation,” even though “the internet has been increasingly feminized. Web content has been designed and created for a particular audience of women—middle to upper class white women” (p. 64). She also reports that “Mothers ‘nibble’ at internet services throughout the day” to check for “news, reference sources, banking, e-mailing, and communicating with other parents in an online community” (p. 67).
In her essay on “Race and Commerce in New Media” Lisa Nakamura <http://commarts.wisc.edu/People/Bios/nakamura.htm> says that those who choose not to watch TV are “often perceived as intelligent, savvy, and discriminating” but “the internet is somehow exempt from the critiques that we make of television” and often considered to be “de facto ‘enriching’” (p. 71). It is far too ideological to claim that interactivity on the Net is, or soon will be, “reduced to little more than sales transactions and e-mail,” and that it is better to either stay off the Net or seek to subvert its capitalist cultural context. Nakamura uncritically quotes Robert McChesney, a protégé of Noam Chomsky who enjoys delivering direful sound bites like this silly 1998 pronouncement: “the differences between the internet and other popular noninteractive media, such as television, are eroding if not already functionally gone” (p. 72; see <http://www.robertmcchesney.com/>, also see his 1999 interview with the left wing Pacifica radio news <http://www.radio4all.org/fp/122199mcches-barsam.htm>). Nakamura relies on McChesney’s thinking to imply that most white Americans are sheep grazing on the commercial fodder found on the Net. In contrast, she believes that “The Pew data indicate that when racial minorities get online, more of them spend their time online chatting, sending and reading instant messages, looking for sports information, and downloading music than do whiles online” (p. 74). Nakamura finds this a more liberating and expressive use of the Internet. She upbraids Abdul Alklimat, who she says, “is not at all interested in black expressive culture on the internet despite the fact that this is how most people of color online are using it” (p. 81, n. 9; see the “Black Research Archive on the Internet” at <http://www.murchisoncenter.org/acrl/paper.htm> and Professor Alkalimat’s homepage at <http://www.africa.utoledo.edu/faculty/alkalimat.html>). Nakamura offers a stale socialist lecture to claim “that noncommodified spaces are becoming increasingly difficult to find on the internet’s particular iteration of hypercapitalism” and to suggest that we are oppressed by “participating in corporate-mediated cyberspaces” and by “subjecting our identities to the law of the market” (pp. 78-9). Has she looked at Internet blogs <http://www.blogcensus.net/; http://www.dijest.com/bc/>? “Phil Wolff estimates that there are 2.4 to 2.9 million active web logs” <http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/internet.htm>. Apparently not, for she ends by saying “The internet’s increasingly corporate culture works incessantly to turn us all into markets, and the greatest challenge of race in cyberspace is to resist this” (pp. 80-1).
Politics & News
Jennifer Stromer-Galley’s piece reports equivocal information about those who prefer mail-in votes and those who might prefer to use the Internet to vote. As we might guess, age is factor because it implies familiarity with Internet use. Older voters express a preference to vote “at a traditional polling place” while younger voters say they would prefer to vote “over the internet.” In any case, Professor Stromer-Galley says “it is clear that internet voting is not at the top of the list of methods for voting” that might dramatically increase voter turn-out (p. 97). She quotes a recent study to say that “a sense of duty to vote ‘is an important consideration for most voters.’” And “there is no clear reason to assume that internet voting is going to increase a person’s […] sense of duty to vote” (p. 99). Like many of the essays, this one leads us to the Pew site to see if more recent material suggests anything different <http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/141/report_display.asp>. Perhaps Stromer-Galley’s major finding (or Pew’s finding) is perfectly old fashioned: “Nearly 75% of the respondents indicated that one reason why they do not vote is that they do not like the candidates”! (p. 93). Professor Stromer-Galley reports that another study found that “the internet had a mild positive impact on political activity during the 1996 and 2000 elections” but “the data do not suggest that the internet was a source or radical change in people’s political activities” (p. 118).
