Problems in the Internet World

What are the biggest Problems associated with studying online environments?

One of the biggest things that make the Internet and online environments so attractive to us is also one of the same things that make it so difficult to study, modularity (the ability to change and morph). A page that you can be looking at one second could be completely different in the next. Several things allow this to happen and based on what you are trying to study could taint or affect the study.

The entire design can be easily changed through CSS. I have a 10,000 some odd page Web site that I control for the university that I can now change in a matter of hours or less given lead time. This ability for change could affect someone who is working on a study of visual style and representation of web pages or certain styles.

Blogs and forums can be easily edited at anytime to modify post that may have previously existed. If you were studying a flame war on a specific topic on a forum you can return in a matter of hours and find the entire conversation or portions of it have disappeared.

Site like the wayback machine can be helpful for archiving specific periods of time for web site but they will not capture everything and do not crawl the sites at specific intervals or events. The nature of the Web tends to change faster than the intervals that these types of services can archive.

A number of other problems exist with online environment study like the inability to contact every test subject due to their scattered nature but these things are also what make it exciting and interesting to invest time in.