Volume 3 (2010): Issue 2 (January 2010)

Departing from a perspective of life as lived in rather than with media, this paper articulates the evolutionary context for people's near-complete immersion in media. Using examples such as the appropriation of the movie "Avatar" by activists around the world it is argued how our orientation to media provides adaptive advantage in contemporary postgeographical society.

A cross-cultural comparison of social networking friendship between MySpace (in USA) and Wretch (in Taiwan) was conducted utilizing the high- and low-context framework proposed by Edward T. Hall (1976). Three network indicators were used to describe the network structure of both social network sites: size, density, and heterogeneity. Data were drawn from the forum “Jobs, Work, Careers” on MySpace and “Job-Related” on Wretch over a 2-month period from mid-October to mid-December in 2007. For each of the 2 sites, 6 users (3 men and 3 women) were randomly selected as sources or “seeds” from which to crawl the friendship networks. From the 6 seed users, a snowball sample was constructed by crawling 2 degrees out along the networks. The results indicated that Wretch, although it followed the expected direction predicted by Hall’s model, did not have significantly larger and denser networks than MySpace. Finally, no differences in same-sex and cross-sex friendships were found between the 2 sites either. The overall findings are discussed with implications for future studies.

This paper describes how a weblog was utilized as a major component in a long-term, multi-site ethnography with both “virtual” and physically situated research components. “Ethnographic blogging” describes not only the act of writing on a website and hoping that someone will read it, but the process of regularly maintaining a blog, and the modes of interaction and observation that this process gradually enables. In my own study of self-identified ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds,’ ethnographic blogging involved traversing news sites, forums, and other blogs for relevant content, leading to opportunities for dialogue with other bloggers and readers; establishing a persona online as a researcher, which has encouraged subjects to invite me to public and private discussions about their culture and identities; and bringing together online subjects from multiple physical sites, among other opportunities. My own experience of integrating a blog into ethnographic research was largely experimental, though I offer these reflections to encourage researchers to consider what alternative means of qualitative analysis online may have to offer us.

This article discusses the usefulness of geo-linguistic analysis for Internet studies by presenting two techniques to frame and visualize the linguistic development of the World Wide Web, in particular the geo-linguistic development amongst different language versions of Wikipedia. An emergent research agenda has been set to explore the multilingual aspects of the Internet using, for example, a global perspective on Wikipedia research. And yet, there is a lack of theoretical and methodological tools for understanding the distribution and diffusion of linguistic materials online. The idea of geo-linguistic factors is introduced in this article to address these shortcomings 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. Cartograms and network analysis are presented as two techniques that showcase the potential uses of geo-linguistic analysis. These two techniques of measurement and visualization indicate certain geographic and linguistic affiliations among languages. It is argued that although certain more developed language versions such as English and German may have central positions in connecting all languages, there exists another pattern that can best be explained by geo-linguistic factors. Finally, the limitations and implications of such findings and techniques are discussed, not only for research on Wikipedia but for Internet studies in general.