Internet Research and the Sociology of Cyber-Social-Scientific Knowledge

Perspectives from the sociology of scientific knowledge are deployed to explore the birth of Internet research, focusing in particular on the development of methodological approaches. For a researcher based in the sociology of scientific knowledge, being an Internet researcher has been a vivid opportunity to experience at firsthand a phenomenon usually studied from the outside. The article begins by assessing some models of the process of scientific change. Characterizing Internet research as new has been a potent resource for enrolling researchers into the field and positioning research responses. The development of virtual methods for doing social research illustrates the process of methodological innovation in social science and the negotiation of methodological adequacy. Methodological discussions have been enlivened by the advent of the Internet as an object of study. Internet research has arguably been a valuable reflexive opportunity for the traditional disciplines that have fed its development.

Keywords:

• Internet
• methodology
• problem area
• research network
• sociology of scientific knowledge

Notes

1. For introductions to some of the range of issues and questions that current sociology of scientific knowledge addresses, see Sismondo (2004), Lynch (1993), Golinski (1998), or Barnes et al. (1996). One of the anonymous referees of this article suggested a whole series of questions from contemporary sociology of scientific knowledge I could have focused on, including issues of institutionalization, practices, and instrumentation. Any of these would be a fascinating subject for study in its relation to Internet research, as a way of exploring the conditions of contemporary knowledge production. In the confines of this article I can address none of them; I hope that in future they will be explored, and I make one suggestion in this regard in the concluding section of this article.

2. It is worth noting here that the references that I cite to explain the core concepts from sociology of science used to explore Internet research are mainly from the 1970s, thus exemplifying my point about the perception that the key work in establishing the discipline was carried out then. There is indeed more recent work going on focusing on the communication networks of scientific disciplines and specialties, for example, by van den Besselaar and Leydesdorff (1996), but this tends to come largely from scientometrics, a field increasingly separate from the mainstream of science and technology studies and from qualitative studies of scientific culture (van den Besselaar, 2001). On a different note, it is also fair to say that I have fallen to some extent into the trap identified by Fuller (2002), in using Kuhn's account as prescription rather than a description. Recent work in sociology of science and technology points out that while a linear and progressive history of the field is a seductive fiction, more complex histories would ultimately prove more fulfilling (Bowker & Jensen, 2004). I acknowledge these concerns, but for the purposes of this article a Kuhnian linear history is a useful tool to think with.