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Online Ethnographies

Online Ethnographies. Supplementary Power Point Slides Social Research Methods, Week 7. Outline:. Online ethnography: When? How? Why? Development of cyberethnographies (since the 1990s)

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Online Ethnographies

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  1. Online Ethnographies Supplementary Power Point Slides Social Research Methods, Week 7

  2. Outline: • Online ethnography: When? How? Why? • Development of cyberethnographies (since the 1990s) • ‘Virtual’ and/or/against ‘real’ ethnography: researcher/researched; community/individuals; space/time, etc. • Ethics and virtual ethnography • Principles of virtual ethnography

  3. Online ethnography: When? How? Why? • An advance of computer-mediated communication and ethnography • Online communications and virtual communities as the object of cyberethnography ‘… the techniques to study any social group should be adapted to its own social and cultural context’ (Guimaraes 2005: 141) BUT what are exactly those contexts for groups which gather in cyberspace? AND what are implications of cyberspace’s dependency on (changing) technology for its ethnography, ethnographers and participants?

  4. Hine's Case for Internet Ethnography Internet ethnography avoids issues of ‘being there’: Generated a 'sample' of web sites through on line search engines Undertook a textual analysis of these sites Undertook email interviews with (a sample of) generators of these sites Analysis of newsgroups Posted messages on these newsgroup sites for respondents for further interviews but had few replies.

  5. Cyberethnographies since the 1990s • Pioneering cyberethnographies (the early 1990s) • Schism between online and offline realties • Primacy of text • Centring on ‘identity play’ • Legitimizing cyberethnographies (the late 1990s) • Cohesiveness between online and offline interactions • Translating offline methodology to online practice • Understanding participants’ perceptions • Multi-modal ethnographies (since the mid-2000s) • Ethnographers as content producers • Face-to-face and virtual interactions – two possibilities (among other forms) of mediated communication

  6. ‘Virtual’ and/or/against ‘real’ ethnography • What are objects of virtual ethnography? And how can they be authentically known? • Participant observation as ‘lurking’? • ‘The informant’ as a partial performance rather than an authentic identity • Authenticity as a topic not a problem of ethnography

  7. Are ‘virtual’ objects of ethnography ‘real’? • ‘Real’ for whom? • It is ‘quite real’ for users/participants • Shifting focus from (‘authentic’) identity to social interaction • Where and how do ‘virtual communities’ exist? • Online ethnography challenges a spatial notion of the ‘field’ and territorially defined ‘community’. • The Internet as a site of mobility. • The field as a field of relations – the space of flows which is organised around connections rather than locations.

  8. What is a context of ‘virtual communities’? • Texts as ethnographic material • Considering particular circumstances of consumption and production of texts ‘The text becomes ethnographically (and socially) meaningful once we have cultural context(s) in which to situate it’ (Hine 2000: 52) • How to be and/or to do an ‘ethnographer’ online? • Producer, consumer, (technology) user • Data collection as data • Danger of ‘going native’ • Reflexivity

  9. Online interview as Computer Mediated Communication A democratic form of exchange? ‘User-friendly’ Race-, gender-, age- and sexuality-blind BUT The effects of presenting 'maleness' on-line Structured interviews do not produce rich data Often misunderstandings of the inquiry’s essence Lack of spontaneity New strategies of visibility

  10. Ethics and virtual ethnography • The problematic notion of privacy: is the Internet a public space? • Covert vs. Overt research: is ‘lurking’ acceptable? • Replicability of online data and protection informant’s identity • New technology and power relationship in the ‘field’

  11. Principles of virtual ethnography 1. The Internet as (i) a way of communication, (ii) object, (iii) site of ‘virtual communities’ 2. The Internet as both culture and cultural artefact (cyberspace dependency on technology) within understood particular context 3. Mobile rather than multi-sited 4. Flow and connectivity as the organizing principles of the ethnographic object 5. ‘Spatial dislocation’ of ethnography

  12. 6. ‘Temporal dislocation’ of ethnography 7. Partial ethnography 8. Reflexive dimension of ethnography: mediated interaction as the source of ethnographer’s insights 9. Absence/presence of informants/ethnographers within the ethnography 10. ‘Adequate for the practical purposes of exploring the relations of mediated interaction…’ (Hine 2000)

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