[Air-L] virtual ethnography and online fieldwork

[Radhika Gajjala]

Just to chime in - stuff that has already been said in different ways ...

Ethnography is not complete until we look at multiple angles - online,
offline, local, global, private, public, individual, group

and look at how contexts shift notions of space, place, community, networks,
cultures and so on...

This is why talking of just "virtual" or "cyber" ethnography as removed from
offline everyday life is problematic (and this discussion thread has
rehearsed that over and over)

Having said that - perhaps what needs to be clearly articulated is the
starting point - the point of entry.

When talking of community to my NGO activist collaborators online social
networks and "virtual community" sometimes becomes irrelevant and even
frivolous and - yet some of the processes of community formation and
collective organization in such groups resembles what those who inhabit
online/offline intersections. I would not understand this if I restricted
myself to just studying online/offline intersections of just doing fully
"cyber" ethnographies...

radhika

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http://personal.bgsu.edu/~radhik