Carin Dessauer explains how Internet news differs from TV news. Instead of waiting for the evening news, you can have Internet news services email you to alert you to breaking stories. Instead of accepting an editor’s judgment about the priority or sequence of stories, you can select the stories you are interested in. Hyperlinks offer more depth or background. Some stories offer video and audio clips, and may be further connected to chat rooms. Editors ask you to rate the story and the site offers to email it to anyone you think might be interested. Finally, we can customize our news interests. Many of us use easily customizable portals like MSN or Yahoo as homepages. All of this creates a layered option for getting the news (pp. 124-5). As for who is getting the news over the Internet, Dessauer says that “by the end of 2001, 62% of Americans had some type of online access (Nielsen/Net Ratings, 2001; p. 126). Pew offers an interesting “Demographics of Internet Users” page at <http://www.pewinternet.org/trends/DemographicsofInternetUsers.htm>. Notice the education variable. Only 32% of those with less than a high school education go online while almost 88% of college graduates are online. Dessauer speculates on how the Internet changes journalism. Computer technology “has meant that journalists [like many teachers] either have had to develop skills or relearn old ones” (p. 130). Transmission costs are no longer a factor. “Only internet news producers have been able to […] reach the whole world for the same costs” as reaching their target audience. If we ignore the cultural obstacles, this is possibly significant because the U.S. represents only 30% of world-wide Internet users <http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info- 2003/internet.htm>. The American audience is fragmented and each fragment has the power to choose the news or the context for news that suits them. Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite have been, in part, succeeded by Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, and Howard Stern. Dessauer mentions Andrew Sullivan’s blog, which, she says, has “been referenced by traditional media” as a quasi-news source <http://www.andrewsullivan.com/> (p. 133). In January 2003, the Pew site released a study titled, “Cable and Internet Loom Large in Fragmented Political News Universe” <http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Political_Info_Jan04.pdf >. The study examined 20 sources where Americans could learn about political campaigns and candidates. The most significant findings were a 10% decline in those who watched nightly network news programs, a 6% decrease in local news, a 5% decrease in news magazines, and a 4% increase in the Internet. “Young people, in particular, are turning away from traditional media sources” for political news. “Just 23% of Americans age 18-29 say they regularly learn something about the election from the nightly network news.”
Steven Schneider and Kristen Foot, the authors of “Crisis Communication and New Media,” explain how the Internet offers a community-building experience in times of crisis. They studied Web site growth for a year after the 9/11 attacks (see their study “One Year Later: September 11 and the Internet” <http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_9-11_Report.pdf>). In addition to offering the news, many Internet sites “enabled visitors to contribute newsworthy information to the public” (p. 143). Some sites gave information-as-it-developed to provide, for example, 9/11 “registries of victims, lists of those missing in the attacks, [and] lists of survivors (‘I’m okay’ sites).” The recent Tsunami tragedy in South Asia will, no doubt, further illustrate these trends. Yahoo features an index of Tsunamis Blog <http://news.yahoo.com/asiadisaster>. Sites were developed to explain “rescue and recovery efforts,” to offer “counseling, education, criminal investigations, community organizing, and solidarity-building efforts.” Many sites offered the chance for cathartic personal expression and offered visitors the chance to see the human faces and read stories about victims. Finally, some sites “allowed individuals to engage in political advocacy” (p. 144). These activities provide the table of contents for the “See what people could do on the Web” page at “The September 11 Web Archive” <http://september11.archive.org/>. Steven Schneider and Kristen Foot say that 63% of the 9/11 sites provided news information. “The second most common action, accessing others’ expression, was possible on 55% of the sites.” Surprisingly, “50% of press sites allowed visitors to provide expression” (p. 145). This supports their finding that “although the Web enables virtually anyone to be an information provider, during times of crisis, press organizations still dominate” and gradually re-establish a more normal (professional) news routine (p. 148). They also remind us that “Online actions engaged in by internet users are, in part, a function of online structures provided by producers” who are usually affiliated with some agency or organization (p. 150).
eCommerce, Design-in-use, & TV vs. the Net
In “SHoP onLiNE!” David Silver and Philip Garland had me flipping through the cyber pages of teenage girl magazines at such sites as <http://www.gurl.com/>, <http://alloy.com/>, and <http://www.delias.com/>. The related Pew study is “Teenage Life Online” <http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/36/report_display.asp>. Both studies expressed surprise at the frequent use of instant messaging (IM) by teenagers. Silver and Garland suggest that online “girl-dominated activities” include “e-mail (95%), IM (78%), and dieting, health, and fitness information (30%).” Both teenage boys and girls surfed the Net for “fun (84%), entertainment (e.g. movies, television, music groups, sports stars) (83%), news (68%),” and to listen “to music (59%),” to visit “chat rooms (55%)” and to visit sites that featured “information that is hard to talk about (18%)” (p. 163). Knowing that school is the institution that frames the use of the Internet for teenagers, the authors should not be so surprised that “American female teens approach and use the internet as a communication tool rather than as a consumer medium” (p. 167). Of course, the authors are aware that “Advertisements portray American female teen cyberculture as […] focused on consumption” even though their use of the Internet is more “diverse and favors communication, entertainment, and information seeking over commerce” (p. 168).
