Understanding Research (27 page)

Whilst its basic functions – email, web-browsing or searching, online databases or web portals – remain relatively constant, the internet that concerns researchers these days has quickly become characterized by the multimedia and interactive software platforms that in the first decade of the twenty-first century transformed the largely text-based world-wide web of the 1990s into multimedia, integrated platforms known as ‘social networking sites’ or ‘social media’.

To date (circa 2012) the internet is dominated by a handful of corporate internet service providers and activities; web-search engines (Google), social networking (Facebook), encyclopaedic information (Wikipedia), visual media (YouTube), voice-over-internet-protocol (Skype), email, news and entertainment. Here social network
ing sites, blogs, increasingly powerful search engines, portals, or instant messaging/ chat/micro-blogging tools like Twitter, and any number of news and entertainment platforms bring with them new opportunities, new topics, and new challenges for researchers (as well as marketers!).

All of the above have only taken root in the last five to six years; relatively recently by even the internet’s brief lifespan. How people use standard applications such as email, word-processing packages or search engines, differs widely. There is a tendency for quick judgment about what counts as ‘skill’ or ‘knowledge’ with respect to the use and application of the internet and related software or web-based tools for academic research; fashion and trends also contribute to the way successive generations of internet users and developers regard one another, and have variable shelf-lives. What was cutting-edge last week can be yesterday’s news by the end of the year.

For this reason alone, it is worth reiterating that familiarity with the latest service or brand is not tantamount to honing sustainable and adaptable internet research skills or developing a feasible online research project. The key objective is to develop internet research skills and online research methodologies that are sustainable and sound, able to deal with change and continuity in this domain.

A word to the wise

At this point, and in view of the way online research methods, ethics, and theoretical frameworks are all very much under construction as today’s Web 2.0 makes way for whatever is around the corner, I’d like to close this discussion of internet research skills and emerging online research methodologies, circa 2012, with some general comments about the broader context in which research is being conducted today.

Ownership and control

Ownership and control of the internet, the web, and rights to all that travels through and within these computer-mediated communications are currently in flux, fiercely contested at the highest international level, and increasingly dominated by
commercial interests. In short, and the concerted actions of open-source software activists and advocacy organizations, and
creative commons
countermoves to proprietary property rights law notwithstanding, less and less online is actually free. The price ordinary users and researchers pay for so-called free access, goods and services, is an increasingly sophisticated level of tagging and tracking – surveillance – by corporate and government entities. Whilst such concerns are not new (digital databases and CCTV cameras predate the internet), transparency has a price-tag that is not yet clear.

Figure 5.6
Cyberpolice!

Source
: Chappatte:
http://www.globecartoon.com

Electronic privacy and transparency

As an everyday user and researcher, protect your privacy and access to personal information online in ways that make sense to you on the ground. As a socially responsible researcher, laid out in all codes of ethics, you are also obliged to protect the rights and privacy of your research subjects. Lurking online is covert observation; a form of research that is considered unethical, key exceptions notwithstanding. That is for your ethics committee to decide.

Archiving and retrieving digital or web-based data

As noted above, when backing up your work, remember that the internet is a volatile domain; formats change, programs become obsolete, freebies disappear or, worse still, start charging. Keep strategic material close to home and in more than one format as well if you opt to use a server-based archiving service.

Figure 5.7
Welcome to the medium of the future

Source
: Nina Paley:
http://www.ninapaley.com

Screen-lives

Finally, remember that in cyberspace and computing generally, an everyday version of
Moore’s Law
applies.
¹⁴
Namely, as readers will note in the cartoon above, in cyberspace the speed in which
things change, links come and go
, is considerably faster than on the ground, as a rule. Successive generations of ‘digital natives’ assume, like their predecessors, that their user-based knowledge and idiomatic terms are here to say. Not the case; what is new today on the web will be yesterday’s news before you know it, perhaps even before a project has been completed.

1
   For the record, the bulk of my own research has been in this area. This does not mean to suggest, however, that I have IT training, am a hacker, or a blogger. An engineering degree or software design skills are not prerequisites to conducting online research, or web-constituted topics. What it does mean though is that my own research experience and working knowledge predates those products and services currently falling under the ‘Web 2.0’ rubric; perhaps that makes me a ‘silver surfer’ in computer years (see UCL 2008).

