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Abstract

The fleeting life cycle of Internet technologies poses new challenges to the pillars of scientific method, validity and reliability, in research about technology. Time compression—the concentration of numerous and rapid technological changes into shorter, erratic time cycles—affected the author's research on Web site design skill, resulting in a disappearance of data that is unexpected in the Information Age. Given the intensifying digitization of human life, the discipline of sociology increasingly confronts a tension between an imperfect, realistic data situation with which history has already made its peace, and an ideal type of scientific method that was always challenging, but now seems even more formidable. History, the past and the discipline, offers tools and insights to address the complexity of time in the digital world and its effect on evidence and methodology.

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The Birth of Web Site Design Skills

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