Considering a Wider Web?

Abstract

What sets the Web apart from 'traditional' mass media is almost instantaneous access to diverse spaces that users navigate in customized ways. Users are often bound up as producers and consumers of materials online [1]. As a result, new avenues for research have emerged for both large ('Big Data') and small-scale Web studies. Research across this spectrum, however, has tended to focus on singular types of Web platform (i.e. Twitter data, online forums etc.). Web users, conversely, are unlikely to relegate browsing to discrete types of Web space. What will be argued here -- with reference to an ongoing case study researching the role of the Web on production and consumption of aesthetic surgery - is usefulness and significance of multimodal critical discourse analysis (MMCDA) for qualitative research across multiple online spaces. MMCDA examines intersecting visual media and texts to recognize and comprehend (re)production of dominant meanings in various contexts. Employing MMCDA across a selection of different types of websites -- assembling a 'snapshot' of a topic(s) - enables wider qualitative exploration of complementary, competing, and contradictory visual and textual sources confronting users on an everyday, experiential level. This raises important epistemological and ethical issues pertinent to undertaking qualitative research on the Web. How do different Web spaces contribute to construction of dominant discourses? How do we - as researchers - gather, analyze and use various data ethically? From this emerges potential for developing more intricate understandings of diverse content available at the click of a hyperlink.