Follow the user: Taking advantage of Internet users as methodological resources

In this article, I introduce a novel epistemological approach meant to re-adapt the digital methods paradigm to a fast changing digital landscape. This change was mostly brought about by the transformation of Web 2.0 into a platformized social media environment and the advent of the post-API and platform surveillance era. This approach is premised on the idea of considering the Internet user as a source of methods, rather than an object of study. To this purpose I suggest to ‘follow the user’, meaning to take advantage of the natively digital methods that Internet users employ to gather, organise, manage and create their own digital data throughout their everyday digital practices. In order to illustrate my approach, I show how to practically follow the users in each of the key phases of a digital research project within social media platforms: keywords selection, data collection, data sampling, data analysis. In doing so, I mean to contribute to an emerging strand of research within the digital methods tradition which is trying to: (a) update digital methods, given the continuous mutations of the digital landscape; (b) seek a more organic and systematic integration of digital and qualitative methods; (c) go beyond the classical quali-quanti dichotomy.