Virtual Methods

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Virtual Methods and the Sociology of Cyber-
Social-Scientific Knowledge
Introduction
Christine Hine
The coming of the Internet has posed a significant challenge for our understanding
of research methods. Across the social sciences and humanities people have found
themselves wanting to explore the new social formations that arise when people
communicate and organize themselves via email, web sites, mobile phones and the
rest of the increasingly commonplace mediated forms of communication.
Mediated interactions have come to the fore as key ways in which social practices
are defined and experienced. Indeed, there are few researchers in the social sciences
or humanities who could not find some aspect of their research interest manifested
on the Internet. There is, then, a considerable will to research and
understand technologically mediated interactions, both as a topic in their own right
and as an important conduit for contemporary social life. At the same time,
however, there is considerable anxiety about just how far existing tried and tested
research methods are appropriate for technologically mediated interactions. New
media seem to offer the hope of reaching different populations of research subjects
in new ways, but their promise is tinged with anxiety. Methodological solutions
gain much of their authority through precedent, and it is not clear as yet just how
far the heritage of research methodology applies to new media and what gaps in
our understanding are still to be exposed.
This volume contains a series of case studies and reviews which explore
methodological solutions to understanding the social interactions mediated by
information and communications technologies. Each of the case studies here
involved its author(s) in working out a situated response to the research question
they wished to address, appropriate to the conditions which they found in context.
In each of the chapters general methodological lessons are drawn from these situated
responses. By looking at research methods in this way, the aim is to provide
guidance for researchers starting out on projects involving mediated interactions.
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