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The End of the Virtual

January 2009

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

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Richard Rogers

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The End of

the Virtual

Digital Methods

Richard Rogers

The End of

the Virtual

Digital methods may be contrasted with what has come to be known as

virtual methods, a currently dominant approach to the study of the

Internet. Virtual methods, rooted in the U.K. Virtual Society? program

(1997-2002), sought to ground cyberspace by demonstrating how it was

hardly a realm apart. Whereas virtual methods have made great strides,

they rely on methods imported from the humanities and the social scien-

ces. Do the methods have to change, owing to the speciﬁcity of the

medium and its objects? With the end of the virtual, Richard Rogers

proposes that Internet research may be put to new uses, given an emphasis

on natively digital as opposed to digitized methods. How to capture and

analyze hyperlinks, tags, search engine results, archived websites, and

other digital objects? What may one learn from how online devices make

use of the objects, and how may such uses be repurposed for social and

cultural research? Ultimately, Rogers proposes a research practice that

grounds claims about cultural change and societal conditions in online

dynamics.

Richard Rogers is Professor of New Media & Digital Culture at the

University of Amsterdam.

Faculty of Humanities

Oratiereeks 339

The End of the Virtual

Vossiuspers UvA is an imprint of Amsterdam University Press.

This edition is established under the auspices of the Universiteit van Amsterdam.

This publication was made possible in part by a grant received from the Mondriaan Interregeling

for the Digital Methods Initiative.

This is inaugural lecture 339, published in this series of the University of Amsterdam

Cover design: Crasborn BNO, Valkenburg a/d Geul

Lay-out: JAPES, Amsterdam

Cover illustration: Carmen Freudenthal, Amsterdam

ISBN 978 90 5629 593 6

e-ISBN 978 90 4851 128 0

may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by

any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the written

permission of both the copyright owner and the author of this book.

The End of the Virtual

Digital Methods

Inaugural Lecture

delivered on the appointment to

the Chair of New Media & Digital Culture

at the University of Amsterdam

on 8 May 2009

Richard Rogers

Geachte aanwezigen,

Situating Digital Methods in Internet Research

Arguably, there is an ontological distinction between the natively digital and the

digitized; that is, between the objects, content, devices and environments ‘born’

in the new medium, as opposed to those which have ‘migrated’to it. Should the

current methods of study change, however slightly or wholesale, given the focus

on objects and content of the medium? The research program proposed here there-

by engages with ‘virtual methods’importing standard practices from the social

sciences and the humanities. The distinction between the natively digital and the

digitized also could apply to current research methods. What type of Internet

research may be performed with digitized methods (such as online surveys and

directories) compared to those that are natively digital (such as recommendation

systems and folksonomy)?

Second, I propose that Internet research may be put to new uses, given an

emphasis on natively digital methods as opposed to the digitized. I will strive to

shift the attention from the opportunities afforded by transforming ink into bits,

and instead inquire into how research with the Internet may move beyond the

study of online culture alone. How to capture and analyze hyperlinks, tags, search

engine results, archived websites, and other digital objects? What may one learn

from how online devices (e.g. engines and recommendation systems) make use of

the objects, and how may such uses be repurposed for social and cultural research?

Ultimately, I propose a research practice which grounds claims about cultural

change and societal conditions in online dynamics, introducing the term ‘online

groundedness.’The overall aim is to rework method for Internet research, devel-

oping a novel path of study: digital methods.

To date, the methods employed in Internet research have served to critique the

persistent idea of the Internet as a virtual realm apart. Such thinking arose from

the discourse surrounding virtual reality in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the

Internet came to stand for a virtual realm, with opportunities for redefining con-

sciousness, identity, corporality, community, citizenry and (social movement) pol-

itics.

Indeed, in 1999, in one of the first efforts to synthesize Internet research,

the communications scholar Steve Jones invited researchers to move beyond the

perspective of the Internet as a realm apart, and opened the discussion of meth-

od.

How would social scientists study the Internet, if they were not to rely on the

approaches associated with it to date: human-computer interaction, social psychol-

ogy and cybercultural studies?

In their ground-breaking work on Internet usage in

Trinidad and Tobago, the ethnographers Daniel Miller and Don Slater challenged

the idea of cyberspace as a realm apart where all ‘inhabiting’it experienced its

identity-transforming affordances, regardless of physical location.

Slater and

Miller grounded the Internet, arguing that Trinis appropriated the medium to fit

their own cultural practices. Although it was a case study, the overall thrust of the

research was its potential for generalization. If Trinis were using the Internet to

stage Trini culture, the expectation is that other cultures are doing the same.

The important Virtual Society? program (1997-2002) marked another turning

point in Internet research, debunking the myth of cyberspace’s transformative ca-

pacities through multiple empirical studies about Internet users. The program ul-

timately formulated five ‘rules of virtuality’.

In what is now the classic digital

divide critique, researchers argued that the use of new media is based on one’s

situation (access issues), and the fears and risks are unequally divided (skills is-

sues). With respect to the relationship between the real and the virtual, virtual

interactions supplement rather than substitute for the ‘real,’and stimulate more

real interaction, as opposed to isolation and desolation. Finally, the research found

that identities are grounded in both the online as well as the offline. Significantly,

the program settled on approaches subsequently characterized as virtual methods,

with an instrumentarium for studying users. Surveys, interviews, observation and

participant-observation became the preferred methods of inquiry. In the huma-

nities, subsequent user studies –concentrating on the amateur, the fan, and the

‘produser’–also are grappling with the real and virtual divide, seeking to demon-

strate and critique the reputational status of online culture.

The argument ad-

vanced here is that virtual methods and user studies in the social sciences and the

humanities have shifted the attention away from the data of the medium, and the

opportunities for study of far more than online culture.

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How may one rethink user studies with data (routinely) collected by software?

User studies to date have relied on accounts favoring observation, interviews and

surveys, owing, in one reading, to the difference in armatures between social

scientific and humanities computing, on the one hand, and the large commercial

companies, with their remarkable data collection achievements, on the other. In a

sense, Google, Amazon and many other dominant Web devices are already con-

ducting user studies, however infrequently the term is used. User inputs (prefer-

ences, search history, purchase history, location) are captured and analyzed so as to

tailor results. Taking a lead from such work, new media theorist Lev Manovich has

called for a methodological turn in Internet research, at least in the sense of data

collection. With ‘cultural analytics,’named after Google Analytics, the proposal is

to build massive collection, storage and analytical facilities for humanities comput-

ing.

One distinguishing feature of the methodological turn is its marked departure

from the reliance on (negotiated) access to commercial data sets, e.g. AOL’s set of

users’search engine queries, Linden Lab’s set of the activities of millions of users

in Second Life, or Sony’s for Everquest, however valuable the findings have been.

In a sense, the research program is one answer to the question, what would

Google do? The programs could be situated in the larger context of the extent

and effects of ‘googlization’. Until now, the googlization critique has examined

the growing ‘creep’of Google; its business model and its aesthetics, across infor-

mation and knowledge industries.

