[Air-L] virtual ethnography and online fieldwork

D.Slater at lse.ac.uk D.Slater at lse.ac.uk
Thu Feb 5 06:19:29 PST 2009


I'd just like to register my complete agreement with Christine's post which is, as always, both sensible and sophisticated. The only slip I've ever noted was her unfortunate choice of the title of her first book. I think we've always agreed on her two central points, below: first, that 'virtuality', like the off-line/online distinction, is the variable social accomplishments of particular actors, which might be performed differently in different settings, or be largely absent and irrelevant (as in the Miller and Slater Trinidad book). I'd only add a political dimension to this: the northern academic presumption that virtuality is an intrinsic property of some new machines acts to frame all research within this analytic so that we are incited to study virtuality, or within the agenda of virtuality, rather than to ethnographically discover how actors frame and perform their use of these new machines (and rejecting the notion of virtuality is just as ethnographically and analytically senseless). Having worked over the last ten years in non-northern settings, and in development contexts, it became very clear to me how politically important - and potentially neo-colonial - are the framings and concerns that we might impose on other people and the technologies we export to them: virtuality, and cognates such as cyberculture, are so clearly a projection of internal northern debates about identity, community, connection, reality, etc, articulated through specficially northern intellectual traditions such as poststructuralism and performativity. Time to stop projecting our dramas onto everyone else and start looking at what they are doing and saying. And we need to do this not only in order to do better research but also in order to ensure that alternative uses and understandings of new technologies are actually allowed to emerge and be valorized. There are clearly issues of power involved here.

The same obviously goes for research within northern contexts. My own recent encounters with Second Life have underlined this: it is patently absurd to agaonize in teh abstract about the virtuality of this setting when the talk and interactions of participants themselves almost obsessively concerns how to define the field and its relationship to other segments of their lives and practices. People constantly discuss this, it is part of their negotiations in defining places and relationships, they resolve the issues in myriad different directions, which also change over time and over the course of relationships, businesses, subcultures, etc. At one extreme there is the 'don't ask me about my first life because it has nothing to do with my second'; at the other extreme, people's profiles contain photos of their real world selves, and no boundary is constructed between 1st and 2nd life. What is interesting is how, when and why people give such dfferent boundaries to their digital practices, what affrodances they deploy to effect and reproduce these boundaries (in the process reconfiguring the medium in often consequnteial ways), and how they change over time and situations. Asserting 'virtuality' as a methodological or substantive presumption is not only daft and obscurantist, it also misses precisely what is interesting. Particularly for sociologists - Danny and my book may be substantively dated in some respects, but the underlying question goes back rather further: W I Thomas could be argued to have come up with the first definition of virtuality in 1928 in his famous interactionist slogan, 'If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences'. Clearly it is not only online that a researcher has to understand definitions of reality as social and variable.

The second point follows immediately from the first - if virtuality is a (research) topic rather than a (analytical/methodological) resource, a framing accomplished by actors rather than by analysts, then - as Christine rightly says - we are back in the terrain of classic ethnography and 'following the actors'. If we happen to follow them into a more bounded virtual space, then we will certainly need different technical fieldwork tools and need to pay attention to the specific conditions under which speech and action may be accomplished - but what else has any decent ethnographer ever done, anywhere? Ethnography is both difficult, creative and - to my mind - the only game in town precisely because you have to make it up as you go along in response to the specific demands of the settings which your actors are constructing. In my recollection, the only real difference between Christine's book and Danny Miller and my book was that she constructively focused on fashioning the tools needed if one does follow the actors into more online/bounded spaces; whereas our book was more concerned to contest the universal applicability of virtuality as a methodological framing, and we therefore (possibly) overstated continuities with classical ethnography, as if the online settings (which we also looked at extensively - Trinidadian websites and chat) made no difference methodologically. These are merely differences of polemical intention and research pragmatics.

don

_______________________________________________
Don Slater
Reader in Sociology, 
Doctoral Programme Director, Sociology
London School of Economics
Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE
Tel: +44 (020) 7849 4653
Fax: +44 (020) 7955 7405
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-----Original Message-----
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of CHRISTINE HINE
Sent: 05 February 2009 11:15
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: [Air-L] virtual ethnography and online fieldwork

I’ve been following the discussions on virtual ethnography with interest, and sorry to have been too snowed under (literally and metaphorically) to contribute until now. I think I agree with a lot of what Pearse has said. I did commit ethnographic sins in Virtual Ethnography and in later work I’ve tried to rectify some of them in some of the directions that Pearse advocates. The actual fieldwork in the original book was pretty thin, but I’d stand by most of the theoretical/methodological discussion in which I tried to argue that ethnography needed to be adaptive to new forms of connection and circumstance and take online interactions seriously, but not to assume in advance that any online setting constituted a bounded cultural whole. Miller and Slater argued similarly, with better fieldwork, that one shouldn’t assume the existence of a “virtual” in advance. 

Actually, I never meant “virtual ethnography” in my usage to imply ethnography performed only in the virtual arena. In the original book I talked about the old-fashioned meaning of virtual, as implying that something was good enough for practical purposes, or virtually the real thing, and I used that to index the need for creative adaptations of method in the face of new circumstances. I wonder now whether we need the label "virtual ethnography" at all? The embedding of internet etc in everyday life seems to me to imply that any ethnographer might be led online by the cultural connections that they follow, and it seems not good ethnography to place fieldwork boundaries according to the medium that happens to be used. Following that line of thought, has “virtual ethnography” simply collapsed back into “ethnography”?

That having been said, there are certainly some fieldwork practices that are a bit different in online settings, and some tips and tricks of the trade to make it easier. The late cyberanthropologist Mario Guimaraes described some of the ways that he organized his collections of logfiles, screenshots and field diaries when carrying out fieldwork in The Palace. A short paper of his on this subject is available at http://www.websm.org/uploadi/editor/doingonlineethnography.pdf
I learned a lot from Mario’s organized approach to these practices – although I never managed to be that organized myself. 

Best wishes,
Christine

 Christine Hine
Department of Sociology
University of Surrey
Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK
http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/ 
staff/chine/
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