June 2024
Okay, this blog has a long context. As part of my effort to encounter scholarship in a more serendipitous way, and as a way not to be controlled by the architecture of the list (dictated mostly Google Search), I’ve come to see conferencing at a great way to reshape my relationship with space and with scholarship (that is outside of my computer.) In June 2024, I attended the the ICA 2024’s key note of Prof Jean Burgess on what comms research has to offer in this Generative AI moment. It is an excellent key note that I took many notes on and hopefully I will publish some reflective accounts later. In this blog, however, I want to reflect on a book called Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net by Steve Jones (1998), since the name of Burgess’s lecture — Steve Jones lecture–caught my attention. As much as I often pride myself on my effort to read everyday, I am often surprised to learn about key influential work in the field of media studies that I have missed — Steve Jones’ work on Internet research nearly 30 years ago at the onset of the commercialisation of the Internet is one of such work.
One key premise in researching the Internet by Jones that I find particularly compelling is the idea that our conceptualisation of the Internet profoundly affects our approach to studying it. Do we see it as a medium for information, a market-driven social space, or perhaps a platform for entertainment or activism? Is it a form of personalised mass media, or does it represent a product or a process? Is it characterised by persistence or ephemerality? If so, what methods from which disciplines, such as communication, anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, will help us to understand the net? Conceptualisation of research objects inevitably shapes our method to studying it. We can’t just pull out a method from a method toolbox on a whim. Yes this is research 101, yet it is often so taken for granted.
I am also struck by Jones’s observation regarding the “predictability” in our research on the Internet, similar to past technologies like television and film. I certainly noticed this trend at many research into digital activism– the field that I am quite familiar with. The question often arises: is this technology (fill in the blank: TikTok, Little Red Book, Instagram) beneficial or detrimental to feminism and activism? Does it aid activists in achieving their goals? It is so understandable, particularly since the technology is new and for that I anticipate a wave of similar research on GenAI. As Jones noted, research that is “predictive” in nature tends to attract significant funding and attention. I’m also guilty of this myself–so this is a self-critique: I am also driven by pressures related to publication, funding, and tenure. But all of this just reminded me of the Payne Fund studies, which examined the impact of motion pictures on American society — I think this study exemplifies so well the enduring paradigms researchers use to study new media.
Jones argues that the predictability in research is partly due to the tools, paradigms, and theories currently available to us, and partly due to the inherent difficulty of being precise about anything online. But what is troubling for Jones is not the challenges inherent in studying complex social phenomena, but that scholars like us often rush to “colonise” new areas of research in an attempt to fill the knowledge gap without fully considering the implications. Again, due to pressures related to publication, funding, and tenure.
Like Jones, when being pressed by those pressures, I always try, sometimes with futility, to move from a prescriptive and predictive approaches and to embrace a more critical and historical perspective. And I’ve tried to teach my students the same: think about research as a self-reflexive process of meaning-making. I have tried to be creative, and reflexive. I’ve tried to engage with ethnography, with history, with political economy in my research, of course with some successes and some failures, in my own work on data activism.
I agree so much with Jones on the need to pay attention to the less obvious questions. Jones noted how searchers have largely focused on the Internet’s societal impacts—such as whether it will bring us closer together, isolate us, or create new forms of electronic communities— and that there are other critical issues worth exploring including the EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES of the Internet. For example, what does it mean for scholars and their scholarship when a particular technology with distinctive and peculiar modes of address, identity, and behaviour becomes a prominent medium of information exchange? Or what of questions related to the insertion of the Internet into modern life, itself already replete with media of communication of all kinds, shapes, and sizes? What will be the interaction between scholars when they share the same “space” asynchronously, even invisibly? What will the subjective changes in our sense of the speed, time, temporality, space because now information can be moved in such a manner? What are the implications for knowledge production?
These are the questions I’ve tried to ask myself in my own research on datafied feminist activism. It’s not just about whether data activism will be successful in terms of its immediate effects, but rather how it will transform or reorganise practices of producing knowledge concerning subjugated and marginalised experiences.
Trang Le 