How do young people make sense of their social media experiences, which rhetoric do they use, which grand narratives of technology and social media do they rely on? Based on discourse analysis of approximately 500 pages of written data and 390 minutes of video (generated by 50 college students aged 18-30 between 2014-2016) this article explores how young people negotiate their own experience and existing discourses about social media. Our analysis shows that young people rely heavily on canonic binaries from utopian and dystopian interpretations of networked technologies to apply labels to themselves, others, and social media in general. As they are prompted to reflect on their experience, their rhetoric about social media use and its implications becomes more nuanced yet remains inherently contradictory. This reflects a dialectical struggle to make sense of their lived experiences and feelings. Our unique methodology for generating deeply self-reflexive, auto-ethnographic narrative accounts suggests a way for scholars to be able to understand the ongoing struggles for meaning that occur within the granularity of everyday reflections about our own social media use.

The web encourages the constant creation and distribution of large amounts of information; it is also a valuable resource for understanding human behavior and communication. To take full advantage of the web as a research resource that extends beyond the consideration of snapshots of the present, however, it is necessary to begin to take web archiving much more seriously as an important element of any research program involving web resources. The ephemeral character of the web requires that researchers take proactive steps in the present to enable future analysis. Efforts to archive the web or portions thereof have been developed around the world, but these efforts have not yet provided reliable and scalable solutions. This article summarizes the current state of web archiving in relation to researchers and research needs. Interviews with researchers, archivists, and technologists identify the differences in purpose, scope, and scale of current web archiving practice, and the professional tensions that arise given these differences. Findings outline the challenges that still face researchers who wish to engage seriously with web content as an object of research, and archivists who must strike a balance reflecting a range of user needs.

The web encourages the constant creation and distribution of large amounts of information; it is also a valuable resource for understanding human behavior and communication. To take full advantage of the web as a research resource that extends beyond the consideration of snapshots of the present, however, it is necessary to begin to take web archiving much more seriously as an important element of any research program involving web resources. The ephemeral character of the web requires that researchers take proactive steps in the present to enable future analysis. Efforts to archive the web or portions thereof have been developed around the world, but these efforts have not yet provided reliable and scalable solutions. This article summarizes the current state of web archiving in relation to researchers and research needs. Interviews with researchers, archivists, and technologists identify the differences in purpose, scope, and scale of current web archiving practice, and the professional tensions that arise given these differences. Findings outline the challenges that still face researchers who wish to engage seriously with web content as an object of research, and archivists who must strike a balance reflecting a range of user needs.

Howard, P. N. (2011). Castells and the Media . Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 160 pages We have seen significant changes in our cultural, political, and economic lives, and those changes are usually ...

This report, which should be read in conjunction with its companion, “Researcher Engagement with Web Archives: State of the Art” (Dougherty, et al., 2010), looks beyond the current state of web archives, and the uses made of them, to expand on some of the challenges identified there, and to point out some of the important opportunities which exist for funding bodies to add considerable value to the investments made to date, as well as to move web archiving technology and practices to the next level of comprehensiveness and usefulness.

This study focuses on the extent to which U.S. campaigns are adapting traditional campaign strategies to the Web and/or developing innovative strategies that employ some of the particular affordances of Web technologies and on how well campaign characteristics, such as incumbency and major party affiliation, and/or race characteristics, such as statewide office and competitiveness, explain the level of a campaign's adaptation of or innovation with Web technologies. Adapting traditional campaigning proved to be far more common than developing innovative strategies. The findings suggest that additional aspects of campaigns' structure and organizational processes need to be studied in order to understand campaigns' Web technology adoption strategies.

This article offers preliminary insights and a possible empirical model for managing the conceptual, methodological, and technological challenges entailed in developmental analysis of link-mediated relations. We offer a "mid-range" approach to making sense of linking practices, midway between close rhetorical/ethnographic analysis of links and large-scale link mapping. We suggest that systematic human coding and interpretation of linked-to producer types affords a more concrete and specific basis for hypothesizing about linking strategies than machine mapping, while providing a more robust attempt to generalize across the universe of candidate Web sites than ethnographic analysis. To illustrate this two-pronged approach to link analysis, we examine the linking practices exhibited on Web sites produced by U.S. Congressional candidates during the 2002 campaign season, focusing on the extent and development of links from candidate Web sites to other types of political Web sites during the three months prior to the November, 2002 election.

In this report, we summarize the state of the art of web archiving in relationship to researchers and research needs. This is a different focus than much of the earlier work in this area, including the JISC PoWR report which focused on institutional strategies for archiving web resources (JISC, 2008). It is important to note that this report focuses on the uses and needs of individual researchers. Research groups are also important, as some of the challenges that face individual researchers can quickly spiral into deeply complex tangles when dealing with collaboratories. For instance, national selection policies and national copyright rules can stand in the way of international projects, even if there are sound academic reasons to pursue international collaboration. While these issues are addressed here when appropriate, the bulk of the report focuses on individual researchers and institutions.