[Air-L] Virtual Ethnography and CyberAnthropology

[Pearse Stokes]

Hello everyone!

I'm getting lots of emails about this discussion and it seems I am not 
the only one enjoying it!

Thank you Paul Emerson Teusner for you're interesting message, 
especially this piece: "Sue Thomas has also written another theory of 
the cyborg as one who - rather than looking at the Internet to see the 
world - is one whom the world sees by looking at the Internet." Yes it 
makes perfect sense to me and I'll check out the other authors you 
mentioned as well!!

Christine Hine, in my humble opinion the "ethnographic sins in Virtual 
Ethnography" are few and far between. Especially considering when you 
wrote it. I loved the multi-sited approach (as you spanned not just 
virtual cultural flows) and think it was way ahead of its time. This 
discussion was born out of recommendations for a 'virtual ethnography' 
syllabus and as I said in response to that "I consider [Virtual 
Ethnography] to be way ahead of its time in terms of the other books 
that were emerging at the time and actually still pretty current." And 
it definitely informed my own research.

My response to "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??" is: Exactly!

Don Slater, again looking back at 'The Internet: An Ethnographic 
Approach" it is clear just how much the web has changed and the 
difficulties encountered by researchers. Again, this makes it an 
excellent addition to a 'virtual ethnography' syllabus. However, what I 
feel is the most interesting and most overlooked aspect of this book is 
its focused approach. That is to say, so much 'internet research' or 
virtual ethnography conceives of 'the' internet, rather than 'a' 
specific internet experienced by a specific group of people (in this 
case Trinidadians [Is that the correct term?]). As we must know by now, 
people experience the internet in a variety of ways, unique ways and 
often exclusive ways. Therefore we must confine our research to specific 
'internets'. The Internet: An Ethnographic approach is one of the few 
early texts that explicitly does this. I suppose this approach stems 
from a good 'ethnographic' approach which is sympathetic to the research 
site, rather than rigid in the assumptions the researcher may hold, as 
outlined by the following:

"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."

So far in the debate I have had a kind of vendetta against 'virtual 
ethnography' but only as it is commonly and sloppily conceived (which is 
certainly not always the case). Often times, 'virtual ethnography' is 
merely 'participant observation'. Even if we decide that the research 
may be 'ethnographic' but the write-up not an ethnography, still, the 
term ethnographic should relate to some kind of immersion in the 
culture. Obviously we can not claim to be fully immersed in a virtual 
fieldwork, so in order to conduct ethnographic fieldwork relating to the 
internet I think we need to develop new shapes of the internet and new 
site locations for each research project. After all, that is what good 
ethnographic research does. As I alluded to before, if Malinowski had 
confined his research to one Island he would have missed the 'Kula Ring'.

So, outside of performing good research this discussion leaves us with 
some terminological disputes. I know I consciously move back and fourth 
between using and criticising terms like 'virtual', usually out of 
convenience and sometimes to make specific points. However, I think any 
syllabus on 'virtual ethnography' should include an awareness of how the 
site has changed, how we conceive of the site has changed, what are the 
important changes researchers observe in their own work and an awareness 
of the limitations and implications of certain terms, like "cyber" or 
"virtual".

Pearse