The project of saying what something is may helpfully begin by saying what it is not. In our case, "Internet studies" as used here is not primarily a study of the technologies constituting the ever-growing, ever-changing networks of computers (including mobile devices such as Internet-enabled mobile phones, netbooks, and other devices) linked together by a single TCP/IP protocol. Certainly, Internet studies in this sense is relevant -in part historically, as these technologies required two decades of development before they became so widely diffused as to justify and compel serious academic attention. That is, we can trace the origins of the Internet to the first efforts in 1973 by Vincent Cerf and Robert E. Kahn to develop the internetworking protocol that later evolved into TCP/IP (cf. Abbate, 2000, pp. 127-33). By contrast, we and our colleagues seek to study the distinctive sorts of human communication and interaction facilitated by the Internet. These begin to emerge on a large scale only in the late 1980s and early 1990s as within the US, ARPANET and its successor, NSFNET (an academic, research-oriented network sponsored by the United States National Science Foundation) opened up to proprietary networks such as CompuServe and others (Abbate, 2000, pp. 191-209). NSFNET simultaneously fostered connections with networks outside the US built up in the 1970s and 1980s: 250 such networks were connected to NSFNET by January 1990, "more than 20 percent of the total number of networks" -and then doubled (to more than 40 percent) by 1995 (Abbate, 2000, p. 210). Following close behind the resulting explosion of Internet access, as Barry Wellman details in our opening chapter, Internet studies may be traced to the early 1990s.
As Susan Herring reminds us, prior to this activity there were computers, networks, and networked communication -studied as computer-mediated communication (CMC), beginning in the late 1970s with Hiltz and Turoff 's The Network Nation (1978: Herring, 2008, p. xxxv). Nonetheless, if we define Internet studies to include CMC as facilitated through the Internet, Internet studies is still barely two decades old. On the one hand, the rapid pace of technological development and the rapid global diffusion of these technologies (at the time of this writing, over 26 percent of the world's population have access to the Internet in one form or another [Internet World Stats, 2010]) would suggest that two decades is a