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Samantha Oxford Skills For Anthropology And Conservation

Critical Reading Exercise

The Anthropology Of Online Communities

-  Samuel M.Wilson and Leighton C. Peterson

 Annual Review of Anthropology , Vol. 31 (October 2002), pp. 449-467. 

The article I have selected is about the Anthropology of Online Communities. The authors aim to

investigate if Online Communities are suited to be studied by Anthropology. They recognise that

there has been a development of technology and the Internet, causing new methods of

communication, allowing new communities to develop. The authors declare that Online

Communities have cultural aspects within them, referring the text and media involved with the

community; creating a culture and the possibility to study them as there are no noticeable reasons

not to. The authors do appreciate that not all anthropologists see Online Communities as worthy of

study, as they believe them to be a hallucination. The authors have included a vast number of

references to articles and studies of those who see ‘Online Communities’ as communities and those

who do not. The authors have used facts of the increased numbers of users of the Internet since

1994 (it doubling annually) as evidence to support that the Internet is becoming an increasing

popular form of communication, and therefore it does have some significance in the study of

communities. They also raise the point that communities are not defined as such by face-to-face

interactions as scholars have challenged this boundary in the past; supporting the authors’ point that

Online Communities do have the potential to be classed as Communities. I believe that the authors

have put forward a convincing argument that Online Communities are something to be studied in

the future by Anthropologists. They raise a point that on the Internet, identity can differ, and

although this may create a difference between how a person is seen and behaves in real life and on

the Internet, it is not necessarily a bad thing. The authors use an illustration to portray this, which

adds interest to the article and is a good source of evidence. The illustration shows two dogs, one

using a computer and is annotated with the sentence ‘On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog!’.

Although exaggerated this picture represents that users of the internet can feel more comfortable

with their ‘Online Community’ then they do in their real life one, possibly because they do not fit in.

Therefore making it more of a community, and more worthy of study to anthropologists. However

the authors conclude that tools of anthropological study can apply to ‘Online Communities’, and that

we should use these traditional methods to study them. What the authors are ignoring here is that

even though there are similarities between online and real communities, due to the distance in-

between members and the different methods of communication and interaction witnessed in OnlineCommunities, it would not be possible to use all traditional Anthropological methods of study to

collect and analyse data, and until these methods are developed the authors should recognise it

would be difficult to study Online Communities.