Virtual Methods

Virtual Methods • 9
to rest on methodological security as a means of understanding the new technologies.
The question is much more interesting, potentially, than whether old methods
can be adapted to fit new technologies. New technologies might, rather, provide an
opportunity for interrogating and understanding our methodological commitments.
In the moments of innovation and anxiety which surround the research
methods there are opportunities for reflexivity. Seizing these moments of reflexivity
depends, however, on not taking the radical capacities of the new technologies
for granted, nor treating them as poor substitutes for a face-to-face gold
standard.
This volume aims to go some way towards addressing the air of innovation and
anxiety around virtual methods head on, by providing examples of innovation, and
by setting precedents to quell anxiety. It also, however, provides fuel for reflexive
consideration of just what methods we aim to use to explore the social formations
which arise through use of information and communication technologies and how
those methods will shape our understanding. It is this potential for reflexive
engagement with our own practices that I aim to capture with the term the
Sociology of Cyber-Social-Scientific Knowledge (SCSSK). Not a catchy term, but
worth practising. Focusing on SCSSK is a reminder to capitalize on the potential
that new technologies provide for social science itself, in examining epistemological
and methodological commitments afresh, opening up possibilities for new
research designs and new approaches, and seizing on the opportunity for reflexive
engagement.
In thinking about the implications of the Internet for research methods from an
SCSSK perspective, it is important to remember that the Internet is both cultural
context and cultural artefact (Hine 2000). The Internet as cultural context is established,
as we saw earlier, through application of ethnographic methods to online
settings. That the Internet is also a cultural artefact is apparent from the extent to
which it is manifested as a varying and variably used set of technologies that have
different meanings for different groups of people. In this sense, using the Internet
is a culturally located experience (Miller and Slater 2000). Using a term from the
sociology of technology, the Internet is an interpretively flexible object (for
extended discussion of this concept see Bijker 1995). It means different things to
different people, and they will see its functions, risks and opportunities in ways
that reflect their own concerns. Any given cultural event we might want to study
incorporates both of these dimensions of the Internet to differing degrees. This
complicates the use of the Internet as a research tool considerably, since we cannot
be sure that using the Internet means the same thing to our informants as to us, nor
that it is the same thing to all of our informants (or indeed all of our colleagues).
This observation brings the mediation of research methods to the fore. Far more
contingencies in the research process become apparent, since we cannot assume
that our choices of medium reflect the experience of our informants nor that our