The process from the marketplace to internet research

The marketplace is a concept that has existed since the times when humans began to transition to a settled life, and market research holds a very important place among research topics. The reason for the existence of marketplaces is not just to buy and sell products or services. People also socialize in these spaces. The reason why local neighborhood markets are set up periodically every week is not just to shop to meet our physical needs, but also to satisfy the need for socialization. Fairs and exhibitions have also developed for this reason and have become widespread to this day. On the other hand, the environment we call social media today has also become a trading environment. The concept of social commerce emphasizes this. We can say that the marketplace established on the streets has digitized and transformed into a social commerce environment. Thus, social media has begun to become an important medium for today's market research. 

Similarly, Ackland, in his 2013 book titled Web Social Science, emphasizes the importance of the field and interdisciplinary studies by stating, “From the early days of the Internet, research examining its social, political, and economic effects has been conducted with contributions from a range of disciplines such as media and cultural studies, communication, economics, political science, sociology, law, and public policy.” According to him, there are three fundamental reasons that encourage social scientific research aimed at examining the “behavior of people and communities on the Internet”:

1. That behavior in online environments is a “unique cultural form.”

2. That some behaviors in the online environment can be “sufficiently similar to real-world behavior” and thus can provide insights into why people or communities behave that way in real life.

3. That behavior in the online environment can affect societies, meaning there can be a “social impact of the Internet,” and thus the consequences of these effects can be examined. 

We see examples of the unique cultural forms that Ackland mentions in the first point as content shared on social media platforms such as Ekşi Sözlük, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. We see examples of behaviors sufficiently similar to real-world behavior, which he mentions in the second point, in augmented reality games and especially in the remote education systems we used during the pandemic period. We see examples related to the social impact of the Internet, which he mentions in the third point, as content shared on the Twitter platform during events such as the Arab Spring, the Gezi Protests, and the Cambridge Analytica Scandal.

I would like to emphasize one point here. Over the years, the Internet and what we can do with it have evolved very rapidly and to a great extent. As Ackland quotes from Claude S. Fischer, in the early years of the Internet, also called the Web1 era, in 1997, the impact of technology was interpreted as follows: “Views that new technologies will revolutionize our way of life are usually bold, fascinating, and happily futuristic. They are exciting to hear; books that talk about them sell well, and they can earn a good spot on companies' conference calendars. However, their shelf life is about as long as a 'Big Mac'... We should think of these technologies as tools that people use to pursue their social goals, not as forces that control people's actions.”

Since we experienced in the example of the Arab Spring how permanent the effects that were thought to be short-lived about thirty years ago can actually be, I think this perspective has now changed. Today, these technologies, and especially the technology companies that develop and market them, have become forces that control and direct people's actions such as shopping, voting, taking sides, and similar activities, contrary to what is mentioned in the last sentence of that quote. One of the most important reasons for this, as Ackland also emphasizes, is the fact that “the real-world effects of the Internet are complex and can be difficult to disentangle from other major forces that affect patterns of communication and society, such as demographic and economic factors.” 

Furthermore, we also see that although the shelf life of technologies is not as short as hamburgers, they transform into or converge with other technologies in relatively short periods. In a process of approximately fifty years, refrigerator-sized computers are turning into 15-millimeter-thin portable computers, and radios, televisions, and cameras are converging into mobile phones. The transition from Web1 to Web2 and then to Web3 also represents such a transformation.