Selon Pearse Stokes <pearsestokes@gmail.com>:
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.
About the "graphy" part of "virtual ethnography", i can't agree with your statement of impossibility. But i agree about the issue, and above all if you mean it literally, if by "graphy" you mean "visual". I see it as an open question today, a state of art, and our responsability to go further. For exemple, more than the quantitative / qualitative debate or articulation, it seems to me more fruitful to think about the role of museography when qualitative methods where created, and about the extended use by "ancient" anthroplogists of maps, plans, and other sketchs and drawings, as they were too in the "travel diary" tradition. For exemple, to achieve a better description of the ties in the Internet network - writing is very poor to account for their complexity; i found usefull to use some tools to map them. These maps were built to complement descriptions. It's a necessity, because, even when you describe precisely how participants find their way, without a map it's not clear for the reader how such "short views" (participants views are "shorts", they are "for practical matters") could build together a "shared space" or "social webspace". My point is, i really believe in virtual ethnography, because social sciences really need these accounts about the ways people not only "act" but find their ways out there. (Actually, i can send my recently publish paper about that very question, but in French. English conterparts are not ready yet.) Regards, Manuel Boutet Centre Maurice Halbwachs (CMH) http://www.cmh.ens.fr/ http://manuel.boutet.free.fr