The Hine article today today made me realize two things. The first is that doing internet research is more complicated than I had ever considered. Not knowing what the internet is (ie not just a place) seems to make things very confusing, and treating it as a multi-sited ethnography is a prime example of those complications.
The second thing I realized is that planning a research project is even more complicated than I realized (and I already thought it was complicated) and requires a degree of thought on a very meta level. I already accounted for finding a methodology that is most likely to capture the data I am interested in, but having to consider whether the methodology is leading me to the data I want but not the conclusion I am expecting seems very convoluted. I have a feeling that if I were planning real ethnographic field work, I would need to design my research plan, and then step back and have someone else look at it for those kinds of biases. I think being so immersed in the research would leave me incapable of objectively assessing my design.
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