Online groundedness

The article develops the notion of online groundedness, which refers to the internet as the site of the baseline when making findings about societal and cultural trends. It does so by historicising the study of online data. Where they were once considered as originating from the virtual for the study of online culture only, online data gradually became deployed as societal and cultural indicators, for example in the realm of digital epidemiology, where the baseline is still derived from traditional data collection methods. Most recently, the online has stood in for the site of at least partial grounding by computational social science, though platform effects make the use of trace data challenging. The article concludes by asking the question of under which circumstances the online serves as a baseline, which would shift the empirical ground and the grounding of findings to the web.