including antivirus programs and firewalls. Online communities: including Internet forums, blogs, and MMORPGs. Open source software: focusing on the ability of Internet users to collaborate to modify, develop, and improve pieces of software which are freely available to the public without charge. Sociology of the Internet: including the social implications of the Internet, new social networks, online societies (virtual communities), identity practices and social interaction on the Internet. Science and technology studies: how and why we have the digital technologies we have, and how society shapes their development. Internet and social media use in politics: including its use for mobilizing political campaigns and protests. Web archiving and the history of the Internet: preservation of the objects of study, and focusing on the development of the Internet over time. Key journals A number of academic journals are central to communicating research in the field, including Bad Subjects, Convergence, CTheory, Cyber Psychology & Behaviour, Computers in Human Behavior, First Monday, Information, Communication & Society, The Information Society, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, M/C Journal, New Media & Society, Social Science Computer Review, tripleC, Fibreculture Journal, and TeknoKultura. However, research relating to internet studies appears in a diverse range of venues and disciplines. History Barry Wellman argues that 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. In 1996, this interest was expressed in other ways as well. Georgetown