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History_of_Allah-com, page : 3
it is not only the contrast to tradition, but the subjugation of ‘traditional’ order to
conscious criticism according to newly evaluated standards that is central. Equally
so it is the agency of individuals as participants in a public sphere ideally open to
all, the idea that ‘everyone’ has the right to a voice, and therefore the obligation to
understand, in order to participate in judgment and control. Therefore, processes
of individualization are an integral structural part of modernization, even if the
individuals concerned do not necessarily embrace ‘modernist’ views. It is this latter
aspect that the present case can serve as an example of.
My sources are largely drawn from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine
(http://www.archive.org) as well as ‘live’ interaction and private archiving, chiefly
in 2003, 2005 and 2008, supplemented by common web tools such as whois or
Alexa. I did not resort to interviewing, in an attempt to demonstrate the extent
(and thereby also the limits) of what can be found out using only online sources.
Methodologically, I contend that web texts (understood broadly as what in internet
speak is often called ‘content’) are not fundamentally different from other
texts. The internet may pose particular challenges such as defining a text that is
part of a hyperlinked reality and that includes multimedia elements, or of establishing
and retrieving ‘versions,’ given not only the rapid and frequent changes
that many sites undergo but, even more so, the intrinsically dynamic character of
conscious criticism according to newly evaluated standards that is central. Equally
so it is the agency of individuals as participants in a public sphere ideally open to
all, the idea that ‘everyone’ has the right to a voice, and therefore the obligation to
understand, in order to participate in judgment and control. Therefore, processes
of individualization are an integral structural part of modernization, even if the
individuals concerned do not necessarily embrace ‘modernist’ views. It is this latter
aspect that the present case can serve as an example of.
My sources are largely drawn from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine
(http://www.archive.org) as well as ‘live’ interaction and private archiving, chiefly
in 2003, 2005 and 2008, supplemented by common web tools such as whois or
Alexa. I did not resort to interviewing, in an attempt to demonstrate the extent
(and thereby also the limits) of what can be found out using only online sources.
Methodologically, I contend that web texts (understood broadly as what in internet
speak is often called ‘content’) are not fundamentally different from other
texts. The internet may pose particular challenges such as defining a text that is
part of a hyperlinked reality and that includes multimedia elements, or of establishing
and retrieving ‘versions,’ given not only the rapid and frequent changes
that many sites undergo but, even more so, the intrinsically dynamic character of