[Air-L] virtual ethnography and online fieldwork

John Postill jpostill at usa.net
Fri Feb 6 03:42:17 PST 2009


My own experience of doing ethnographic fieldwork on internet and residential
politics in a suburb of Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) chimes with Don Slater's
account of the open-ended and muddling through nature of ethnographic
research. Early during field research I was queried by a Swedish political
scientist about what exactly I meant by 'local governance', since that seemed
to be a key element of my research strategy. To his frustration, my reply will
be familiar to other ethnographers - that it was still early days and I would
have to see what local activists, residents, politicians, etc, made of this
notion, if anything, and see where the research led me before even deciding
whether this notion was even applicable to the actualities on the ground. As
it happened, my findings led me in other directions. 

This muddling through can also reveal unexpected parallels in internet-related
practices across vast geographical stretches, sometimes cutting across the
North-South divide mentioned by Don Slater. For example, I didn't set out to
study suburbia but it turns out that the internet uses by local activists in
suburban Kuala Lumpur are not that dissimilar to those in other suburbs (e.g.
of Toronto, Melbourne and Tel Aviv) - they are all shaped by the imperative to
build and sustain an environment conducive to the reproduction of middle-class
nuclear families. 

This is all very different from the kind of young urban transnational activism
described by Juris (2008) in his recent monograph Networked Futures, based on
ethnographic research among Barcelona-based antiglobalisation activists. 

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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