2
   These have been collected, offered, and overheard from students and colleagues over the years.

3
   For instance, a report by Symantec, the anti-virus software developer, in April of 2010, noted that every second 100 attempts are made by hackers, of varying levels of expertise, to break into people’s personal data such as online banking codes; with an attempt being successful every 4.5 seconds according to Symantec’s calculations. Computer infections with bugs and viruses grew by 71 per cent in 2009; reportedly enabled by programs now being designed to facilitate these sorts of activities. See
www.symantec.com/business/theme.jsp?themeid=threatreport
(last accessed 21 April 2010).

4
   Here we are picking up the story of Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues’ work at CERN in Switzerland because the internet that concerns us here, and most research students, is
the popularized form of computer-mediated communication known as the world-wide web. This means we are not looking at the preceding, and overlapping roles played by the US military establishment, former vice-president Al Gore’s role in promoting a US version of the internet’s ‘global internet infrastructure’, hacker communities and software developers in the USA from the 1970s, and preceding decades when cybernetics ideas and R&D criss-crossed pioneering internet communities and advocates such as the WELL and the Electronic Frontier Foundation on the west coast of the US. Neither are we looking at the role played, and claimed by French IT developers in the 1980s and 1990s who developed an internet prototype, the minitel.

5
   That US-based web addresses are generic to the internet and so dispense with the country code relates to the economic and technical dominance of US (state) actors and agencies in its short history; a contentious and cantankerous topic in itself.

6
   For example, the.xxx domain name furore (a top-level domain name for adult content), or the consequences for IP addresses as top-level domain names such as .com reach saturation.

7
   For more information on web addresses, protocols, and the increasingly important IP (internet protocol) address that is unique to every computer, see Ó Dochartaigh (2009: 69–75). For a good glossary of abbreviations and jargon related to the internet, see Gaiser and Schreiner (2009: 160–4).

8
   See Ó Dochartaigh (2009: 28–9).

9
   This message can mean several things: a spelling mistake or language-based confusion about spelling, the deletion of the website from the internet, that the URL address has been changed or is no longer in use, or that certain authorities have blocked (censored, or filtered) access to that content. 404 error messages are becoming antiques also, but where they do pop up they are not then end of the story either; sometimes they are temporary glitches, so try again. These two phrases come from two spoofs on this once frequent occurrence; see
http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/humor/marvin-the-server-404.html
;
www.sendcoffee.com/minorsage/404error.html
(26 August 2011).

10
   For a useful synopsis see Gaiser and Schreiner (2009: 113–14).

11
   UCLA:
www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/sas/modules/intsas.htm

12
   See
Chapter 3
for an overview. See also the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s ‘Research Ethics Framework’ at
www.esrc.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/Images/ESRC_Re_Ethics_Frame_tcm6–11291.pdf
; the UK Social Research Association’s ‘Ethical Guidelines’ at
www.the-sra.org.uk/ethical.htm
; the UK Government Social Research Unit guidelines at
http://www.gsr.gov.uk/downloads/professional_guidance/ethical_assurance/ethics_guidance.pdf

13
   Thanks to Marieke Riethof and Jowan Mahmod for noting this double-edged side to anonymity when citing participants by their online handles. Sometimes ‘silencing marginalized voices is also a political/ethical choice’ when undertaking ethnographic work with marginal online communities (M. Riethof, private email 18 August 2011). Other times, to claim that a nickname is not a real name and so taking the additional step is not necessary in the final report cuts no ice within the community, as ‘everyone knows who everyone is already’. Sometimes academic conventions put too much stress on ‘transparency’ based on civic notions of identity; our ‘official’ names and ‘real name’ email addresses (see Franklin 2004, Jones 1999). And sometimes, online visibility is only the tip of the iceberg (see Franklin 2007, O’Neill 2009).

14
   
Moore’s Law
refers to the – now folkloric – accuracy of the predictive model developed in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, the global brand leader in microprocessor manufacturing, that computing power will increase exponentially; doubling every 18 months to 2 years.