Hi All, Jenny Ryan has begun a Webnographer's Wiki: http://www.webnographers.org/index.php?title=Main_Page Here's the gist: Webnographers: Resources for Virtual Ethnography The Gist: Cyberanthropology is but a fetal field, far from defined. This website was developed in the interest of providing a central hub for those interested in ethnographies of the internet. Created by and for webnographers, its success in contingent on your participation. Ethnography is not constrained solely to anthropologists, and indeed the barriers that divide the various social sciences are at once arbitrary and collapsible. Any individual interested in the complex social, cultural, and psychological facets of humans relating with and through the internet is encouraged to join in this nascent community. Webnographers unite! PLEASE PARTICIPATE :) Scott http://scottmacleod.com Pearse Stokes writes:

Hello everyone!

I'm getting lots of emails about this discussion and it seems I am not the only one enjoying it!

Thank you Paul Emerson Teusner for you're interesting message, especially this piece: "Sue Thomas has also written another theory of the cyborg as one who - rather than looking at the Internet to see the world - is one whom the world sees by looking at the Internet." Yes it makes perfect sense to me and I'll check out the other authors you mentioned as well!!

Christine Hine, in my humble opinion the "ethnographic sins in Virtual Ethnography" are few and far between. Especially considering when you wrote it. I loved the multi-sited approach (as you spanned not just virtual cultural flows) and think it was way ahead of its time. This discussion was born out of recommendations for a 'virtual ethnography' syllabus and as I said in response to that "I consider [Virtual Ethnography] to be way ahead of its time in terms of the other books that were emerging at the time and actually still pretty current." And it definitely informed my own research.

My response to "I wonder now whether we need the label "virtual ethnography" at all? The embedding of internet etc in everyday life seems to me to imply that any ethnographer might be led online by the cultural connections that they follow, and it seems not good ethnography to place fieldwork boundaries according to the medium that happens to be used. Following that line of thought, has ?virtual ethnography? simply collapsed back into ?ethnography??" is: Exactly!

Don Slater, again looking back at 'The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach" it is clear just how much the web has changed and the difficulties encountered by researchers. Again, this makes it an excellent addition to a 'virtual ethnography' syllabus. However, what I feel is the most interesting and most overlooked aspect of this book is its focused approach. That is to say, so much 'internet research' or virtual ethnography conceives of 'the' internet, rather than 'a' specific internet experienced by a specific group of people (in this case Trinidadians [Is that the correct term?]). As we must know by now, people experience the internet in a variety of ways, unique ways and often exclusive ways. Therefore we must confine our research to specific 'internets'. The Internet: An Ethnographic approach is one of the few early texts that explicitly does this. I suppose this approach stems from a good 'ethnographic' approach which is sympathetic to the research site, rather than rigid in the assumptions the researcher may hold, as outlined by the following:

"Having worked over the last ten years in non-northern settings, and in development contexts, it became very clear to me how politically important - and potentially neo-colonial - are the framings and concerns that we might impose on other people and the technologies we export to them: virtuality, and cognates such as cyberculture, are so clearly a projection of internal northern debates about identity, community, connection, reality, etc, articulated through specficially northern intellectual traditions such as poststructuralism and performativity. Time to stop projecting our dramas onto everyone else and start looking at what they are doing and saying. And we need to do this not only in order to do better research but also in order to ensure that alternative uses and understandings of new technologies are actually allowed to emerge and be valorized."

So far in the debate I have had a kind of vendetta against 'virtual ethnography' but only as it is commonly and sloppily conceived (which is certainly not always the case). Often times, 'virtual ethnography' is merely 'participant observation'. Even if we decide that the research may be 'ethnographic' but the write-up not an ethnography, still, the term ethnographic should relate to some kind of immersion in the culture. Obviously we can not claim to be fully immersed in a virtual fieldwork, so in order to conduct ethnographic fieldwork relating to the internet I think we need to develop new shapes of the internet and new site locations for each research project. After all, that is what good ethnographic research does. As I alluded to before, if Malinowski had confined his research to one Island he would have missed the 'Kula Ring'.

So, outside of performing good research this discussion leaves us with some terminological disputes. I know I consciously move back and fourth between using and criticising terms like 'virtual', usually out of convenience and sometimes to make specific points. However, I think any syllabus on 'virtual ethnography' should include an awareness of how the site has changed, how we conceive of the site has changed, what are the important changes researchers observe in their own work and an awareness of the limitations and implications of certain terms, like "cyber" or "virtual".

Pearse

_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/