New ways of doing research in the digital world

For the last two months I've been a graduate student. Given this, the following post may be seen as an attempt to try to escape some of the "hard" procedures that graduate students have to face. While not entirely denying that, I would add that this is coupled with the motive of exploring whether new ways of doing research are possible--especially given the changes in information technology that have characterized the lifetime of someone my age (23).

I'll start by going directly to the core of what I'm getting at: Our access to information has changed drastically in the last two decades (especially in the last 5 years for a good many Americans). Anyone with access to the internet has not just instant access to any information that would traditionally be confined to an encyclopedia, but also the ability to use a search engine to find opinions, ideas, facts, and many other kinds of written knowledge. As if this wasn't enough, our social networks have gone from being grounded in the real world to being ubiquitously available online, regardless of differences in space and time, so we can exchange information instantly with those that we were formerly cut off from.

What surprises me is that, as a first year graduate student, this rapidly changing state of affairs has had practically no effect on the way that research is done. Well, that's obviously an overstatement. The way research is done has changed: Modern information technologies are used to make journal articles available faster, and collaboration over great distances is now simultaneous and practical in cases that would have been impossible before. Furthermore, we can email ourselves ideas, and these are immediately available wherever computers are available.

The problem is that these changes reflect nothing more than a willingness to incorporate new technological possibilities into a static and essentially unchanging framework for how research is done. Ironically (at least in the field of developmental psychology in which cognition is often seen as a construction of the cultural environment), there has been little talk of how the ways that research is done ought to change profoundly in response to changes in the availability of information.

This increased availability makes us into truly different people. We have access to information in a way that was previously unimaginable (except for those who could afford a ubiquitous entourage of freakishly learned advisors), and this means that the kinds of things that are worth learning, and the kinds of things that are worth writing about from an academic point of view must change to suit the times.

What those changes ought to be is a subject for a future post...