Creative productivity emerges from human interactions (Hartley, 2009, p. 214). In an era when life is lived in rather than with media (Deuze, this issue), this productivity is widely distributed among ephemeral social networks mediated through the internet. Understanding the underlying dynamics of these networks of human interaction is an exciting and challenging task that requires us to come up with new ways of thinking and theorizing. For example, inducting theory from case studies that are designed to show the exceptional dynamics present within single settings can be augmented today by large-scale data generation and collections that provide new analytic opportunities to research the diversity and complexity of human interaction. Large-scale data generation and collection is occurring across a wide range of individuals and organisations. This offers a massive field of analysis which internet companies and research labs in particular are keen on exploring. Lazer et al (2009: 721) argue that such analytic potential is transformational for many if not most research fields but that the use of such valuable data must neither remain confined to private companies and government agencies nor to a privileged set of academic researchers whose studies cannot be replicated nor critiqued. In fact, the analytic capacity to have data of such unprecedented scope and scale available not only requires us to analyse what is and could be done with it and by whom (1) but also what it is doing to us, our cultures and societies (2). Part (1) of such analysis is interested in dependencies and their implications. Part (2) of the enquiry embeds part (1) in a larger context that analyses the long-term, complex dynamics of networked human interaction. From the latter perspective we can treat specific phenomena and the methods used to analyse them as moments of evolution.
It was with such an understanding that we started to discuss the idea for this special issue of Cultural Science together with colleagues and guests during an early career researcher workshop at the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation in Brisbane, Australia in mid-2010. We were interested to find out who was taking such perspective
on what subjects of enquiry in the field of internet research to see what insights this may yield and what challenges it bears for how we conceive of networked human interaction. In general, we share with others that the complexity of our challenges arises from the gradual and inexorable transition from episodic histories to multilayered interactions, currently expedited by ephemeral, internet-enabled social networks. (e.g. Diamond 1999, Potts et al 2008, Hermann-Pillath 2009, Page 2011) We have narrowed this special issue to the discussion of methods which, after all, represent moments of evolution within the system of science themselves. (Luhmann 1994: 560) We have invited contributions from emerging and established scholars interested in understanding the complexity of change dynamics in various internet-enabled fields and situations. We were particularly interested in contributions that combine innovative research design with a large context treatment of socio-cultural phenomena, as well as in research that outlines how specific data is being used and processed to help understand the complexity of specific phenomena in ways hitherto not realised, and, finally, how the chosen approaches help reconsider the dynamics of institutions, identities, socio-cultural relations and, indeed, the ways we are doing research.
We have received contributions from various fields and backgrounds, a fact that is reflective of the evolution of Internet research/scholarship more generally (see Denise Rall’s article in this issue). The special issue opens with two general articles that take an evolutionary and interdisciplinary approach to media and culture thereby serving as background papers for this special issue. Mark Deuze provides an evolutionary context for today’s media-immersed life and argues that our embracement of media afford adaptive advantage in our ‘post-geographical society.’ He proposes that we have entered a time of ‘the survival of the mediated.’ Ben Hamley, Alan McKee and Christy Collis take entertainment as a subject of study to drive home the idea that Cultural Studies must ‘continue with its core originating impulse’ of interdisciplinarity and bring together disciplines that have traditionally been left out of the conversations within the field of cultural studies. Only in this way, they argue, can we revitalize and expand our understanding of culture and the domain of cultural studies itself. These two general articles set the stage for the special issue section on internet research methods as moments of evolution, which consists of five papers.
Denise Rall’s article Locating four pathways towards internet scholarship gives an overall review of the change and evolution of internet scholarship. It identifies four outstanding, though not mutually exclusive, pathways to internet scholarship: the professional, the peripatetic, the research-based, and the immersed. Academic biographical narrative is used to analyse each of the pathways, and to detail the evolution of internet scholarly engagement with the changes in technological and intellectual terrain. Using data drawn from two social network sites, Wretch from Taiwan and MySpace from the USA, Hui-Jung Chang conducts a cross-cultural comparison of social networking friendship in two culturally distinctive societies. Nikoleta Daskalova takes the publicly available Europe Media Monitor (EMM), a technological system for online news processing, as her focus of study. Through analysis of its basic applications, data processing methods, and the institutional context of the system, Daskalova explores the implication of intelligent information for the production and distribution of knowledge and urges the need for improved interaction between the humanities and social sciences, as well as between computer science and software engineering because, as she argues, ‘after all, it is not only a question of reading data but also of how we read reality.’ Jason Tocci’s approach toward internet is more of experimental nature. He uses a weblog as both a tool and a site for his ethnographical research, through which he invites us to reflect alternative means of qualitative methods in internet studies. Finally, Han-Teng Liao and Thomas Petzold discuss the usefulness of geo-linguistic analysis for internet studies by presenting two techniques, cartograms and network analysis, to frame and visualize the linguistic development of the World Wide Web, in particular the geo-linguistic development amongst different language versions of Wikipedia. The idea of geo-linguistic factors is introduced in their article to address the lack of theoretical and methodological tools for understanding the distribution and diffusion of knowledge from different linguistic materials online, and to respond to the study of a wide range of issues such as linguistic pluralism on the internet or, more generally, the diffusion of innovation. The papers presented here cover a good variety of internet scholarship, from quantitative to qualitative analysis, from critical to empirical approaches. These are important initial and experimental explorations to a vast, nascent, fast-changing field of study which constantly necessitates methodological approaches that take into account the evolutionary needs of human interactions.
We thank the publisher and general editor, John Hartley, for the opportunity to add a special issue to the Cultural Science journal which we recommend to every reader interested in how an ‘evolutionary understanding of a knowledge-based society past and present helps to map the possibility space of future scenarios for creative productivity (both market-based and in community contexts) to which public policy and business strategies must adapt.’ (Cultural Science 2008) Furthermore, we thank all contributors to this special issue, those who submitted a paper, those who reviewed these submissions, and those involved in the journal management process. We hope that this special issue adds to existing discussions about networked human interaction and that it may inspire future theoretical, empirical and practice-led investigations that help us better understand the related challenges that spur changes in our societies and vice versa, to better conceive the changes that spur new challenges to our societies.
