The Web as an Object of Study

INTRODUCTION Over the last decade, as email, the world wide web and various digital technologies have emerged, scholars of new media have employed a variety of methodological strategies to explore the social, political and cultural phenomena associated with the growth of these applications. Several recently-published edited volumes highlight the range of methods employed in research regarding social dimensions of internet technologies (Gauntlett, 2000; Howard and Jones, 2003; Jones, 1999; Mann and Stewart, 2000). These collections, along with recent issues of scholarly journals, demonstrate that traditional methods of social research, such as ethnography (e.g. Hakken, 1999; Hine, 2000; Markham, 1998), textual analysis (e.g. Crowston and Williams, 2000; Mitra, 1999; Mitra and Cohen, 1999), focus groups (e.g. Price and Capella, 2001, Stromer-Galley and Foot, 2002), surveys (e.g. Parks and Floyd, 1996; Schmidt, 1997; Smith, 1997; Yun and Trumbo, 2000) and experiments (e.g. Iyengar, 2002) have been adapted for use online in order to investigate both online and offline phenomena. In addition, some scholars have found it useful to employ internet applications as bases for studies of purely offline phenomena (e.g. Witte et al., 2000). However, our focus is on the development of methods for studying the social dimensions of the internet itself, and in particular, the web. As the web has emerged as a distinct media form in the past 10 years, it has been viewed increasingly as an object of study by social researchers. The ongoing evolution of the web poses challenges for scholars as they seek to develop methodological approaches that permit robust examination of web new media & society