Das Internet mit seinen Potenzialen an digitaler Vernetzung, Publikationsmöglichkeiten und Kommunikationsformen verändert die Forschung und ihre Ergebnisse nachhaltig. Wissenschaftler und Wissenschaftlerinnen twittern und bloggen, arbeiten in spezialisierten digitalen Netzwerken zusammen und nutzen Wikipedia. Zugleich dringen große Internetakteure wie etwa Google immer mehr in den akademischen Sektor ein. Das Buch analysiert die aktuellen technisch-sozialen Entwicklungen im Internet sowie ihre Auswirkungen auf die Arbeit von Wissenschaftlern.

PD Dr. Michael Nentwich ist Direktor des Instituts für Technikfolgen-Abschätzung (ITA) der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien. René König, Dipl.- Soz., arbeitete dort im Projekt "Interactive Science".

1 Introduction

In the early part of the 21st century one of us coined the term "cyberscience" (Nentwich 2003) to describe the trend of applying information and communication technologies (ICT) to scientific research. Scholars tended increasingly to use the Internet not only to exchange e-mails, but also to participate in online debates, cooperate at distance, use remote databases, simulate and model reality on their computers, and teaching their students with the web. These developments have not come to a halt since the early days but have accelerated and diversified ever since. As will be discussed in section 1.1, the Internet has today become an essential tool for everyday scholarly communication; academic work without the use of the Internet is now as unthinkable as writing an academic paper on a typewriter, especially for young researchers. The emergence of Web 2.0 opened up new opportunities, seized not only by the general Internet community worldwide, but increasingly also by researchers and academic teachers. During the same period powerful commercial actors continued the development of the Internet and made it a different place compared to its early days.

This book focuses on these latest trends and addresses two interrelated research questions: What role does the digital social culture triggered by Web 2.0 play in the academic world at present and what are the potentials of platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia? What impact will the emerging socio-technical practices have?

We approach an answer to these questions in three steps. First, we will review the status quo of how cyberscience developed (1.1) and which new tools and platforms evolved over the last decade with the potential to serve the academic communities (1.2); as a basis for our empirical research and subsequent analysis, we will present our conceptual framework (1.3). Second, we will present five empirical case studies, discussing promising fields of the developments in recent years when it comes to analyze the potential impact on academia: social network sites such as Facebook and similar sites specifically dedicated to research communities (2.1); microblogging with a focus on Twitter (2.2); collaborative knowledge resources, exemplified by various projects of the Wikimedia foundation, namely Wikipedia, Wikibooks, and Wikiversity (2.3); virtual worlds, in particular the rise and fall of Second Life (2.4); finally the most prominent and ubiquitously used universal search engine Google Web Search as well as Google Scholar and Google Books, which are of special interest for academia (2.5). In a third step, we will analyze the empirical material of chapter 2 in the light of our conceptual framework identifying the following key issues: the crucial role of interactivity (3.1); the blurring boundary between academia and the public (3.2); academic quality in the age of Web 2.0 (3.3); the problem of multiple channels and information overload (3.4); transparency and privacy (3.5); and finally potentially democratizing effects emerging from the participatory possibilities of the new platforms (3.6). The book closes with an outlook and overall conclusions, in which we put the analyzed developments into perspective (4.)

ContentsPrefaceIX1 Introduction11.1 Cyberscience 1.0 Revisited21.2 Web 2.0 and Cyberscience51.2.1 The Internet is becoming a social space51.2.2 Social media, digital social networks and digital social culture71.2.3 On the path to cyberscience 2.0?91.3 Conceptual Framework and Methods111.3.1 Modeling scholarly activities and ICT impact on academia111.3.2 Methods applied152 Case Studies172.1 Social Network Sites192.1.1 Main functions262.1.2 Potential for science and research332.1.3 Usage practices and impact352.1.4 Interim conclusions482.2 Microblogging502.2.1 Main functions512.2.2 Potentials for academia542.2.3 Usage practices and impact572.2.4 Interim conclusions702.3 Collaborative Knowledge Production-The Case of Wikimedia722.3.1 Main functions and core principles742.3.2 Potentials for academia822.3.3 Usage practices and impact852.3.4 Interim conclusions972.4 Virtual Worlds-The Case of Second Life1002.4.1 Main functions1012.4.2 Potentials for science and research1032.4.3 Usage practices and impact1042.4.4 Interim conclusions1122.5 Search Engines-The Case of Google1132.5.1 Main functions1162.5.2 Potential for academia1252.5.3 User practices and impact1272.5.4 Interim conclusions1393 Cross-Cutting Analysis1433.1 Interactivity as a Crucial Category1433.1.1 Utopian and dystopian perspectives1433.1.2 Insiders and outsiders: methodological issues1463.1.3 Overcoming the barriers between utopians and dystopians1493.2 New Windows in the Ivory Tower1513.2.1 Bringing together the academic and the public sphere1523.2.2 Blurring media formats1553.2.3 Blurring roles1583.2.4 Bridging the boundaries?1613.3 Academic Quality and Digital Social Networks1633.3.1 Recent developments in academic quality control1633.3.2 Ex ante quality control for or through digital social networks?1653.3.3 Ex post quality control in digital social networks1683.3.4 Crediting and incentives1713.4 Information Overload or Information Paradise?1723.4.1 The evolution and diversification of communication channels in academia1733.4.2 Quantitative impacts of multi-channel communication1763.4.3 Qualitative impacts?1783.5 Between Transparency and Privacy1813.5.1 Privacy versus transparency in the Web 2.01823.5.2 Privacy impact assessment of academic use of social media1833.5.3 Paths towards transparent and privacy-friendly academic Web 2.0?1853.6 Towards Democratization of Science?1883.6.1 What does democratization mean?1883.6.2 Internal democratization?1903.6.3 External democratization?1943.6.4 Obstacles for assessing democratization processes1974 Overall Conclusions and Outlook1994.1 Maturing Cyberscience1994.2 The Cyberscience 2.0 Prospects2014.3 An Ambivalent Overall Assessment205Abbreviations207List of Tables209List of Figures210Bibliography211Index233