seth thinks about computer-assisted and -mediated research

The complexity of composition is static.  I make this assertion not to downplay that complexity, but to introduce the fact that all that has been written about spoken words, written words, genre, media, and modality all bear on each other.  In addition, adding the researched "subject" to the equation increases the complexity by the order of one whole human consciousness, which is a great increase indeed.  Research in computer mediated spaces can bring many of the issues assumed to be simple and answered in other spaces to light, in addition to bringing up brand spanking new issues and complexities.  We should remember, when doing research in computer mediated spaces, that:

• people create themselves with and from and inside of texts
• these texts are then as much people as they are the materiality of the light on the screen
• interfering with these texts changes them and thus changes the perceptions (of audience and author) of the people involved
• computers are a commodity
• commodities are by definition a limited and limiting resource in terms of access and usage
• computer mediated spaces presuppose and create social situations that are not readily visible on the screen
• the researcher may not be the expert for a given technology
• and on and on and on

Of course there is great value to "virtual" research.  As I wrote above, digital spaces, I think, provide little terrain that is perfectly novel.  They are new media but subject to all the old theories of language and power and rhetoric.  In this way, virtual research is like a new window on an old back yard--everything is the same out there, but looked at from this angle, you can see things that you couldn't before.  In addition, people use virtual spaces and it's always good to investigate with academic rigor the things that people use.  There are differences, obviously, between different media, and it's important to begin to value all media equally.  The privilege of print text, of those moldy old books in the corners of libraries is nothing more than the enactment of certain types of power and privilege.  There are disadvantages to computer mediated research as well.  Computers, while fascinating for the speed at which they change and evolve, provide a fleeting subject matter for just those reasons.  The body of work on MOO's, for example, while less than twenty years old is becoming hilariously obsolete.  Also, it is difficult to obtain genuine empirical observation in a landscape that is created by the people you're trying to study.  SecondLife research, as an example, needs to take into consideration that many of the people with whom the researcher interacts could be role-played, or advertising robots, or griefers or who or whatever.  Ultimately these disadvantages are dangers we can avoid or embrace, dangers which may very well lead to very interesting findings.

Students look to teachers and institutions to label and create the official value of texts.  This is an ideological function in the sense that the value of books in a library is created by a hierarchical power structure that makes access--to their materiality and their meaning--the central criteria for validity.  Online spaces, while they may pretend at wider access, will surely (and eventually, if they don't already) come to bear under the weight of institutional practices.  Even though anyone can Google the work of important critical theorists, access to their full text articles is regulated by academic databases, libraries, and the fullness of their discursive locations.  I understood Thurlow and McKay's work as creating a space to account for the huge human complexity of communication in another media.  In other words, computers assist and mediate human beings in the huge complex of their relationships, and it is impossible or at least invalid to presume or posit that computers somehow simplify and make more generalizable our practices.