Library science scholars in particular concern

themselves with the changing locus of access to information and knowledge (from

public shelves and stacks to commercial servers). The ‘Google effect’also may be

couched in terms of supplanting surfing and browsing with search. It also may be

studied in terms of the demise of the expert editor, and the rise of the back-end

algorithm, themes to which I will return later. Here, however, the point is that

they also may be studied in terms of models for research –ones that seek to

replicate the scale of data collection as well as analysis.

The proposal I am putting forward is more modest, yet still in keeping with

what are termed registrational approaches to user studies. Online devices and soft-

ware installed on the computer (e.g. browsers) register users’everyday usage.

Browser histories would become a means to study use. The larger contention is

that data collection, in the methodological turn described above, could benefit

from thinking about how computing may have techniques which can be appro-

The End of the Virtual

priated for research. Thus the proposal is to consider first and foremost the avail-

ability of computing techniques.

I would like to suggest inaugurating a new era in Internet research, which no

longer concerns itself with the divide between the real and the virtual. It concerns

a shift in the kinds of questions put to the study of the Internet. The Internet is

employed as a site of research for far more than just online culture. The issue no

longer is how much of society and culture is online, but rather how to diagnose

cultural change and societal conditions using the Internet. The conceptual point of

departure for the research program is the recognition that the Internet is not only

an object of study, but also a source. Knowledge claims may be made on the basis of

data collected and analyzed by devices such as search engines. One of the more

remarkable examples is Google Flu Trends, a non-commercial (Google.org) pro-

ject launched in 2008, which anticipates local outbreaks of influenza by counting

search engine queries for flu, flu symptoms and related terms, and ‘geo-locating’

the places where the queries have been made. It thereby challenges existing meth-

ods of data collection (emergency room reports), and reopens the discussion of the

Web as anticipatory medium, far closer to the ground than one might expect.

Where did the ‘grounded Web,’and its associated geo-locative research prac-

tice, originate? The ‘end of cyberspace’as a placeless space (as Manuel Castells put

it) may be located in the technical outcomes of the famous Yahoo lawsuit, brought

by two non-governmental organizations in France in 2000.

At the time, French

Web users were able to access the Nazi memorabilia pages on Yahoo.com in the

United States, and the French organizations wanted the pages blocked –in France.

IP-to-geo (address location) technology was developed specifically to channel con-

tent nationally; when one types google.com into a browser in France, now google.

fr is returned by default. This ‘grounding’of the Web has been implemented by

major content-organizing projects such as YouTube; online television is served

geographically, too.

Diagnostic work such as Google Flu Trends, whereby claims about societal

conditions are made on the basis of captured Internet practices, leads to new the-

oretical notions. For the third era of Internet research, the digital methods pro-

gram introduces the term online groundedness, in an effort to conceptualize research

which follows the medium, captures its dynamics, and makes grounded claims

about cultural and societal change. Indeed, the broader theoretical goal of digital

methods is to rethink the relationship between the Web and the ground. Like the

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ethnographers before them, the researchers in the UK Virtual Society? program

needed to visit the ground in order to study the Web. Here the digital methods

research program actually complicates the sequence in which one’s findings are

grounded.

For example, journalism has methodological needs, now that the In-

ternet has become a significant meta-source, where the traditional question nor-

mally concerns the trustworthiness of a source. Snowballing from source to source

was once a social networking approach to information-checking, methodologically

speaking. Who else should I speak to? That question comes at the conclusion of the

interview, if trust has been built. The relationship between ‘who I should speak to’

and ‘who else do you link to’is asymmetrical for journalism, but the latter is what

search engines ask when recommending information. How to think through the

difference between source recommendations from verbal and online links? Is

search the beginning of the quest for information, ending with some grounded

interview reality beyond the net, whereby we maintain the divide between the

real and the virtual? Or is that too simplistic? Our ideal source set divide (real

and virtual, grounded or googled) raises the question of what comes next. What

do we ‘look up’upon conclusion of the interview to check the reality? The Inter-

net may not be changing the hierarchy of sources for some (i.e. the restrictions on

citing Wikipedia in certain educational settings), but it may well be changing the

order of checking, and the relationship of the Web to the ground.

I developed the notion of online groundedness after reading a study conducted

by the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. The investigation into right-wing and

extremist groups in the Netherlands explored whether the language used was

becoming harsher over time, perhaps indicating a ‘hardening’of right-wing and

hate culture more generally. Significantly, the investigators elected to use the In-

ternet Archive, over an embedded researcher (going native), or the pamphlets,

flyers and other ephemera at the Social History Institute.

They located and ana-

lyzed the changes in tone over time on right-wing as well as extremist sites, find-

ing that right-wing sites were increasingly employing more extremist language.

Thus the findings made about culture were grounded through an analysis of web-

sites. Most significantly, the online became the baseline against which one might

judge a societal condition.

The End of the Virtual

Follow the Medium: The Digital Methods Research Program

Why follow the medium? A starting point is the recognition that Internet research

is often faced with unstable objects of study. The instability is often discussed in

terms of the ephemerality of websites and other digital media, and the complex-

ities associated with fixing them, to borrow a term from photography. How to

make them permanent, so that they can be carefully studied? In one approach,

vintage hardware and software are maintained so as to keep the media ‘undead.’

Another technique, as practiced in game environments, addresses ephemerality

through simulation/emulation, which keeps the nostalgic software, like Atari

games, running on current hardware. The ephemerality issue, however, is much

larger than issues of preservation. The Internet researcher is often overtaken by

events of the medium, such as software updates that ‘scoop’one’s research.

As a research practice, following the medium, as opposed to striving to fix it,

may also be discussed in a term borrowed from journalism and the sociology of

science –‘scooping.’Being the first to publish is to ‘get the scoop.’‘Being scooped’

refers to someone else having published the findings first. Sociologist of science

Michael Lynch has applied this term to the situation in which one’s research sub-

jects come to the same or similar conclusions as the researchers, and go on record

with their findings first. The result is that the ‘[research subjects] reconfigure the

field in which we previously thought our study would have been situated’.

Internet research, being scooped is common. Industry analysts, watchdogs and

bloggers routinely coin terms (googlization) and come to conclusions which shape

ongoing academic work. I would like to argue, however, that scooping is also done

by the objects themselves, which are continually reconfigured. For example, Face-

book, the social networking site, has been considered a walled garden’or rela-

tively closed community system, where by default only ‘friends’can view infor-

mation and activities concerning other friends. The walled garden is a series of

concentric circles: a user must have an account to gain access, must ‘friend’peo-

ple to view their profiles, and must change privacy default settings to let friends of

friends view one’s own profile. Maximum exposure is opening profiles to friends

of friends. In March 2009, Facebook changed a setting; users may now make their

profile open to all other users with accounts, as opposed to just friends, or friends

of friends, as in its previous configuration. Which types of research would be

‘scooped’by Facebook’s flipping a switch? Facebook serves as one notable example

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of the sudden reconfiguration of a research object, which is common to the me-

dium.

