ONLINE SCHOOL FOR INTERNET STUDIES
March-May 2018
Club for Internet and Society Enthusiasts is launching an online school. It is a space for education and research that allows us to learn Internet studies and conduct a research in several teams.

The school will be held for 9 weeks (March 19 - May 19).

The best lecturers and researchers from Russia and worldwide will talk on research's various aspects, theories, methods and most significant problems. We will address the issues of global importance while using Russian data. We plan to obtain a result useful for both theoretical and practical needs

To apply for your participation, please, select a course project you like the most and contact us via e-mail (clubforinternetandsociety@gmail.com) before March, 10. On March 15 you will receive a letter informing you on the results.

There are no any fees for participants. All the materials will be published in June.
6 goals and 6 issues
  1. Publications in scientific journals and in media
  2. Special projects with media
  3. Developed research methods
  4. Collective research blogs
  5. Researchers' network in Russian cities
  6. Public presentations at the Conference "Internet beyond global network" (May 2018): discussion panels, sections and workshops.

  1. How did the Internet's development differ in various cities of Russia?
  2. Why do users resist innovations and refuse to apply it?
  3. How does the communication in parents online communities influence the parenthood?
  4. How did the views of the state and the media on Internet had been changing over the time?
  5. How do video bloggers take on the public person's functions and what are the key features of this publicity?
  6. What happens to the body on the Internet? How does body act and what affects it?

The principles and the key features
  • The school is a space for collective production of knowledge.We welcome participants with different background; From the prospective students it is only expected to share the view on research and to be ready to learn and work together.
  • The school is the space where we learn and act. We will listen to lectures and perform the tasks, so each of those tasks becomes the part of the overall project.
  • The school is oriented to global research problems and challenges, however we use Russian cases and data. Our working language is Russian, but many texts for reading are in English, and English is partly going to be our writing language.
  • According to the school's final results, some of the projects will be finished and part of them will go on.
Project descriptions
History of the Internet
  • How did the Internet develop in Russian cities?
  • Who were and still remain the main actors of the process? Why did they begin working with the Internet, if we speak about business, government, activists? What kind of relationships were between them?
  • What level of locality different Internet-projects had? Which projects appear on the local level now?
What do we do:
  • Using different data types: archives, qualitative reports, interviews
  • Make up the local Internet timeline
  • Develop research topics and write a draft for the book

Lecturers: Denis Sivkov, Julie Firmstone
Tutors: Leonid Yuldashev, Olga Dovbysh, Elena Gudova, Ksenia Antonova, Evgenia Kleshcheva, Alexandra Goncharova
Participants needed: 30
Digital disengagement
• How is the Internet perceived by IT specialists?
• Do they ever resist using some part of the Internet, and if so, which one?
• How does the Internet-related work transform the possibility of the Internet's personal use (self-presentation, personal communication, creative implementation)?
What do we do:
  • Conduct biographical interviews
  • Write a scientific article
  • Create an information project on what it means to be user and how to be (or not to be) one

Lecturers: Adi Kuntsman, Charles Ess, Laura Portwood
Tutors: Adi Kuntsman, Anna Schetvina
Participants needed: 4
Youtube vloggers: performing self and network publics
  • How dramaturgy of videoblogs of different genres and popularity levels is constructed
  • How vloggers communicate with their audience, how they influence them and what they teach them (in a sense of peer learning)
  • What is the inner structure of the audience (core/periphery, fans/viewers)
  • How audience perceives this dramaturgy and forms of interaction
  • How private space of vloggers is organized and how does audience perceive it?
  • How and why vloggers are taking roles of public persons and what are the main features of this publicity (non-textual, mediated, youtube-based and so on)
What do we do:
  • We take interviews with vloggers of different genres and different number of subscribers
  • We conduct included observations and participate in vlog shooting process
  • We analyze content and compare it with collected data
  • We analyze comments, fan-groups and online-communities
  • We take interviews (online and offline) of various representatives of vloggers' subscribers
Lecturers: Crystal Abidin, Jean Burgess
Tutors: Konstantin Gabov, Ksenia Babushkina, Irina Ksenofontova, Angelina Kozlovskaya
Participants needed: 10
Parents online communities
  • Are there any regional differences in the image of the parenthood online and how can we study them?
  • Parenting online: which formats are there in the Internet for the parents' collective communication?
  • Does the variety of parenting experience increase? What is the Internet's role in this process?
  • How is the parents' economic activity structured (when it is build around children-related topics), and what is the role of Internet here?
What do we do:
  • Collect a database for the regions where from our informants are, study the content
  • Interview parents and community organizers
  • Compile a «good practices» collection from parents communities
  • Write articles, conduct blog on the research

    Tutors: Olga Verbilovich, Oksana Dorofeeva, Tatiana Fomicheva, Elizaveta Sivak, Yana Kozmina
    Participants needed: 10
Discourses on the Internet: state and media views
  1. What do the state and the media say about the Internet? How it is changed over the past 20 years?
  2. Does the media discourse depend on what the state is doing, and what else affects it?
  3. How does the state and the media develop the idea on the security and risks related to the Internet?
  4. Which theoretical frame are most useful here: imaginaries, discourse analysis or social representations?
What do we do:
  • Work with databases of media and government publications
  • Write two scientific articles
  • Create a map of the state's main actors and the Internet-managing organizations: who is who
Lecturers: Martin Bauer, Patrice Flichy, Konstantin Gaaze
Tutors: Alexandra Keidia, Evgenia Suvorina, Alena Kolesnikova, Marina Kalashnikova
Participants needed: 10
Body and the Internet
  1. Where is the body on the Internet?
  2. In which Internet-practices does the body play the main role?
  3. Talking about creation of new bodily normativity, what kind of mechanics stands behind it?
  4. What kind of manifestations of bodily and sensory experiences can be observed online?
What do we do:
  • Study theories, methods, and practical cases
  • Research ways of presenting body and bodily experience on the Internet
  • Explore opportunities of direct and technologically mediated bodily-sensory tracking methods and its interpretation
  • Ethically put together a multimedia project

Guest speakers: Irina Sirotkina, Timur Schukin, Sergei Sokolovsky
Tutors: Elena Sokolova, Olga Remneva, Sergey Shevchenko
Participants needed: 6-8
Organizers of a school are Club for the Internet and Society Enthusiasts. It is informal community of the Internet researchers. The club's work involves academics, artists, journalists, students, IT-specialists and civic activists.

Since 2015 we hold seminars, conferences, translate English-language articles, books and study programs on Internet. We have some educational projects and a research project.

Club's website.