Gina Neff and David Stark take audience analysis and usability testing to the next step in “Permanently Beta,” which recognizes “the practice of design-in-use” so that “products are formed by their use, not simply” by their initial design (p. 180). The metaphor here is taken from software development. A beta release expects to attract user’s advice and feedback, which blurs “the line between users and producers of a product.” The open source code of Linus Torvald’s Linux (a clone of the unix operating environment) offers perhaps the paradigm model of a community in which “users of a program” are treated “as codevelopers” (p. 179). In relation to the teen cyber magazines in “SHoP onLiNE!” Neff and Stark explain that “We don’t have people sitting around thinking, ‘What do teens want?’” Instead, “We just put up the framework” to allow the users or consumers to define the product (p. 182). Command-and-control or top-down management styles seems doomed because “permanently beta” produces “products that are negotiations in themselves” (p. 184). The authors recognize that the beta principle does not exempt company management and workers, which results in putting people “‘into a condition of permanent survival-oriented tension’ in ‘unfettered’ organizations within an information-intensive economy” (p. 175). In the realm of education, the beta principle seems to result in for-profit schools for customers where assessment or customer satisfaction is more important than grades and where professors are demoted to ill paid facilitators; and in community colleges where 65% of the instruction is done by adjuncts.
We are all familiar with the argument that the hours spent watching TV would be better spent reading books. Wendy Griswold and Nathan Wright examine the argument by substituting the Internet for TV in comparison to book culture. I am surprised that they never questioned the validity of the switch, because unlike TV, Net surfers and bloggers are highly involved in the literacy skills of reading and writing. The difference that the authors don’t recognize or question is between literary book culture and popular Internet culture. For example, in Silicon Literacies, Catherine Beavis recognized that some Australian children come to school knowing the novelistic world of Pokemon, which may involve the “need to recognize and make use of the skills, strengths and attributes of some 150 different creatures/characters” (p. 48). If the tables were turned, we would discover the teachers to be illiterate about Pokemon culture and the computer skills that support it. When Beavis used computer games in class, her student hierarchy—in regard to who is an “A” student and who is a “D” student—was generally reversed because the “good” students of book culture knew little about game culture and had little expertise about computer games. In any case, the Society Online authors endorse other scholars who found “that the internet complements and supports offline practices rather than displacing, undermining, or competing with them” (p. 206). They also found “that the heaviest internet users are more likely to be heavier readers as well” (p. 210). In my own experience, which goes back to the ancient days of manual typewriters and Compugraphic typesetting machines <http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/woverbeck/dtr5.htm>, I know this isn’t the case. There are only so many hours in the day and I now spend many of those hours in front of monitors; hours that I used to spend reading books. Of course, I am still reading and writing on the computer, and occasionally accessing online library journals. The authors recognize that reading a book requires total concentration while Internet use is more like TV in that it can be interrupted or done in snatches of time in between doing other things (p. 214). The authors sought to confirm their findings by studying a focus group of 10 college freshmen who typically “reported multitasking, with many windows open and Instant Messenger constantly running.” Perhaps surprisingly, their group illustrated that “Most internet use is very local, involving campus friends and activities or connecting with hometown news and friends. The group members reported making little use of the internet’s potential for global contacts” (p. 213).
Mp3s, Tolerance Online, and Privacy
Richard Peterson and John Ryan offer a history of music from Pope Gregory who “ordered a compilation and standardization of the whole chant repertoire” to Napster, but they avoid considering legal, economic, and industry contexts surrounding the practice of file sharing (p. 224). The associated Pew study is very recent, being released on 5 December 2004: “Artists, Musicians and the Internet” <http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Artists.Musicians_Report.pdf>, which reports that “More than three-quarters of all artists, 77%, and 83% of Paid Artists use the internet, compared to 63% of the entire population.” The Society Online authors make 4 points. Computer technology “has democratized the recording process” to allow “many more musicians to get into the business of recording their own music.” The Pew study says “32 million Americans […] consider themselves artists and more than three times as many […] pursue some sort of artistic endeavors.” The Pew survey concluded that “up to 10 million Americans earn at least some money from their” art. Computers also make it possible for musicians “to manipulate sound in ways that were undreamed of” earlier. Computers reduce the distance between professional and amateur production to make “it easy for an amateur to manufacture” CDs or digital tape recordings (p. 231). Finally, music can “be distributed via the internet” around the world for no direct costs (p. 232). The Pew study mentions other benefits, such as networking among artists, advertising products at Web sites (77% of the 2,755 surveyed artists had their own Web site), and learning about their competition: “58% of Paid Online Artists” listen to online music compared to 34% among all Internet users. It surprised me to learn that most online musicians “do not say internet piracy is a big threat.”