More theoretically, following the medium is a particular form of medium-spe-

cific research. Medium specificity is not only how one sub-divides disciplinary

commitments in media studies according to the primary objects of study: film,

radio, television, etc. It is also a particular plea to take seriously ontological dis-

tinctiveness, though the means by which the ontologies are constructed differ. To

the literary scholar and media theorist Marshall McLuhan, media are specific in

how they engage the senses.

Depth, resolution and other aesthetic properties

have effects on how actively or passively one processes media. One is filled by

media, or one fills it in. To the cultural theorist Raymond Williams, medium

specificity lies elsewhere. Media are specific in the forms they assume –forms

shaped by the dominant actors to serve interests.

For example, creating ‘flow,’

the term for how television sequences programming so as to keep viewers watch-

ing, boosts viewer ratings and advertising. Thus, to Williams, media are not a

priori distinct from one another, but can be made so. To Katherine Hayles, the

specificity of media resides in their materiality; a book specifies, whilst text does

not.

Her proposal for media-specific analysis is a comparative media studies pro-

gram, which takes materially instantiated characteristics of media (such as hyper-

text in digital media), and enquires into their (simulated) presence in other media

(such as print). One could take other media traits and study them across media.

For example, as Alexander Galloway has argued, flow is present not only in radio

and television, but also on the Web, where dead links disrupt surfing.

Hayle’s point of departure may be seen in Mathew Fuller’s work on Microsoft

Word and Adobe Photoshop, which studies how particular software constrains or

enables text.

To Fuller, a Microsoft document or a Photoshop image are specific

outputs of software, distinctive from some document or some image. An accom-

panying research program would study the effects of (software) features, as Lev

Manovich also points to in his work on the specificity of computer media. With

these media Manovich’s ontology moves beyond the outputs of media (Hayle’s

hypertextual print, Fuller’s Word document and Photoshop image).

Computer

media are metamedia in that they incorporate prior media forms, which is in

keeping with the remediation thesis put forward by Jay David Bolter and Richard

Grusin.

Yet, to Manovich, computer media not only refashion the outputs of

other media; they also embed their forms of production.

The End of the Virtual

The medium specificity put forward here lies not so much in McLuhan’s sense

engagement, Williams’s socially shaped forms, Hayles’s materiality, or other theo-

rists’properties and features. Rather, it is situated in method. Previously I described

such work ‘Web epistemology’.

On the Web, information, knowledge and soci-

ality are organized by recommender systems –algorithms and scripts that prepare

and serve up orders of URLs, media files, friends, etc. In a sense, Manovich has

shifted the discussion in this direction, both with the focus on forms of production

(method as craft) as well as with the methodological turn associated with the

cultural analytics initiative. I would like to take this turn further, and propose that

the under-interrogated methods of the Web also are worthy of study, both in and

of themselves as well as in the effects of their spread to other media, e.g. TV

shows recommended to Tivo users on the basis of their profiles.

Initial work in the area of Web epistemology arose within the context of the

politics of search engines.

It sought to consider the means by which sources are

adjudicated by search engines. Why, in March of 2003, were the US White House,

the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Heritage

Foundation and news organizations such as CNN the top returns for the query

‘terrorism’? The answer lies somewhat in how hyperlinks are handled. Hyper-

links, however, are but one digital object, to which may be added: the thread,

tag, PageRank, Wikipedia edit, robots.txt, post, comment, trackback, pingback,

IP address, URL, whois, timestamp, permalink, social bookmark and profile. In

no particular order, the list goes on. The proposal is to study how these objects are

handled, specifically, in the medium, and learn from medium method.

In the following, I would like to introduce a series of medium objects, devices,

spaces, as well as platforms, first touching briefly on how they are often studied

with digitized methods and conceptual points of departure from outside the me-

dium. Subsequently, I would like to discuss the difference it makes to research if

one were to follow the medium –by learning from and reapplying how digital

objects are treated by devices, how websites are archived, how search engines

order information and how geo-IP location technology serves content nationally

or linguistically. What kinds of research can be performed through hyperlink ana-

lysis, repurposing insights from dominant algorithms? How to work with the In-

ternet archive for social research? Why capture website histories? How may search

engine results be studied so as to display changing hierarchies of credibility, and

the differences in source reliance between the Web, the blogosphere and news

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sphere? Can geo-IP address location technology be reworked so as to profile coun-

tries and cultures? How may the study of social networking sites reveal cultural

tastes and preferences? How are software robots changing how quality content is

maintained on Wikipedia? What would a research bot do? Thus, from the micro to

the macro, I treat the hyperlink, website, search engine and spheres (including

national webs). I finally turn to social networking sites, as well as Wikipedia, and

seek to learn from these profiling and bot cultures (respectively), and rethink how

to deploy them analytically. The overall purpose of following the medium is to

reorient Internet research to consider the Internet as a source of data, method

and technique.

The Link

How is the hyperlink most often studied? There are at least two dominant ap-

proaches to studying hyperlinks: hypertext literary theory and social network the-

ory, including small world and path theory.

To literary theorists of hypertext,

sets of hyperlinks form a multitude of distinct pathways through text. The surfer,

or clicking text navigator, may be said to author a story by choosing routes (multi-

ple clicks) through the text.

Thus the new means of authorship, as well as the

story told through link navigation, are both of interest. For small world theorists,

the links that form paths show distance between actors. Social network analysts

use pathway thought, and zoom in on how the ties, uni-directional or bi-direc-

tional, position actors.

There is a special vocabulary that has been developed to

characterize an actor’s position, especially an actor’s centrality, within a network.

For example, an actor is ‘highly between’if there is a high probability that other

actors must pass through him to reach each other.

How do search engines treat links? Arguably, theirs is a scientometric (and

associational sociology) approach. As with social network analysis, the interest is

in actor positioning, but not necessarily in terms of distance from one another, or

the means by which an actor may be reached through networking. Rather, ties are

reputational indicators, and may be said to define actor standing. Additionally, the

approach does not assume that the ties between actors are friendly, or otherwise

have utility, in the sense of providing empowering pathways, or clues for successful

networking.

The End of the Virtual

Here I would like to explore how engines treat links as markers of impact and

reputation. How may an actor’s reputation be characterized by the types of hyper-

links given and received? Actors can be profiled not only through the quantity of

links received, as well as the quantity received from others who themselves have

received many links, in the basic search engine algorithm. Actors may also be

profiled by examining which particular links they give and receive.

In previous

research, my colleagues and I found linking tendencies among domain types, i.e.

governments tend to link to other governmental sites only; non-governmental

sites tend to link to a variety of sites, occasionally including critics. Corporate

websites tend not to link, with the exception of collectives of them –industry

trade sites and industry ‘front groups’do link, though. Academic and educational

sites typically link to partners and initiatives they have created. Taken together,

these linking proclivities of organizational types display an everyday ‘politics of

association’.

