Leisure Studies and the Problem of the Net

Abstract

As I showed in the last chapter, the Net has been known about in the public sphere of Western popular culture since the early 1990s, and this knowledge and experience spread rapidly from the middle of the 1990s onwards. Even if it failed to make an impact on my PhD, I was using the Net as a leisure space by the time the PhD was awarded. One would expect, then, that leisure scholars writing from the 1990s onwards would be aware of this technological development and swift to respond to the issues it raised. This chapter will be an overview of research and theories about the Net in the subject field of leisure studies — not a systematic literature review, but a search, review and analysis of key literature. To undertake a systematic literature review I would need to read everything that has been written about the Net across the broader disciplines of sociology and media and communication studies, and that would be a Herculean task. So the literature review is limited to one part of leisure studies, with references here and there to other subject fields and disciplines, in this chapter and other chapters.