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@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@scottmacleod.com Subject: Re: [Air-L] virtual ethnography To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org, mathias.fuchs@creativegames.org.uk Message-ID: <S362488AbZA2XZv/20090129232551Z+60567@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