For example, in work my colleagues and I conducted initially in

1999, we found that while Greenpeace linked to governmental sites, government

did not link back. Novartis, the multinational corporation, linked to Greenpeace,

and Greenpeace did not link back. When characterizing an actor according to

inlinks and outlinks, one notices whether there is some divergence from the

norms, and more generally whether particular links received may reveal some-

thing about an actor’s reputation. A non-governmental organization receiving a

link from a governmental site could be construed as a reputation booster, for

example.

Apart from capturing the micro-politics of hyperlinks, analysis of links also may

be put to use in more sophisticated sampling work. Here the distinction between

digitized and natively digital method stands out in greater relief. The Open Net

Initiative at the University of Toronto conducts Internet censorship research by

building lists of websites (from online directories such as the Open Directory

Project and Yahoo). The researchers subsequently check whether the sites are

blocked in a variety of countries. It is important work that sheds light on the scope

as well as technical infrastructure of state Internet censorship practices world-

wide.

In the analytical practice, sites are grouped by category: famous bloggers,

government sites, human rights sites, humor, women’s rights, etc.; there are ap-

proximately forty categories. Thus censorship patterns may be researched by site

type across countries.

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The entire list of websites checked per country (some 3000) is a sample, cover-

ing of course only the smallest fraction of all websites as well as those of a parti-

cular subject category. How would one sample websites in a method following the

medium, learning from how search engines work (link analysis) and repurposing it

for social research? My colleagues and I contributed to the Open Net Initiative

work by employing a method which crawls all the websites in a particular cate-

gory, captures the hyperlinks from the sites, and locates additional key sites (by

co-link analysis) that are not on the lists. I dubbed the method ‘dynamic URL

sampling’, in an effort to highlight the difference between manual URL-list com-

pilation, and more automated techniques of finding significant URLs. Once the

new sites are found, they are checked for connection stats (through proxies initi-

ally, and later perhaps from machines located in the countries in question), in

order to determine whether they are blocked. In the research project on ‘social,

political and religious’websites in Iran, researchers and I crawled all the sites in

that ONI category, and through hyperlink analysis, found some thirty previously

unknown blocked sites. Significantly, the research was also a page-level analysis (as

opposed to host only), with one notable finding being that Iran was not blocking

the BBC news front page (as ONI had found), but only its Persian-language page.

The difference between the two methods of gathering lists of websites for analysis

–manual directory-style work and dynamic URL sampling –shows the contribu-

tion of medium-specific method.

The Website

Up until now, investigations into websites have been dominated by user and ‘eye-

ball studies,’where attempts at a navigation poetics are met with such sobering

ideas as ‘don’t make me think’.

Many methods for studying websites are located

over the shoulder, where one observes navigation or the use of a search engine,

and later conducts interviews with the subjects. In what one may term classic

registrational approaches, a popular technique is eye-tracking. Sites load and eyes

move to the upper left of the screen, otherwise known as the golden triangle. The

resulting heat maps provide site redesign cues. For example, Google.com has

moved its services from above the search box (tabs) to the top left corner of the

page (menu). Another dominant strand of website studies lies in feature analysis,

The End of the Virtual

where sites are compared and contrasted on the basis of levels of interactivity,

capacities for user feedback, etc.

The questions concern whether a particular

package of features result in more users, and more attention. In this tradition,

most notably in the 9/11 special collection, websites are often archived for further

study. Thus much of the work lies in the archiving of sites prior to the analysis.

One of the crucial tasks ahead is further reflection upon the means by which

websites are captured and stored, so as to make available the data upon which

findings are based. Thus the digital methods research program engages specifically

with the website as archived object, made accessible, most readily, through the

Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The research program specifically asks

which types of website study are enabled and constrained by the Wayback

Machine.

In order to answer that question, the work first deconstructs, or unpacks, the

Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine. In which sense does the Internet Ar-

chive, as an object formed by the archiving process, embed particular preferences

for how it is used, and for the type of research performed using it? Indeed, Web

archiving scholar Niels Brügger has written: ‘[U]nlike other well-known media,

the Internet does not simply exist in a form suited to being archived, but rather is

first formed as an object of study in the archiving, and it is formed differently

depending on who does the archiving, when, and for what purpose.’

The idea

that the object of study is constructed by the very means by which it is tamed, and

captured by method and technique, is a classic point from the sociology and philo-

sophy of science and elsewhere.

Thus the initial research questions are, which

methods of research are privileged by the specific form assumed by the Web ar-

chive, and which are precluded? For example, when one uses the Internet Archive

(archive.org), what stands out for everyday Web users accustomed to search en-

gines is not so much the achievement of the existence of an archived Internet.

Rather, the user is struck by how the Internet is archived, and, particularly, how

it is queried. One queries a URL, as opposed to keywords, and receives a list of

stored pages associated with the URL from the past. In effect, the Internet Ar-

chive, through the interface of the Wayback Machine, has organized the story of

the Web into the histories of individual websites.

Which research approaches are favored by the current organization of websites

by the Internet Archive? With the Wayback Machine, one can study the evolution

of a single page (or multiple pages) over time; for example, by reading or collect-

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ing snapshots from the dates when a page was indexed. How can such an arrange-

ment of historical sites be put to use? Previously I mentioned the investigative

reporting work done by NRC Handelsblad in their analysis of the rise of extremist

language in the Netherlands. The journalists read some hundred websites from the

Internet archive, some dating back a decade. It is work that should be built upon,

methodologically as well as technically. One could scrape the pages of the right-

wing and extremist sites from the Internet Archive, place the text (and images) in

a database, and systematically query it for the presence of particular keywords

over time. As NRC Handelsblad did, one could determine changes in societal con-

ditions through the analysis of particular sets of archived sites.

How else to perform research with the Internet Archive? The digital methods

program has developed means to capture the history of sites by taking snapshots

and assembling them into a movie, in the style of time-lapse photography.

demonstrate how to use the Internet archive for capturing such evolutionary his-

tories, my colleagues and I took snapshots of Google’s front pages from 1998 up to

the end of 2007. The analysis concerned the subtle changes made to the interface,

in particular the tabs. We found that the Google directory project, organizing the

Web by topic, undertaken by human editors, has been in decline. After its place-

ment on the Google front page in 2001, it was moved in 2004 under the ‘more’

button, and in 2006 under ‘even more.’By late 2007, with the removal of the

‘even more’option, one had to search Google in order to find its directory.

The

larger issue of the demise of the human editor, read in this case from the evolution

of Google’s interface, has far-reaching implications for how knowledge is collected

and ordered. Indeed, after examining Google, researchers and I turned to Yahoo,

the original Web directory, and found that there, too, the directory had been

replaced by the back-end algorithm. In examining the outputs of a query in the

directory, we also learned that at Yahoo the results are no longer ordered alphabe-

tically, in the egalitarian style of information and source ordering inherited from

encyclopedias. Yahoo is listing its directory sources according to popularity, in the

well-known style of recommendation systems more generally.

