Introduction by Professor Klaus Bruhn Jensen

The internet is among the most flexible and universally applicable technologies ever invented by humans. Nevertheless, the many significant variations in the social uses of the internet around the world remain poorly understood. The Peoples’ Internet (PIN) project compares the current state and future potential of the internet in three centers of the global economy and world politics – China, Europe, and the United States – focusing on the interplay of civil society with the other two key sectors of modern societies: market and state.

The internet represents the global communication infrastructure of the twenty-first century – a resource for the peoples  of the world to monitor and address political and economic powers. As such, the internet is key to the development of sustainable institutions at the local, national, and global levels that enable communication and collaboration, including in domains and on topics that generate contestation and conflict. To help focus its research questions, PIN will consult with representatives of business, political life, and NGOs at the beginning as well as in the conclusion of the project. In a future perspective, PIN will contribute to a global research infrastructure to support further studies and applications of the internet around the world.

Population surveys about media use, communicative patterns, and public participation in social and cultural activities – in China, the US, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and the United Kingdom

Ethnographic fieldwork exploring the interrelations of media and communication with everyday routines and cultural traditions

Big data analyses tapping the bit trails that users leave behind as they move around the internet

Fiona Huijie Zeng, PhD student
  
   

Signe Sophus Lai, PhD student
    
   

Jesper Pagh, PhD student
   
 

• Fernando Bermejo is Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and also the Research and Program Director of Media Cloud.
• Philip Howard is Professor and Director of the Oxford Internet Institute.
• Rikke Frank Jørgensen is Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
• Sun Sun LIM is Professor and Dean at the Singapore University of Technology and Design.
• Lee Rainie is Director of Internet and Technology Research at the Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C.

Background publications

The PIN project builds on a model of communication covering one-to-one, one-to-many, as well as many-to-many forms of interaction, published in 2011 in New Media and Society. 

The basic communication model underlying the PIN project.

The model informed an EU COST Action, including a comparative study of media and internet use in nine European countries. The results of this project were published in 2015 in a special issue of the International Journal of Communication, which also addressed the question of how to capture and compare the uses of a rapidly changing internet.

A comparative study of internet and media use in nine European countries.

The implications for developing internet use studies was further explored in this article:

Implications of longitudinal studies of internet use.

Publications from the project include empirical, theoretical, as well as methodological contributions.

PIN fieldwork is based on a comparative ethnographic approach, laid out in an article co-authored by three PIN scholars. Tracing Communicative Patterns. A comparative ethnography across platforms, media and contexts, Nordicom Review

One article addresses the growing centrality of mobile communication in the global media environment. Jensen & Helles (2018).

Another article examines many-to-one communication: the users of social and other digital media speak into the system and are monitored by commercial and political interests. Jensen & Helles (2017) - A related article addresses the consequences, at once cultural and commercial, of digital surveillance. Helles & Flyverbom (2019)