Book review : Research Methods and Global Online Communities

Alexia Maddox’s Research Methods and Global Online Communities arrives at a critical moment in the development of scholarship in the areas of digital sociology and digital ethnography. In this volume, Maddox revisits and gives in-depth critical discussion on approaches in sociology for mapping communities, while drawing on her own in-depth ethnographic research conducted among herpers-reptile collectors who are a black-market connected network through the exchange of reptiles and money and through websites, online forums and digital technologies. The volume is concerned with identifying the characteristics of community in the digital age and then exploring how to research such communities. In the chapters that follow, Maddox is meticulous in setting out that she is not aiming to define community in the information era, but to understand how communities are bounded, mediated, composed and retain a sense of cohesion.