Are the histories of search engines, captured from their interface evolutions,

indicating changes in how information and knowledge are ordered more generally?

A comparative media studies approach would be useful, with one of the more

poignant cases being the online newspaper. With the New York Times, for example,

articles are still placed on the front page and in sections, but are also listed by

The End of the Virtual

‘most emailed’and ‘most blogged’, providing a medium-specific recommender

system for navigating the news. The impact of recommender systems –the domi-

nant means on the Web by which information and knowledge are ordered –may

also be studied through user expectations. Are users increasingly expecting Web-

like orderings at archives, libraries, tourist information centers and other sites of

knowledge and information queries?

The Search Engines & the Spheres

The study of search engines was jolted by the now infamous AOL search engine

data release in 2006, where 500,000 users’searches over three months were put

online, with frightening and often salacious press accounts about the level of inti-

mate detail revealed about searchers, even if their histories are made anonymous

and decoupled from geography (no IP address). One may interpret the findings

from the AOL case as a shift in how one considers online presence, if that remains

the proper term. A person may be ‘googled’, and his or her self-authored pre-

sence often appears at or towards the top of the returns. Generally speaking, what

others have written about a person would appear lower down in the rankings.

However, with search engine queries stored, a third set of traces could come to

define an individual. This opens up intriguing policy questions. How long may an

engine company keep search histories? Thus search engines are being studied in

the legal arena, especially in terms of how data retention laws may be applied to

search histories.

Previously, I mentioned another strand in search engine studies, summed up in

the term googlization. It is a political-economy style critique, considering how

Google’s free-service-for-profile model may be spreading across industries and

(software) cultures. I have covered the critique elsewhere, striving to propose a

research agenda for googlization scholars which includes front-end and back-end

googlization. Front-end googlization would include the study of the information

politics of the interface (including the demise of the human-edited directory).

Back-end googlization concerns the rise of the algorithm that recommends sources

hierarchically, instead of alphabetically, as mentioned above. The significance of

studying the new information hierarchies of search engines also should be viewed

in light of user studies. A small percentage of users set preferences to more than

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ten results per page; typically they do not look past the first page of results; and

they increasingly click the results appearing towards the top.

Thus the power of

search engines lies in the combination of its ranking practices (source inclusion in

the top results) together with the users’apparent ‘respect’for the orderings (not

looking further). Google’s model also relies on registrational interactivity, where a

user’s preferences as well as history are registered, stored and employed, increas-

ingly, to serve customized results. Prior to the Web and search engine algorithms

and recommendation systems, interactivity was ‘consultational,’with pre-loaded

information ‘called up’.

A query would return the same information for all users

at any given time. Now the results are dynamically generated, based on one’s

registered preferences, history and location.

The different orders of sources and things served by engines are under-studied,

largely because they are not stored, and made available for research, apart from

the AOL data release, or other negotiated agreements with search engine compa-

nies. Google once made available an API (application programming interface) al-

lowing data collection. A limited number of queries could be made per day, and

the results repurposed. Researchers relying on the API were scooped by Google

when it discontinued the service in late 2006. With its reintroduction in a different

form in 2009, Google emphasized, however, that automated queries and the per-

manent storage of results violated the terms of service. How to study search en-

gine results under such conditions? Now we scrape Google, and post a notice

appreciating Google’s forbearance.

What may be found in Google’s search engine results? As I have remarked,

search engines, a crucial point of entry to the Web, are epistemological machines

in the sense that they crawl, index, cache and ultimately order content. Earlier I

described the Web, and particularly a search engine-based Web, as a potential

collision space for alternative accounts of reality.

The phrasing built upon the

work of the sociologist C. Wright Mills, who characterized the purpose of social

research as ‘no less than to present conflicting definitions of reality itself’.

Are

engines placing alternative accounts of reality side by side, or do the results align

with the official and the mainstream? Storing and analyzing search engine results

could answer such questions. Such has been the purpose of the software project

called the Issue Dramaturg, so called for the potential drama within the top re-

sults, whereby sites may climb to or suddenly fall from the top. It is important to

point out that top engine placements are highly sought after; organizations make

The End of the Virtual

use of search engine optimization techniques so as to boost site visibility. There are

white hat and black hat techniques; that is, those accepted by engines and those

that prompt engines to delist websites from results until there is compliance again

with engine etiquette.

In the Issue Dramaturg project, my team stored Google search engine results

for the query ‘9/11’as well as other keywords for two purposes. The one is to

enquire into source hierarchies, as described above. Which sources are privileged?

Which are ‘winning’the competition to be the top sources returned for particular

queries? The other purpose has been to chart particular sources, in the approach

to engine studies I have termed ‘source distance’. For the query 9/11, how far

from the top of the engine returns are such significant actors as the New York City

government and the New York Times? Are such sources prominent, or do they ap-

pear side by side with sources that challenge more official and familiar views?

Apart from the New York City government and the New York Times, another actor

we have monitored is the 9/11 truth movement (911truth.org). For months be-

tween March and September 2007, the 9/11 truth movement’s site appeared in

the top five results for the query 9/11, and the other two were well below result

fifty. In mid-September 2007, around the anniversary of the event, there was dra-

ma. 911truth.org fell precipitously to result two hundred, and subsequently out of

the top one thousand, the maximum number of results served by Google. We

believe that is one of the first fully documented cases of the apparent removal of a

website in Google –from a top five placement for six months to a sub-one thou-

sand ranking.

The case leads to questions of search engine result stability and

volatility, and opens up an area of study.

However dominant it may be, there are more search engines than Google’s

Web search. What is less appreciated perhaps is that there are other dominant

engines per section or sphere of the Web. For the blogosphere, there is Technor-

ati; for the newssphere, Google News; and for the tagosphere or social bookmark-

ing space, Delicious. Indeed, thinking of the Web in terms of spheres refers initi-

ally to the name of one of the most well-known, the blogosphere, as well as to

scholarship that seeks to define another realm, the Web sphere.

The sphere in

blogosphere refers in spirit to the public sphere; it also may be thought of as the

geometrical form, where all points on the surface are the same distance from the

center or core. One could think about such an equidistant measure as an egalitar-

ian ideal, where every blog, or even every source of information, is knowable by

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the core, and vice versa. On the Web, however, it has been determined that cer-

tain sources are central. They receive the vast majority of links as well as hits.

Following such principles as the rich get richer (aka Pareto power law distribu-

tions), the sites receiving attention tend to garner only more. The distance be-

tween the center and other nodes may only grow, with the ideal of a sphere being

a fiction, though a useful one. I would like to suggest an approach examining the

question of distance from core to periphery, and operationalize it as the measure of

differences in rankings between sources per sphere. Cross-spherical analysis is a

digital method for measuring and learning from the distance between sources in

different spheres on the Web.