“Technology and Tolerance” inquires into attitudes of those online finding, for example, that weekly Internet “use was far more related to respondents’ education than to their household income” (p. 238). The authors quote from a work by C.R. Sunstein who worries about blogs (he calls them “Daily Me” productions) and how the Internet can support “like-minded people” who “reinforce each other’s opinions, thereby leading to extremist and less tolerant views” (p. 239). No doubt, but even while they do this they are reading, writing, doing rhetorical analysis, responding to critics, learning HTML and file management, and otherwise “going to school” on the Net. The study discovered that “where differences are found, they are in the direction of internet users being more open and tolerant than nonusers” (p. 252).
The authors of “American Internet Users and Privacy” tell us that in Europe “any entity collecting personally identifiable information about an individual is required to obtain full and unambiguous consent from that person” (p. 278). In fact, the U.S. is “the only industrialized nation without such a comprehensive law” to protect privacy (p. 280). One relevant Pew study in this regard is the 22 October 2003 study “Spam: How It Is Hurting Email and Degrading Life on the Internet” <http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Spam_Report.pdf>. Even though “86% of email users report that usually they ‘immediately click to delete’ their incoming spam,” the authors find that “Although Americans want their personal information clearly protected […] they do not seem to endorse the governmental oversight mandated by the EU [European Union] directive” (p. 285). The authors point out that “personal information typically becomes valuable only when assembled into large data sets. The value of any one person’s information is negligible” (p. 286). This may be true of so-called legitimate spyware that invades your computer <http://www.spychecker.com/spyware.html>. “Browser helper object” files (bho hooks) that hijack your Internet Explorer browser are more malicious and somewhat difficult to root out. Phishing for identity theft is apparently a tolerated and calculated part of the American online experience.
Conclusion
Society Online is an interesting work, in part because of its novel use of Internet resources, specifically the Pew Internet and American Life project. Some of the articles suggest important principles, such as the “Permanently Beta” piece. Sometime in the 1970s I took an American studies class in popular culture. At the time, I thought it was cool to discuss Arthur Hailey’s novel Airport at an Albuquerque Sunport restaurant instead of in a university classroom. I suppose we used the novel and the place to conjecture about American values and trends. Society Online offers a better way to study the dimension of American popular culture found on the Internet, both to discover who is online and how to study them.
I will also repeat that the work is creative in suggesting how a print text can interconnect with data found on the Internet. In a review of Mediating Science Learning through Information and Communications Technology <http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev338.htm> I complained about exactly this; about how the book offered something of a catalog of Internet resources to teach science, but failed to mention a single URL or to direct readers to the Internet sources the authors described. Society Online has me thinking more broadly of novels beyond William Gibson’s stylish Neuromancer. In an indirect way I suspect that the popular novel, The Da Vinci Code, meshes with the Net by sending many readers to the Internet to search for early Church history. I suspect that many future books, both fiction and academic works like Society Online, will seek to more directly interconnect with the Net.
References
Anders, James, Rachel Anders, Karl Masutra, Rachel Anders, and James K. Anders, editors.(1998). Complete Idiot’s Guide to Sex on the Net. Indianapolis: Alpha Books, Macmillan.
Beavis, Catherine. (2002). “Reading, Writing and Role-playing Computer Games,” in Ilana Snyder, ed. Silicon Literacies: Communication, Innovation and Education in the Electronic Age. London: Routledge: pp. 47-61.
Lane, Frederick S., III. (2000). Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age. New York: Routledge.
Pew Internet and American Life Project <http://www.pewinternet.org/>.
About the Reviewer
John Rothfork
English Department
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ 86011
John.Rothfork@nau.eduJohn Rothfork teaches online courses in a graduate certificate and an M.A. program in professional and technical writing at Northern Arizona University. His Website is at http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/jgr6/.
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