[Air-L] virtual ethnography

laetitia le chatton laetitia.lechatton at gmail.com
Sat Jan 31 01:52:50 PST 2009


Hi,
thank you all for precious advices

Hine's book reporsts:
“Given an accessible field site, an ethnographer could follow the  
progress of development of a web site and explore the interpretation  
of those involved as to the capacities of the technology and the  
identity being addressed. This analysis could be combined with an  
analysis of the content of the resulting website” (Hine ,2000, p51)
I am very interested by the problem  Scott just stressed but I don't  
see here any sin reported. Virtual refers to a target point where we  
can find webcontent ( a website) and if she speacks about networks of  
texts, the citation above puches me to interpret it as the meaning  
informants could made of it.  (See the chapter where she discusses the  
controversy between "internet as a culture or cultural artefact", or  
more precisely p50 the subchapter "text, technology and reflexivity")


Le 31 janv. 09 à 01:18, Pearse Stokes a écrit :

> Hi,
>
> I just thought I'd add the following.
>
> Firstly, I'm not sure Miller & Slatter perform any kind of 'virtual  
> ethnography' in the strict sense in 'The Internet: An Ethnographic  
> Approach' and generally I think it's massively dated.
> The key text from the 90s would be Hine's Virtual Ethnography and  
> Hakken's Cyborgs at Cyberspace. I consider Hine's to be way ahead of  
> its time in terms of the other books that were emerging at the time  
> and actually still pretty current.
>
> My problem with Virtual Ethnography is that it commits the cardinal  
> sin of bad ethnography; It takes a preconceived notion and attempts  
> to graft that method onto a new research site. Also, I believe the  
> dichotomy of virtual and real is a false one. Furthermore, it  
> retains the anthropological stance of the researcher, and 'the  
> other'. It places the web firmly 'in there' (inside the box or  
> across a 'network of networks') and I argue that it most definitely  
> does not exist in there and that the term virtual is nothing more  
> than a convenience.
>
> More recently Virtual Ethnography or Netnography or webnography, are  
> performed primarily in the commercial arena, with Puri's Web of  
> Insight as a sort of handbook (available here: http://lk.nielsen.com/documents/WebofInsightsPaperMay07.pdf)
>
> Further, if you consult recent articles that claim to perform  
> virtual 'ethnography' generally they perform 'participant  
> observation' without actually 'writing the culture' (the 'graphy' in  
> ethnography). An example would be boyd's 'Why Youth (heart) Social  
> Networking sites' ... an extended period of 'deep And for the most  
> part virtual ethnography is just interviews and qualitative  
> analysis. Which isn't ethnography.
>
> I think cyber anthropology is a better direction than virtual  
> ethnography. Anyway, thats just my feed back,
>
> Good luck!
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:25:51 -0600
> From: scott at scottmacleod.com
> Subject: Re: [Air-L] virtual ethnography
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org, mathias.fuchs at creativegames.org.uk
> Message-ID:
> 	<S362488AbZA2XZv/20090129232551Z+60567 at ams10.chi.affinity.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Here's a MIT OCW "Ethnography" course - http://tinyurl.com/dg32zg  
> (also http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Science--Technology--and-Society/STS-360Ethnograph 
>  ySpring2003/Calendar/index.htm) - but not on virtual ethnography.
>
> In a related vein, I'm looking for a "Virtual Ethnography" syllabus  
> from MIT, Cal, Stanford, Cambridge, Ivy League schools, the  
> Sorbonne, University of Munich, University of Chicago, etc. Are  
> there any syllabi out there that you know of on "Virtual  
> Ethnography" vis-a-vis MIT's above?
> Scott
> scottmacleod.com
>
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