using the web to do social science
Social science is often concerned with the emergence of collective behavior out of the interactions of large numbers of individuals, but in this regard it has long suffered from a severe measurement problem - namely that individual-level behavior and interactions are hard to observe, especially at scale and over time. In this talk, I will argue that the technological revolution of the Internet is beginning to lift this constraint. To illustrate, I will describe several examples of internet-based research that would have been impractical to perform until recently, and that shed light on some longstanding sociological questions. Although internet-based research still faces serious methodological and procedural obstacles, I propose that the ability to study truly "social" dynamics at individual-level resolution will have dramatic consequences for social science.
social science web-based experiments networks