[Air-L] virtual ethnography and online fieldwork

John Postill jpostill at usa.net
Tue Feb 10 09:39:28 PST 2009


There is so much to digest and reflect upon in Don Slater's detailed response
to my post about suburban internet practices and ethnographic research that
I'll just take up briefly his third point about the notion of 'practice',
namely:

> 
> 3. Does the idea that suburbs have some similar properties (and
> therefore (?) comparable internet practices) in Kuala Lumpur and Toronto
> necessitate recourse to concepts of macro structure and global
> processes? Don't think so, in which case I'm not that bothered. I've
> probably got a very complicated process to unravel, and vast range of
> contingencies to track, so that I can see how these similar properties
> might arise from similar architectural and spatial arrangements,
> work/life relations, domestic arrangements (nuclear family?), class
> cultures, the practices of transnational corporations, and so on. And
> on, and on. Many of us have found the notion of 'practice' very useful
> in many of these studies as it posits an elementary unit of analysis
> that embraces so many features of a social setting without reducing them
> to structures. 
> 

I wholly agree with Don's practice-theoretical stance, which is the one I've
adopted in my own recent work (synthesised with field theory). There is no
need to resort to 'concepts of macro structure and global processes' to
account for the emergence of analogous internet-related practices in
geographically remote localities, in this particular case practices related to
residential activism in middle-class suburbs. Given roughly equivalent issues
on the ground (traffic, schools, crime, etc) suburban people in different
parts of the world will come up with similar (internet) practices to address
them - these local processes and the resulting practices are analogous but
independent from one another. Of course, from a comparative perspective the
contrasts are as interesting as the similarities. 

I think of local residential politics as being an L-shaped Bourdieuan field of
practice, with the vertical axis (= subfield) representing the three tiers of
government (four in EU countries), and the horizontal axis representing the
non-governmental subfield of residential activism, a subfield increasingly
mediated by internet and mobile technologies. I hope this can be a way around
the macro-micro problem mentioned by Don. Internet-related practices sustain
this resilient L-shaped field: they may allow for more fluid and egalitarian
interactions among leading residents, but they do not alter the
vertical/hierarchical subfield of government.   

John

Dr John Postill
Senior Lecturer in Media
Sheffield Hallam University
Sheffield S11 8UZ
United Kingdom
j.postill at shu.ac.uk
http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/





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