In his seminal work, Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online 2 , Kozinets ascertains that we have reached a point of no return: social scientists can no longer regard the internet and computer-mediated communications and all their affordances as esoteric phenomena. The distinction between online and offline (or 'real world') has become a false dichotomy as they are seamlessly blended together to form the social worlds we inhabit. The sheer size of the tome, SAGE Internet Research Methods (1682 pages) 3 , proves that the last decade has seen a substantial surge in internet-related social research and that the field has matured. Christine Hine-perhaps one of the best-known scholars to write about the methodologies for sociological and ethnographic understanding of the internet-has emphasized that tackling the 'virtual' entails much more than simply transferring methods 'online'; it forces the researcher to become reflexive in terms of what constitute the core principles of social research. 4 As Hughes writes, researching the internet and through the internet raises a wide range of ethical, epistemological, ontological and methodological issues, along with debates and controversies that may force us to consider anew how such research differs from conventional social research methods. 5
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