This Handbook is a detailed introduction to the numerous academic perspectives that apply to the study of the internet as a political, social and communicative phenomenon. Covering both practical and theoretical angles, established researchers from around the world discuss everything: the foundations of internet research appear alongside chapters on understanding and analyzing current examples of online activities and artifacts. The material covers all continents and explores in depth subjects such as networked gaming, economics and the law. The sheer scope and breadth of topics examined in this volume, which ranges from on-line communities to e-science via digital aesthetics, are evidence that in today's world, internet research is a vibrant and mature field in which practitioners have long since stopped considering the internet as either an utopian or dystopian "new" space, but instead approach it as a medium that has become an integral part of our everyday culture and a natural mode of communication.​ This Second International Handbook of Internet Research is an updated version of the first International Handbook of Internet Research that came out in 2010. Since then, the field has changed, and this new version retains a number of the key updated chapters from the first handbook, as well as completely new chapters.
About the Author: Jeremy Hunsinger holds a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech.
At Virginia Tech, he was one of the founders of the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture. He attended the Oxford Internet Institute's 2004 Summer Doctoral Programme and was an instructor there in 2009 and 2011. Jeremy was Graduate Fellow of the NSF Workshop on Values in Information Systems Design in 2005 and 2010. He was an Ethics Fellow at the Center for Information Policy Research at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, in 2007-2010. He was coeditor of the journal Learning Inquiry and has published in Fast Capitalism, The Information Society, Social Epistemology, and other leading academic journals. He recently also coedited a special issue on Learning and Research in Virtual Worlds for Learning, Media, & Technology. Jeremy coedited the International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments and the International Handbook of Internet Research and has edited and contributed to several other volumes.

Matthew M. Allen is Professor of Internet Studies at Deakin University, Geelong, Australia. Matthew led the establishment of Internet Studies as a teaching and research program within Australia, setting up the first degree programs at undergraduate and postgraduate level at Curtin University in the 1990s and being appointed as Professor of Internet Studies and Head of Department. He is an award-winning educator, a Fellow of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, and has more than 20 years' experience and expertise in teaching students via the Internet. He has written widely on topics in this field, focusing primarily on the way in which Internet technologies cannot be used as "tools" to improve learning but are part of the dialogic experience of shared learning and teaching between students and academics. He is also a leading researcher of social consequences and meanings of the Internet, most recently publishing highly-cited work on the history of the Internet, focused on the origins, impact, and end of the so-called "web 2.0" period of Internet development. He is also a former President of the Association of Internet Researchers and helped internationalize the Association in its early years. His current research projects include consideration of the profound importance of the "Chinese Internet," especially as it becomes a site of global political contestation; the recent history of the lived experience of broadband deployment in Australia; and the philosophical and cultural complexities of regulation of Internet content, conduct, and consequences.

Lisbeth Klastrup holds a Ph.D. in Digital Culture and Communication from the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Lisbeth Klastrup is Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. Since 1999, she has studied online culture, digital communication, and social inter-action, with a specific focus on the everyday uses of social media, transmedial worlds, and multiplayer gameworlds. Her current research focuses on the mediation of death on social media, the use of transmedial world in everyday digital life, and the use of social media and memes in Danish elections. She has published several articles and book chapters within the areas mentioned and is coeditor of the first Danish book on digital media analysis (Digitale Verdener 2004), coeditor of the first International Handbook of Internet Research, author of an introductory book on Social Network Media (Sociale Netværksmedier, DK 2016), and coauthor of the forthcoming book Transmedial Worlds in Everyday Life: Networked Reception, Social Media, and Fictional Worlds (Tosca and Klastrup 2019).