Conceptually, a sphere is considered to be a device demarcated source set, i.e.

the pure PageRank of all sources on the Web (most influential sites by inlink

count), or indeed analogous pageranks of all sources calculated by the dominant

engines per sphere, such as Technorati, Google News and Delicious. Thus, to

study a sphere, we propose first to allow the engines to demarcate it. In sphere

analysis, one considers which sources are most influential, not only overall but per

query. Cross-spherical analysis compares the sources returned by each sphere for

the same query. It can therefore be seen as comparative ranking research. Most

importantly, with cross-spherical analysis, one may think through the conse-

quences of each engine’s treatment of links, freshness, tags, etc. Do particular

sources tend to be in the core of one sphere, and not in others? What do compar-

isons between sources, and source distances, across the spheres tell us about the

quality of the new media? What do they tell us about current informational com-

mitments in particular cultures?

In a preliminary analysis, my colleagues and I studied which animals are most

associated with climate change on the (English-language) Web, in the news and in

the blogosphere. We found that the Web has the most diverse set of animals asso-

ciated with climate change. The news favored the polar bear, and the blogosphere

amplified, or made more prominent, the selection in the news sphere. Here we

cautiously concluded that the Web may be less prone to the creation of media

icons than the news, which has implications for studies of media predicated upon

a publicity culture. The blogosphere, moreover, appeared parasitically connected

to the news as opposed to providing an alternative to it.

The End of the Virtual

The Webs

As mentioned above, Internet research has been haunted by the virtual/real di-

vide. One of the reasons for such a divide pertains to the technical arrangements

of the Internet, and how they became associated with a virtual realm, cyberspace.

Indeed, there was meant to be something distinctive about cyberspace, technolo-

gically.

The protocols and principles, particularly packet switching and the end-

to-end principle, initially informed the notion of cyberspace as a realm free from

physical constraints. The Internet’s technical indifference to the geographical loca-

tion of its users spawned ideas not limited to placeless-ness. In its very architec-

ture, the Internet also supposedly made for a space untethered to the nation-

states, and their divergent ways of treating flows of information. One recalls the

famous quotation attributed to John Gilmore, co-founder with John Perry Barlow

of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. ‘The Internet treats censorship as a mal-

function, and routes around it’.

Geography, however, was built into cyberspace

from the beginning, if one considers the locations of the original thirteen root

servers, the unequal distributions of traffic flows per country, as well as the allot-

ment of IP addresses in ranges, which later enabled the application of geo-IP ad-

dress location technology to serve advertising and copyright needs. Geo-IP tech-

nology, as well as other technical means (aka locative technology), also may be put

to use for research that takes the Internet as a site of study, and inquires into what

may be learned about societal conditions across countries. In the digital methods

research program, my colleagues and I have dubbed such work national Web

studies.

Above I discussed the research by British ethnographers, who grounded cyber-

space through empirical work on how Caribbean Internet users appropriated the

medium to fit their own cultural practices. This is of course national Web studies,

although with observational methods (from outside of the medium). To study the

Web, nationally, one also may inquire into routinely collected data, for example by

large enterprises such as Alexa’s top sites by country (according to traffic). Which

sites are visited most frequently per country, and what does site visitation say

about a country’s informational culture? Alexa pioneered registrational data col-

lection with its toolbar, which users installed in their browsers. The toolbar pro-

vided statistics about the Website loaded in the browser, such as its freshness. All

websites the user loaded, or surfed, also would be logged, and the logged URLs

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would be compared with the URLs already in the Alexa database. Those URLs not

in the database would be crawled, and fetched. Thus was born the Internet Ar-

chive.

The Internet Archive (1996- ) was developed during the period of Internet

history that one could term cyberspace. (I have developed periodizations of Inter-

net history elsewhere, and will not further elaborate here.)

To illustrate the de-

sign and thought behind the Internet Archive, and the national Web archives

sprouting up in many countries, it may be useful to point out that the Internet

Archive was built for surfing –an Internet usage type that arguably has given way

to search.

At the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive, type in a single

URL, view available pages, and browse them. If one reaches an external link, the

Internet Archive looks up the page closest in date to the site one is exiting, and

loads it. If no site exists in the Internet Archive, it connects to the live website. It

is the continuity of flow, from Website to Website, that is preserved.

National

Web archives, on the other hand, have ceased to think of the Web in terms of

cyberspace. Instead, their respective purposes are to preserve national Webs. For

the purposes of contributing method to Internet research, the initial question is,

how would one demarcate a national Web?

At the National Library in the Netherlands, for example, the approach is similar

to that of the Internet censorship researchers, discussed above. It is a digitized

method, that is, a directory model, where an expert chooses significant sites based

on editorial criteria. These sites are continually archived with technology origin-

ally developed in the Internet Archive project. At the time of writing, approxi-

mately one thousand national websites are archived in the Netherlands –a far cry

from what is saved in the Internet Archive.

In accounting for the difference in

approaches and outcomes of the two projects, I would like to observe that the end

of the virtual, and the end of cyberspace, have not been kind to Web archiving; the

return of the nation-state and the application of certain policy regimes (especially

sing the situation? I would like to invite national Web archivists to consider a

registrational approach, e.g. the Alexa model adapted for a national context.

The End of the Virtual

Social Networking Sites & Post-demographics

‘We define social networking websites here as sites where users can create a pro-

file and connect that profile to other profiles for the purposes of making an expli-

cit personal network.’

Thus begins the study of American teenage use of such

sites as MySpace and Facebook, conducted for the Pew Internet & American Life

Project. Surveys were taken. 91% of the respondents use the sites to ‘manage

friendships’; less than a quarter use the sites to ‘flirt’. Other leading research into

social networking sites considers such issues as presenting oneself and managing

one’s status online, the different ‘social classes’of users of MySpace and Facebook,

and the relationship between real-life friends and ‘friended’friends.

Another set

of work, often from software-making arenas, concerns how to make use of the

copious amounts of data contained in online profiles, especially interests and

tastes. I would like to dub this latter work ‘post-demographics.’Post-demo-

graphics could be thought of as the study of the data in social networking plat-

forms, and, in particular, how profiling is, or may be, performed. Of particular

interest here are the potential outcomes of building tools on top of profiling plat-

forms. What kinds of findings may be made from mashing up the data, or what

may be termed meta-profiling?

Conceptually, with the ‘post’prefixed to demographics, the idea is to stand in

contrast to how the study of demographics organizes groups, markets and voters

in a sociological sense. It also marks a theoretical shift from how demographics

have been used ‘bio-politically’(to govern bodies) to how post-demographics are

employed ‘info-politically,’to steer or recommend certain information to certain

people.

