As people begin to write not only the histories of the Internet and the World Wide Web but also the histories of academic study of the Internet and the World Wide Web, so they begin to discern patterns, phases, hot topics and fads. There is a useful summary of the ways of thinking about the Internet and the World Wide Web up to the turn of the millennium, distinguishing between ‘popular cyberculture', ‘cyberculture studies' and ‘critical cyberculture studies'.
The first strand includes journalistic accounts of experiences online, branched into utopian and dystopian forms. The former is best exemplified by the establishment of new magazines discussing cyberspace, such as Wired, while the latter often took the form of populist books offering portents of doom about the digital age. This first bloom of publishing overlaps in Silver's account with the second phase, in which journalistic or popular accounts rub shoulders with academic work engaging with bodies of theory, and with key interests in online identity, community and communication - mapping the social effects of cyberspace. The third stage is marked by the more systematic development and deployment of ‘theory', and by a broadening out of focus as more and more academics and commentators set their sights on cyberspace. We are arguably largely still in this third stage, though the terrain has been complicated both by trends in the technologies and their uses, and by internal debates about what to name this thing of ours (and therefore how to go about thinking about it). Running alongside this typology is a second story; this time a story about research methods: how is the Internet to be understood empirically, what tools do we have and what works?
Rather, it is a case of plundering existing research for emerging methodological ideas developed in the course of diverse research projects, and weighing up whether they can be used and adopted for our own purposes'. While this might seem a bit casual, it rightly reflects the current state of play in net and web research: an openness to trying different techniques, to mixing methods, rather than a desire to fix a gold standard. Such research practice, Wakeford continues, means ‘moving back and forth between long-standing debates in methodology and the distinctive challenges posed by new electronically mediated research'. It seems likely, nonetheless, that the close attention to detail shown in ethnographic studies of Internet use will continue to prove popular and fruitful.
Yet, the current alleged demassification and resocialization of ‘Web 2.0', the rise of me media and ‘new' social networking media, will inevitably challenge again our methodological choices. In particular, it seems to me we will need to find ways to explore the processes of ‘writing' and ‘reading' ‘me media' texts such as blogs, and new ways to research how users interact in and with those hybrid spacesNew theories and new methods can, in fact, together fittingly form a new agenda for research into New Media as socio-technical assemblage: Media Studies 2.0.
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