Communication & change

IPC 560: Communication & Change Critical Assignment Bibliographical Information: ” The Web as an Object of Study”, Schneider Steven, and Foot Kirsten, New Media and Society, no 6(1), pgs 114-122.
http:// faculty. washington. edu/kfoot/ Publications/Web-as-Object-of-Study. pdf
Summary of Author’s Argument: In their article authors bring up very urgent questions about potential problems related to the study of the Web because of the dynamic and constantly changing nature of this phenomenon. Indeed, as Internet has rapidly emerged and developed during the last decade as a new pervasive communicative environment, scholars were compelled to adapt the available methodologies and to develop new ones to properly study some unique qualities of the Web which differentiate it from the more traditional forms of media (like printed media and broadcast media), and which at the same time manifest similarity to them.
Personal Evaluation of Project’s Importance: First of all, one of the most important merits of this article is that it successfully manages to convince readers that the very appearance of Internet has indeed introduced a lot of change into our modern forms of communication. At the same time, authors are quick to point out that the Web has immediately gotten intertwined with its numerous spheres of application in social, political, cultural, and other realms, which on one hand were boosted by the possibilities that communicative Internet technologies offered, and on the other hand themselves contributed to the formation of the Web as we know it today. At this point we can find in the article some interesting observations of the mentioned peculiarities of the Web. For one, we are made aware that the content of the Web actually consists of ephemeral and permanent features. The Web is ephemeral because the permanency of its content is not guaranteed, and even if the permanency is pursued the content has to be constantly recreated for this purpose. However, the Web can be thought of as permanent due to the fact that in order to be conveyed Web content must be in a permanent form, which is not the case for example with live radio and television translations. In this regard the Web is similar to recorded media but, again, is not identical to them. Indeed, if you want to keep an old newspaper you just have to passively withstand from its destruction, but if you want to keep a Web page, an update of which may destroy its previous version, you have to take action to save it or risk to lose it forever. Now, I believe that such fine nuances that the article discusses are very important because if the modern trends of rapid development of computer and communicative technologies continue, the Web media may soon become the dominant means of human communication, so it is hard to overestimate how important it is to know its qualities.
Finally, aside from more general considerations, the authors of the article undertake a fruitful endeavor to structure the existing methodologies of Web studies and separate three approaches to such studies. By doing so the authors again greatly help those readers who want to find out how peculiarities of the Web influence our ways of its study. Of course, each of the offered approaches has its benefits and shortcomings, but perhaps the most important thing is that we can learn to apply different approaches in a conscious manner, thus increasing the effectiveness of our studies of the ever-changing Web.
All in all, I believe that the important quality of this article is that it can be interesting for those who take a general interest in such a dynamic and changing phenomenon as Internet, and as well for professionals who seek to diversify their methodological base.