The term post-demographics also invites new methods for the study of

social networks, where the traditional demographics of race, ethnicity, age, in-

come, and educational level –or derivations thereof such as class –give way to

tastes, interests, favorites, groups, accepted invitations, installed apps and other

information comprising an online profile and its accompanying baggage. That is,

demographers normally would analyze official records (births, deaths, marriages)

and survey populations, with census-taking being the most well known of those

undertakings. Profilers, however, have users input data themselves in platforms

that create and maintain social relations. They capture and make use of informa-

tion from users of online platforms.

Richard Rogers

Perhaps another means of distinguishing between the two types of thought and

practice is with reference to the idea of digital natives, those growing up with

online environments, and unaware of life prior to the Internet, especially with the

use of manual systems that came before it, like a library card catalog.

The cate-

gory of digital natives, however, takes a generational stance, and in that sense is a

traditional demographic way of thinking. The post-demographic project would be

less interested in new digital divides (digital natives versus non-natives) and the

emergent narratives surrounding them (e.g. moral panics), but rather in how pro-

filers recommend information, cultural products, events or other people (friends)

to users, owing to common tastes, locations, travel destinations and more. There

is no end to what could be recommended, if the data are rich and stored. How to

study the data?

With post-demographics, the proposal is to make a contribution to Internet

research by learning from those profilers and researchers who both collect as well

as harvest (or scrape) social networking sites’data for further analysis or software-

making, such as mash-ups. How do social networking sites make their data avail-

able to profilers? Under the developers’menu item at Facebook, for example, one

logs in and views the fields available in the API (or application programming inter-

face). Sample scripts are provided, as in ‘get friends of user number x,’where x is

yourself. Thus the available scripts generally follow the privacy culture, in the

sense that the user decides what the profiler can see. It becomes more interesting

to the profiler when many users allow access, by clicking ‘I agree’on a third-party

application.

Another set of profiling practices are not interested in personal data per se, but

rather in tastes and especially taste relationships. One may place many profiling

activities in the category of depersonalized data analysis, including Amazon’s semi-

nal recommendation system, where it is not highly relevant which person also

bought a particular book, but rather that people have done so. Supermarket loy-

alty cards and the databases storing purchase histories similarly employ depersona-

lized information analysis, where like Amazon, of interest is the quantity of par-

ticular items purchased as well as the purchasing relationships (which chips with

which soft drink). Popular products are subsequently boosted. Certain combina-

tions may be shelved together.

While they do not describe themselves as such, of course the most significant

post-demographic machines are the social networking platforms themselves, col-

The End of the Virtual

lecting user tastes, and showing them to others, be they other friends, everyday

peoplewatchers or profilers. Here I would like to describe briefly one piece of

software my research team built on top of the large collection device, MySpace,

and the kinds of post-demographic analytical practices which resulted.

Elfriendo.com is the outcome of reflecting on how to make use of the profiles

on the social networking platform, MySpace. At Elfriendo.com, enter a single

interest, and the tool creates a new profile on the basis of the profiles of people

expressing that single interest. One may also compare the compatibility of inter-

ests, i.e. whether one or more interests, tunes, movies, TV shows, books and

heroes are compatible with other ones. Is Christianity compatible with Islam, in

the sense that those people with one of the respective interests listen to the same

music and watch the same television programs? Elfriendo answers those sorts of

questions by analyzing sets of friends’profiles, and comparing interests across

them. Thus a movie, TV show, etc. has an aggregate profile, made up of other

interests. (To wit, Eminem, the rapper, appears in both the Christianity and Islam

aggregate profiles, in early February 2009.) One also may perform a semblance of

post-demographic research with the tool, gaining an appreciation of relational

taste analysis with a social networking site, more generally.

It is instructive to state that MySpace is more permissive and less of a walled

garden than Facebook, in that it allows the profiler to view a user’s friends (and

his/her friends’profiles), without your having friended anybody. Thus, one can

view all of Barack Obama’s friends, and their profiles. Here, in an example, one

queries Elfriendo for Barack Obama as well as John McCain, and the profiles of

their respective sets of friends are analyzed. The software counts the items listed

by the friends under interests, music, movies, TV shows, books and heroes. What

does this relational taste counting practice yield? The results provide distinctive

pictures of the friends of the two presidential candidates campaigning in 2008.

The compatibility level between the interests of the friends of the two candidates

is generally low. The two groups share few interests. The tastes of the candidates’

friends are not compatible for movies, music, books and heroes, though for TV

shows the compatibility is 16%. There seem to be particular media profiles for

each set of candidate’s friends, where those of Obama watch the Daily Show, and

those of McCain watch Family Guy, Top Chef and America’s Next Top Model.

Both sets of friends watch Lost. The findings may be discussed in terms of voter

post-demographics, in that the descriptions of voter profiles are based on media

Richard Rogers

tastes and preferences as opposed to educational levels, income and other standard

indicators.

Wikipedia & Networked Content

At present, approaches to the study of Wikipedia have followed from certain qua-

lities of the online encyclopedia, all of which appear counter-intuitive at first

glance. One example is that Wikipedia is authored by so-called amateurs, yet is

surprisingly encyclopedia-like, not only in form but in accuracy.

The major de-

bate concerning the quality of Wikipedia vis-à-vis Encyclopedia Britannica has raised

questions relevant to digital methods, in that the Web-enabled collective editing

model has challenged the digitized work of a set of experts. However, research has

found that there is only a tiny ratio of editors to users in Web 2.0 platforms,

including Wikipedia. This is otherwise known as the myth of user-generated con-

tent.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimbo Wales, has often remarked that the dedicated

community is indeed relatively small, at just over 500 members. Thus the small

cadre of Wikipedia editors could be considered a new elite, leading to exercises in

relativizing the alleged differences between amateurs and experts, such as through

a study of the demographics of Wikipedians.

Another example of a counter-

intuitive aspect of Wikipedia is that the editors are unpaid, yet committed and

highly vigilant. The vigilance of the crowd, as it is termed, is something of a

mythical feature of a quality-producing Web, until one considers how vigilance is

performed. Who is making the edits? One approach to the question lies in the

Wikiscanner project (2007- ), developed by Virgil Griffith studying at the Califor-

nia Institute of Technology. The Wikiscanner outs anonymous editors by looking

up the IP address of the editor and checking it against a database with the IP

address locations (geoIP technology). Wikipedia quality is ensured, to Griffith, by

scandalizing editors making self-serving changes, such as a member of the Dutch

royal family, who embellished an entry and made the front-page of the newspaper

after a journalist used the tool.

How else are vandals kept at bay on Wikipedia, including those experimenters

and researchers making erroneous changes to an entry, or creating a new fictional

one, in order to keep open the debate about quality?

Colleagues and I have

contributed to work about the quality of Wikipedia by introducing the term net-

The End of the Virtual

worked content.

It refers to content held together by human authors and non-

human tenders, including bots and alert software which revert edits or notify

Wikipedians of changes made. Indeed, when looking at the statistics available on

Wikipedia on the number of edits per Wikipedian user, it is remarkable to note

that the bots are by far the top editors. The contention, which is being researched

in the digital methods program, is that the bots and the alert software are signifi-

cant agents of vigilance, maintaining the quality of Wikipedia.

