Anja Bechmann and Stine Lomborg have contributed with an article entitled "Mapping actor roles in social media: Different perspectives on value creation in theories of user participation", Niels Brügger has written the article "Web historiography and Internet Studies: Challenges and perspectives", and last, but not least, Charles Ess has co-edited the issue and co-written the editorial (with William H. Dutton).

The special issue of New Media & Society takes its point of departure in a workshop held at the Centre for Internet Studies in 2010, co-organized with the Oxford Internet Institute.

In the editorial Ess and Dutton presents the issue as follows: "The immediate upshot was a productive and enjoyable workshop co-sponsored by the Oxford Internet Institute and the Information and Media Studies Department of Aarhus University, held at Aarhus University on 19 March 2010. Following the workshop, the editors of New Media and Society, Steve Jones and Nick Jankowski, agreed with our proposal to build on the momentum of this workshop with an open call for papers that would be published in a special issue of the journal as one more step in support of an array of efforts to catalyze discussion of the state of the art of this developing field. The primary goals of our special issue were, first, to articulate significant bodies of findings and begin to identify an evolving set of constitutive domains within the field. Secondly, with these as primary starting points, both our contributors and we, as editors, sought to identify developing trajectories of future research. We intended to demarcate areas of likely importance, while not prematurely defining and thus closing off what is manifestly an expanding and changing field of Internet Studies."