Grazie all’indispensabile contributo di Chiara sono riuscito a completare la traduzione in inglese del mio articolo sulla semantica della società in uno spazio mediato di rete.
Abstract
During the last few years the Internet has been increasingly used by people as a read-write medium. Thanks to the dropped prices and skills necessary to afford and use technologies aimed to create digital contents, a large amount of people in the world is now able to produce persistent digital information. A large share of this information is today exposed to a mass audience on the Internet. The aim of this paper is to present a vision and few examples of how this large amount of data might be used for sociological research. From the theoretical point of view this kind of researches drawn on the concept of social semantics developed by Niklas Luhmann. Social semantics, once crystallized in books is today also available in online conversations. The networks of interpersonal communications, when computer mediated, becomes observable and, as a consequence, social scientists have access to invaluable new data. Today, the online data have four characteristics that tend to increase even more the sociological value of this conversations. As a matter of fact, the online network of communications is in fact persistent, searchable, replicable and addressed to an invisible audience. Due to these properties online conversations may be analyzed with standard content analysis qualitative or quantitative techniques. The paper will present the theoretical framework for researches based upon the analysis of online conversations.
Keywords: social semantics, web 2.0, Luhmann, user generated content, methodology
Download: Social semantics in a networked space. New perspectives for social sciences
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Technorati tags: social semantics, luhmann, web 2.0, web science, networked space