The Practices of Web Navigation

This paper reports the first set of results of a field qualitative research, focusing on users as significant actors in shaping the Internet and in negotiating its meanings. The research has been conducted from January 2001 to April 2002 by "Osservatorio sulla Comunicazione" - a media research centre directed by Fausto Colombo which is part of the Università Cattolica del S. Cuore in Milan. The research was organised in two field steps, meant to investigate on the one side the representations and meanings that users assign to the Internet, and on the other side their actual navigation practices and styles. The paper we are presenting here focused on the second step, and aim both at defining "navigation styles" as a result of a set of socially situated practices, and at deploying the very idea of "navigation style" as an interface between Self and Other, uniqueness and iteration, individual expression and generalization, practice and its acknowledgment / recognizability. Style thus enabled us to articulate the dimension of "surfing practices" as a dimension of social action, and as practice of medium appropriation.