What shapes the internet? An overview of social science and interdisciplinary perspectives
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This overview of the social science and interdisciplinary research about the internet focuses on how social, political, and economic contexts affect the internet. Drawing on over 50 sources from 1964 to 2020 this paper categorizes the history of internet research into three periods: (1) the internet as a virtual reality, spanning from the 1990s to 2000; (2) the internet as a mirror of society, from 2000 to 2010; and (3) the privatized internet, from 2010 onwards. The internet of the first phase was a new—virtual—reality where geographical distances were abolished, and communities of strangers were coming together. Scholarship of the first phase was characterized by speculations about the future of the technology. The internet of the second phase, accessible to a broader public, also became a tool of surveillance for governments and corporations. Internet studies became more descriptive. The third phase was marked by the widespread use of proprietary algorithms to collect user data. Scholars of the third phase raised concerns about highly privatized digital landscapes. Far from agreeing with early dystopian scholarship about the internet, contemporary scholarship offers a nuanced understanding of the relationship between the internet and its political, economic, and social contexts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it