[Air-l] question about cyberspace ethnography literature

[Alireza Doostdar]

Dear AoIRs,

I'm in the process of revising a paper I've submitted to the American
Anthropologist about blogging in Iran, which I've titled "'The Vulgar
Spirit of Blogging': On Language, Culture, and Power in Persian
Weblogestan". My ethnographic research consisted in part of maintaining
a Persian-language blog where I wrote observations and commentary on a
debate that was raging among many Iranian bloggers at the time on
"vulgar" linguistic and cultural practices, and where I engaged in
conversations with other bloggers. In my paper, I reflect on my methods
of drawing attention to my own words on my blog (through hyperlinking,
explicitly invoking other people's blog entries, sending trackback
pings, making provocative statements, etc) so as to get comments from
other people, and I analyze these methods within a larger context of
communicative practices by bloggers who write to be noticed and who need
to be noticed in order to be read. Based on this and other analyses, I
conceptualize blogging (in the Persian language at least) as an emergent
speech genre (in the Bakhtinian sense) that draws on various on- and
off-line genres of speech.

One of my reviewers has asked that I situate my intensively engaged
ethnographic method within a literature of cyberspace ethnography that
discusses such engagement (and other methods, like lurking) and the
relevant theoretical and ethical issues. I already have several pieces I
can use, including Christine Hine's "Virtual Ethnography" and David
Hakken's "Cyborgs at Cyberspace?". I would TREMENDOUSLY appreciate pointers
on other relevant literature, preferably things I can get my hands on
fast, as my revisions are due by Monday!

Thank you in advance,

-Alireza