<P> A number of academic journals are central to communicating research in the field, including Bad Subjects, Convergence: The Journal of Research into New media Technologies, Ctheory, Cyber Psychology + Behaviour, Computers in Human Behavior, First Monday, Information, Communication, and Society, The Information Society, Journal of Computer - Mediated Communication, M / C, New Media & Society, tripleC: Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, Fibreculture Journal, and TeknoKultura, but research relating to internet studies appears in a diverse range of venues and disciplines . </P> <P> Key foundational work, that developed in to Internet Studies, is found in studies of the Information Society and the Network Society by scholars such as Manuel Castells, Mark Poster, Frank Webster, etc . Other important authors are Sherry Turkle and Robert Kraut for their socio - psychological contributions; Abbate and Patrice Flichy for their socio - historical research; Barry Wellman and Caroline Haythornwaite for their social network approaches; Ronald E. Rice for his information science contributions; David Lyon and Philip Agre for their privacy and surveillance writings; Lawrence Lessig, Andrew Chadwick, Jonathan Zittrain for their study of law and politics; and Robin Williams, Robin Mansell and Steve Woolgar for their contributions about innovation . </P> <P> As Barry Wellman argues, internet studies may find its beginnings with the 1978 publication of The Network Nation, and was largely dominated by computer scientists, presenting at venues like the annual CSCW conference . These were quickly joined by researchers in business fields and library and information science . By the late 1990s, more attention was being paid to systematic investigation of users and how they made use of the new technologies . During the 1990s, the rapid diffusion of internet access began to attract more attention from a number of social science and humanities disciplines, including the field of communication . Some of these investigations, like the Pew Internet & American Life project and the World Internet Project framed the research in terms of traditional social science approaches, with a focus less on the technology than on those who use them . But the focus remained at the aggregate level . In the UK, the ESRC Programme on Information and Communications Technologies (1986--1996) laid considerable ground work on how society and ICTs interact, bringing together important clusters of scholars from media and communications, society, innovation, law, policy and industry across leading UK universities . </P> <P> In 1996, this interest was expressed in other ways as well . Georgetown University began offering a related master's program in that year, and at the University of Maryland, David Silver created the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies on the web . Middlebury College developed Politics of Virtual Realities, one of the first undergraduate courses dedicated to exploring the political, legal and normative implications of the Internet for liberal democracy . By 2001, The Chronicle of Higher Education noted that "internet studies" was emerging as a discipline in its own right, as suggested by the first undergraduate program in the area, offered at Brandeis University, and noted that "perhaps the most telling sign of the field's momentum" was the popularity of the annual conference created by the then nascent Association of Internet Researchers . </P>

When did communication scholars start to research new technologies like the internet