UNCORRECTED PROOFS 4 The Internet in Everyday Life: Exploring the Tenets and Contributions of Diverse Approaches Maria Bakardjieva Introduction The Internet in everyday life is a newly emergent continent on the map of Internet research that has not been properly explored and charted yet. At the same time, its contours and substantive make-up seem distinct enough to warrant a special designation. The elements that distinguish the Internet in everyday life from its boisterous Internet research kin can be captured by several key words: use, users, offline context and embeddedness. First and foremost, this means that researchers in this area manifest avid interest in Internet use performed by ordinary people as one among their many different activities and related to the broader horizons of their lives. Secondly, this means attention to the social and cultural environ- ment in which Internet use takes place with its different levels and variations: personal, domestic, organizational, national, etc. In other words, the user is not perceived exclusively as an online persona involved in different pursuits in cyberspace, but as a physical actor who sits in a chair and stares at a screen for a variety of time stretches and purposes. Thirdly, the interconnectedness between Internet use and numerous other practices and relations is emphasized in this approach. For some authors (Haythornthwaite & Wellman, 2002; Ward, 2005) looking at the Internet as part of everyday life is a marker of the second age of the medium or of a second-generation research that breaks away from the early euphoria surrounding everything “cyber” and the effervescent speculations about how the Internet will transform society as we know it. Indeed, to insist on talking about the Internet in everyday life is to deny the medium its extraordinary status, to see it as ordinary, but in no case as unim- portant. There are some decisive advantages to be gained from redefining the glorious new communication medium in this way. Among them is the sobering realization that conceptual frameworks, methodologies, trends, and patterns established in other areas of social and cultural studies may be applicable to the Internet. All of a sudden, neither the Internet nor its study are so special and 9781405185882_4_004.qxd 7/29/09 3:24 PM Page 59