[Air-L] Virtual ethnography and online fieldwork

[tboellst at uci.edu]

This is my first post to this list, so hopefully I won’t mess it up!

As an utter newbie to this list, it’s interesting to see so many
discussions of “virtual ethnography,” “cyber anthropology,” whatever you
want to call it. I share Christine’s sense of being snowed under (I am
enjoying very much being Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, but
the workload is quite extraordinary, particularly when teaching three
courses, as I am at the present!). However, I did want to take a couple
minutes to respond to the postings about “virtual ethnography and online
fieldwork,” particularly the recent posting from Don Slater. As is the
case with Christine, I’ve never yet had the honor of meeting Don, though
his work has influenced mine greatly and I teach with it often. Don’s
impassioned posting is, as always, insightful, but there’s a bit of the
baby getting thrown out with the bathwater so to speak, and I want to make
a case for not closing the door on certain kinds of ethnographic research
topics and methods.

Don is absolutely right when stating 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).

Online we encounter a range of social formations that vary in the ways
they are linked up to actual-world contexts. Sometimes the link is quite
direct, as in the case examined in the Trinidad book, or in my colleague
Victoria Bernal’s work on Eritreans online, and so on. One of my graduate
students, Robert Phillips, has just completed a fascinating dissertation
on gay Singaporeans’ use of the Internet that fits into this rough genre
of work as well. There are all kinds of social formations “in between”
(though it’s too multidimensional for “in between” to really make sense).

And then another genre or type of social formation that we can study
ethnographically is online games or virtual worlds whose connection to the
actual world is much more indirect in terms of reference or community. The
majority of persons who participate in Eritrean diasporic websites are
themselves Eritrean (though we don’t know 100% for sure of course, and
there are migrants, children of migrants, etc., that complexify
designations like “Eritrean”). In a virtual world like Second Life, where
I’ve conducted a lot of ethnographic fieldwork, the connection to the
actual world is more indirect. There are things like avatars with
humanlike bodies, grass and water, social norms of facing someone you talk
to, and a thousand other examples of indirect linkage, and some cases of
residents who know each other in the actual world prior to involvement in
Second Life (siblings, friends, spouses, etc.) or who meet in the actual
world after becoming close in Second Life. But the majority of social
interaction and meaning-making that takes place “inworld” is not directly
predicated on actual-world sociality. If I and my friend Joe in Sydney
have a conversation in Second Life one day, that conversation is
predicated on us both having physical bodies, Internet access, and so on,
but it’s not true that the content and meaning of the conversation (and
our social actions inworld, etc.) is only comprehensible to a researcher
if that researcher books flights to Los Angeles and Sydney so as to talk
to us in the physical world.

This has really interesting and I think significant implications for
method as well as theory. As I discuss in Coming of Age in Second Life,
having written two books on gay Indonesians I’ve been fascinated to see
both similarities and differences in how I’ve had to conduct ethnographic
research in physical-world and online contexts. The political dimensions
to all of this are important, but I do think they are more complex than
Don presents them (although we are basically in agreement):

>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.

There are absolutely issues of power here, but they are multivalent and
complex. Having worked in non-northern settings for 17 years, I can state
quite emphatically that virtuality and cognates like cyberculture are not
so clearly a projection of internal northern debates. The potential for
neo-colonial thinking runs both ways here. In fact, historically colonial
thought worked in essence to preserve “virtuality” as the prerogative of
the colonizer, through what Mamdani terms “the spatial containerization of
the native.” In particular, a notion of “virtuality” was a threat to
colonial power because it could lead to the “imagined community” (in
Anderson’s classic phrasing) of nationalism that directly challenged
colonial rule. (In this quick example the notion of “virtuality” isn’t the
same as in “virtual world,” but there is a shared history, and
additionally I could talk about the fascinating ways persons in
non-northern settings use online spaces, including creating their own
virtual worlds!)

So projecting of dramas can take multiple forms, and Don is certainly
right we should be vigilant, but part of that vigilance is to not assume a
single form of that “drama,” or that the category of “internal northern”
is clearly definable -- particularly if it presumes an analogous “internal
non-northern.” I’ve certainly had many conversations over the years where
gay Indonesians (that is, Indonesians using what at first glance appears
to be the English term “gay”) find it interesting to discuss where the
“internal”-ness of their sexual subjectivities begins and ends!

To me the key thing is to keep the theoretical and methodological doors
open as we research this broad, broad range of new ethnographic domains.
Don’s entirely right that “Asserting 'virtuality' as a methodological or
substantive presumption is not only daft and obscurantist, it also misses
precisely what is interesting” – so the point is to explore the forms
virtuality takes and follow that moving target. Don’t assume it, but also
don’t assume it’s fake, a projection of northern academic fashion, etc.
Don hits on precisely this point when stating that:

>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.

In fact, I don’t think Don and Danny overstated continuities with
classical ethnography at all: I think their book is very well crafted
theoretically and methodologically to respond to what they were looking
at. It’s that kind of sensitivity and flexibility that to my mind
characterizes the best ethnographic work, whether I encounter it as
Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, among the work of my
colleagues working in Indonesia studies, or among my colleagues working in
the ethnography of virtual worlds or other aspects of Internet culture.

What seems clear to me is that there are many contexts in which
researchers must explore various direct interfaces and interchanges
between online and offline culture, which in some cases will demand
meeting people in the physical world in addition to meeting them online.
But it is also clear that there now are (and will continue to be in the
future) contexts in which forms of society and culture appear online, in
online games, virtual worlds, and other things too. These forms of society
and culture are obviously shaped by physical-world societies and cultures
in many ways, but the persons interacting within the online societies and
cultures in question will in most cases meet few (or even none) of each
other offline, and it does an ethnographic injustice to that situation to
assume that all ethnographic research on online culture must include
meeting one’s interlocutor’s in the physical world. In some cases (and for
some research questions) it will make sense, but in other cases it will
not. Any approach can be done well or badly, and all have something
important to contribute.

All the best, Tom Boellstorff