Online Ethnographies

Supplementary Power Point SlidesSocial Research Methods, Week 11

Outline:Online ethnography: When? How? Why?Development of cyberethnographies (since

the 1990s)‘Virtual’ and/or/against ‘real’ ethnography:

researcher/researched; community/individuals; space/time, etc.

Ethics and virtual ethnographyPrinciples of virtual ethnography

Online ethnography: When? How? Why?An advance of computer-mediated communication and

ethnographyOnline communications and virtual communities as

the object of cyberethnography

‘… the techniques to study any social group should be adapted to its own social and cultural context’ (Guimaraes 2005: 141)

BUT what are exactly those contexts for groups which gather in cyberspace?

AND what are implications of cyberspace’s dependency on (changing) technology for its ethnography, ethnographers and participants?

Hine's Case for Internet Ethnography Internet ethnography avoids issues of ‘being

there’: Generated a 'sample' of web sites through

on line search engines Undertook a textual analysis of these sites Undertook email interviews with (a

sample of) generators of these sites Analysis of newsgroups Posted messages on these newsgroup

sites for respondents for further interviews but had few replies.

Cyberethnographies since the 1990sPioneering cyberethnographies (the early 1990s)

Schism between online and offline realtiesPrimacy of textCentring on ‘identity play’

Legitimizing cyberethnographies (the late 1990s)Cohesiveness between online and offline

interactionsTranslating offline methodology to online practiceUnderstanding participants’ perceptions

Multi-modal ethnographies (since the mid-2000s)Ethnographers as content producersFace-to-face and virtual interactions – two

possibilities (among other forms) of mediated communication

‘Virtual’ and/or/against ‘real’ ethnography

What are objects of virtual ethnography? And how can they be authentically known?

Participant observation as ‘lurking’?‘The informant’ as a partial performance rather

than an authentic identityAuthenticity as a topic not a problem of

ethnography

Are ‘virtual’ objects of ethnography ‘real’? ‘Real’ for whom? It is ‘quite real’ for users/participantsShifting focus from (‘authentic’) identity to social

interaction

Where and how do ‘virtual communities’ exist?

Online ethnography challenges a spatial notion of the ‘field’ and territorially defined ‘community’.

The Internet as a site of mobility.The field as a field of relations – the space of flows which

is organised around connections rather than locations.

What is a context of ‘virtual communities’?Texts as ethnographic materialConsidering particular circumstances of consumption

and production of texts

‘The text becomes ethnographically (and socially) meaningful once we have cultural context(s) in which to situate it’ (Hine 2000: 52)

How to be and/or to do an ‘ethnographer’ online?Producer, consumer, (technology) userData collection as dataDanger of ‘going native’Reflexivity

Online interview as Computer Mediated CommunicationA democratic form of exchange?‘User-friendly’Race-, gender-, age- and sexuality-blind BUTThe effects of presenting 'maleness' on-lineStructured interviews do not produce rich dataOften misunderstandings of the inquiry’s

essenceLack of spontaneityNew strategies of visibility

Ethics and virtual ethnographyThe problematic notion of privacy: is the

Internet a public space? Covert vs. Overt research: is ‘lurking’

acceptable?Replicability of online data and protection

informant’s identityNew technology and power relationship in

the ‘field’

Principles of virtual ethnography1. The Internet as (i) a way of communication,

(ii) object, (iii) site of ‘virtual communities’2. The Internet as both culture and cultural

artefact (cyberspace dependency on technology) within understood particular context

3. Mobile rather than multi-sited4. Flow and connectivity as the organizing

principles of the ethnographic object5. ‘Spatial dislocation’ of ethnography

6. ‘Temporal dislocation’ of ethnography7. Partial ethnography8. Reflexive dimension of ethnography: mediated

interaction as the source of ethnographer’s insights

9. Absence/presence of informants/ethnographers within the ethnography

10. ‘Adequate for the practical purposes of exploring the relations of mediated interaction…’ (Hine 2000)