From the Wikiscanner project and the bots statistics related above, it is worth

emphasizing that Wikipedia is a compendium of network activities and events,

each logged and made available as large data sets. Wikipedia also has in-built re-

flection or reflexivity, as it shows the process by which an entry has come into

being, something missing from encyclopedias and most other finished work more

generally. One could study the process by which an entry matures; the materials

are largely the revision history of an entry, but also its discussion page, perhaps its

dispute history, its lock-downs and re-openings. Another approach to utilizing

Wikipedia data would rely on the edit logs of one or more entries, and repurpose

the Wikiscanner’s technical insights by looking up where they have been made.

‘The places of edits’show subject matter concerns and expertise by organization

and by country.

Conclusion. The End of the Virtual –Grounding Claims

Online

My aim is to set into motion a transformation in how and why one performs

research using the Internet. The first step is to move the discussion away from the

limitations of the virtual (how much culture and society are online) to the limita-

tions of current method (how to study culture and society, and ground findings

with the Internet).

I would like to conclude with a brief discussion of these limitations in Internet

research as well as a proposal for renewal. First, the end of cyberspace and its

placeless-ness, and the end of the virtual as a realm apart, are lamentable for

particular research approaches and other projects. In a sense, the real/virtual di-

vide served specific research practices.

Previously I mentioned that Internet ar-

chiving thrived in cyberspace, and more recently, it suffers without it. Where

Richard Rogers

cyberspace once enabled the idea of massive website archiving, the grounded Web

and the national Webs are shrinking the collections.

Indeed, I have argued that one may learn from the methods employed in the

medium, moving the discussion of medium specific theory from ontology (proper-

ties and features) to epistemology (method). The Internet, and the Web more

specifically, have their ontological objects, such as the link and the tag. Web epis-

temology, among other things, is the study of how these natively digital objects are

handled by devices. The insights from such a study lead to important methodo-

logical distinctions, as well as insights about the purpose of Internet research.

Where the methodological distinction is concerned, one may view current Inter-

net methods as those that follow the medium (and the dominant techniques em-

ployed in authoring and ordering information, knowledge and sociality) and ones

that remediate or digitize existing method. The difference in method may have

significant outcomes. One reason for the fallowing of the Web archiving efforts

may lie in the choice of a digitized method (editorial selection) over a digital one

(registrational data collection), such as that employed in the original Internet Ar-

chive project, where sites surfed by users were recorded. Indeed, I have employed

the term digital methods so that researchers may consider the value and the out-

comes of one approach over another. As a case in point, the choice of dynamic

URL sampling over the editorial model could be beneficial to Internet censorship

research, as I discussed.

Third, and finally, I have argued that the Internet is a site of research for far

more than online culture and its users. With the end of the virtual/real divide,

however useful, the Internet may be rethought as a source of data about society

and culture. Collecting it and analyzing it for social and cultural research requires

not only a new outlook about the Internet, but method, too, to ground the find-

ings. Grounding claims in the online is a major shift in the purpose of Internet

research, in the sense that one is not so much researching the Internet, and its

users, as studying culture and society with the Internet. I hope you will join me in

this urgent project.

Ik heb gezegd.

The End of the Virtual

Notes

1. Barlow, 1996; Benedict, 1991; Dibbell, 1998; Rheingold, 1991; Rheingold; 1993;

Shaviro, 2008; Stone, 1995; Turkle, 1995.

2. Jones, 1999.

3. Hine, 2000.

4. Slater & Miller, 2000.

5. Woolgar, 2002.

6. Jenkins, 2006; Keen, 2007; Bruns, 2008.

7. Manovich, 2007. See also Manovich, 2008.

8. Contractor 2009; Lazer et al., 2009.

9. Jeanneney, 2007; Vaidhyanathan, 2007; Rogers, 2009.

10. Rogers, 2003.

11. Castells, 1996; Goldsmith & Wu, 2006; Rogers, 2008.

12. Marres & Rogers, 2008.

13. NRC Handelsblad, 2007.

14. Lynch, 1997.

15. McLuhan, 1964.

16. Williams, 1974.

17. Hayles, 2004.

18. Galloway, 2004.

19. Fuller, 2003.

20. Manovich, 2008.

21. Bolter & Grusin, 1999.

22. Rogers, 2004.

23. Introna & Nissenbaum, 2000.

24. Landow, 1994; Watts, 1999; Park & Thewall, 2003

25. Elmer, 2001.

26. Krebs, 2002.

27. cf. Beaulieu, 2005.

28. Marres & Rogers, 2000; Rogers, 2002.

29. The Issue Crawler software, with particular allied tools, has been developed specifi-

cally to perform such hyperlink analysis. The software crawls websites, and links are

gathered and stored. The crawler-analytical modules are adaptations from sciento-

metrics (co-link analysis) and social networking analysis (snowball). Once a network is

located with the Issue Crawler, individual actors may be profiled, using the actor pro-

filer tool. The actor profiler shows, in a graphic representation, the inlinks and out-

links of the top ten network actors. The other technique for actor profiling relies on a

scraper that would capture all outlinks from a site, and a scraper of a search engine, the

Yahoo inlink ripper, which provides a list of the links made to a website.

30. Diebert et al, 2006.

31. Krug, 2000; Dunne, 2005.

32. Foot & Schneider, 2006.

33. Brügger, 2005, 1.

34. Latour & Woolgar, 1986; Knorr-Cetina, 1999; Walker, 2005.

35. Screen-capturing software has been employed previously for the analysis of Wikipedia

pages, showing the evolution of entries and thus how Wikipedians build knowledge.

36. The ‘even more’button returned to the interface of Google.com in 2008.

37. Spink & Jansen, 2004.

38. Jensen, 1999.

39. The notice appears on the credits page of the Issue Dramaturg, http://issuedramaturg.

issuecrawler.net/.

40. Rogers, 2004.

41. C. Wright Mills, 1971, 212; Rogers & Marres, 2002.

42. Rogers, 2009.

43. Foot & Schneider, 2002; Schneider & Foot, 2002.

44. Chun, 2006.

45. Boyle, 1997.

46. Rogers, 2008.

47. Shirky, 2005.

48. Galloway, 2004.

49. Weltevrede, 2009.

50. Lenhart & Madden, 2007.

51. Boyd & Ellison, 2007.

52. Foucault, 1998; Rogers, 2004.

53. Prensky, 2001.

54. One gains a sense of how analysis may be performed, and the kinds of findings that may

be made, because Elfriendo captures the top 100 profiles, thus providing an indication,

as opposed to a grounded finding from a proper sampling procedure.

55. Giles, 2005.

56. Swartz, 2006.

57. Van Dijck, 2009.

58. Chesney, 2006; Read, 2006; Magnus, 2008.

59. Niederer, 2009.

60. For the edits may be traced.

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