Cyberspace, the web graph and political deliberation on the Internet

Ongoing debate about the effects of the internet and computer mediated communication on political deliberation and democracy has been limited by traditional research methods and a general failure in social science to recognize that cyberspace is a fundamentally new social space with its own laws. Although the mapping of symbolic networks emerging within cyberspace remains a difficult problem both theoretically and methodologically, this paper argues that shadows of these networks can often be discerned from the lower order web graph. The paper demonstrates that established graph patterns in social network theory such as centrality, marginality and betweenness can be readily observed in visualizations based on crawls of web sites oriented toward targeted issues. Further, there is a correspondence between these patterns and the virtual social network behind them, although in ways that are not always consistent with traditional interpretations. Finally, the paper begins to outline the broad strokes of a hybrid, interactive research method involving both network and content analysis for the purposes of understanding the growing roll of cyberspace in political deliberation.