question about cyberspace ethnography literature
Dear AoIRs, I'm in the process of revising a paper I've submitted to the American Anthropologist about blogging in Iran, which I've titled "'The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging': On Language, Culture, and Power in Persian Weblogestan". My ethnographic research consisted in part of maintaining a Persian-language blog where I wrote observations and commentary on a debate that was raging among many Iranian bloggers at the time on "vulgar" linguistic and cultural practices, and where I engaged in conversations with other bloggers. In my paper, I reflect on my methods of drawing attention to my own words on my blog (through hyperlinking, explicitly invoking other people's blog entries, sending trackback pings, making provocative statements, etc) so as to get comments from other people, and I analyze these methods within a larger context of communicative practices by bloggers who write to be noticed and who need to be noticed in order to be read. Based on this and other analyses, I conceptualize blogging (in the Persian language at least) as an emergent speech genre (in the Bakhtinian sense) that draws on various on- and off-line genres of speech. One of my reviewers has asked that I situate my intensively engaged ethnographic method within a literature of cyberspace ethnography that discusses such engagement (and other methods, like lurking) and the relevant theoretical and ethical issues. I already have several pieces I can use, including Christine Hine's "Virtual Ethnography" and David Hakken's "Cyborgs@Cyberspace?". I would TREMENDOUSLY appreciate pointers on other relevant literature, preferably things I can get my hands on fast, as my revisions are due by Monday! Thank you in advance, -Alireza
I hope I didn't miss somebody mentioning this book.... Miller / Slater: The Internet. An ethnographic approach. It has bits and pieces on methodology and is a worthwhile read for the subject matter.. best nilz -- Dr. Nils Zurawski Universität Hamburg Inst. für kriminologische Sozialforschung Allendeplatz 1 20146 Hamburg Germany tel. +49 (0) 40 42838 6185 fax. +49 (0) 40 42838 2328 Projekt zu Videoüberwachung: http://www.uni-muenster.de/PeaCon/zurawski/ueberwachung
participants (2)
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Alireza Doostdar -
Nils Zurawski