What shapes the internet? An overview of social science and interdisciplinary perspectives
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.021 | 0.020 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".