Blog 1: Why Study 'the Internet'?

Foot contends that it is important to archive and preserve the bits of content and the experimental dimension of site interactions online to understand cyber culture through web sphere analysis. Web sphere analysis is an analysis of the relations between the producers and users of the web materials mediated between the structure of website's links and hyperlinks. She explains that the methodology in creating web sphere analysis involves identifying the objects or themes related to the web sites, to apprehend the hyperlink context, and archive the metadata with some periodicity of present and past analysis. I think it would be very difficult to extend this methodology for web sphere analysis to social media sites. First off, although social media is composed of many hyperlinks and links between personal profiles, it would be challenging to conduct interviews with all the producers and users in the social media web sphere and in turn hard to retrieve data to analyze. Also, a website page dominantly focuses on a topic, whereas social media sites are combined views, interests, opinions, etc. of multiple topics which one may express through words, videos, audio, or pictures. The hash tag, as found on twitter, or the @ sign, used in most social media to directly interact with another user, create easy ways to connect and interact with another and find similarities with common hash tags and links posted. But this poses a problem in web sphere analysis. Users can make up hash tags that are irrelevant. Then that information is no longer useful and the data is derived into another form of interaction investigation through the web. The link, which Foot explains to be the "essence of the web", becomes very complicated through the social networking service. The whole dynamic and structure of social media sites are through hyperlinks and connecting with other users on the sites. It is not a page based up political, economical, beliefs, etc. like used as the archives of information for the 9/11 example Foot used. The whole dynamic of web sphere analysis is changed through SNS when it becomes a system of links and personal interests. Also, personal profiles make it difficult to analyze interactions due to permanency. With SNS I do not think there would be certainty in viewing content later if needed to find it, creating complications for web sphere analysis.

Comparing the study between Foot's web sphere analysis of post-9/11 production and the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing I predict would be very similar in that many people would be a high percentage of a personal producer. Both reactions were both very startling and unsettling and would bring a lot of people to want to voice their feelings and expressions. I think that the Boston Marathon bombing would probably have a higher percentage overall in the producer being a personal user because it is more prevalent to have your own page or site of some sort than it would have in 2001. I would think that more people interacted on the web to deal and cope with the tragedy of the bombing and SNS played a major role in venting peoples emotions. In the past year, it has become a norm to interact and communicate solely through the web. When something is blown up on social media, everyone has something to say about it, and they can, through SNS. I think their would be more people on their own social media sites then there would be on government and news sites when enabling expression.