1. Supplementary Power Point Slides Social Research Methods, Week 11
Online Ethnographies
Supplementary Power Point Slides
Social Research Methods, Week 11

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 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 9

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)