Virtual Etnography - Christine Hine pag: 62 - 65

To take a connective approach is not to suggest that no bounded locations exist on the Internet, or that the 'being there' is never important on the Internet. As Clifford (1992) and Featherstone (1995) suggest, diverting attention to travel does not mean assuming that everyone is a traveller and nobody dwells any more. This kind of connective ethnography remains agnostic about the 'real' existence of places and categories. Rather than cataloguing the characteristics of Internet communication,· the virtual ethnographer asks, not what is the Internet, but when, where and how is the Internet (Moerman, 1974)? A connective ethnography could be a useful adjunct to space-based approaches. The World Wide Web, as a mixture of varyingly interlinked cultural sites and· cultural connections, could form a model for a new way of orienting an ethnography to the field. This is not to say that web surfing is going to be used to stand in for ethnographic engagement. Following hypertextual links may be part of the strategy, but connectivity is also performed in the borrowing of material and images from other sites and other media, by the authorship and readership of sites, by the portrayals of the Internet in other media, and in myriad other ways. Connection could as well be the juxtaposition of elements in a narrative, the array of pages thrown up by a search engine, or a set of hyperlinks on a web page as an instance of communication between two people. The goal of the ethnography becomes to explore what those links are, how they are performed and what transformations occur en route in a snowballing approach (Bijker, 1995) that insensitive to heterogeneity. Each performance of a connection becomes an invitation to the ethnographer to move on. This suggests an active engagement through exploration and interaction rather than a disengaged textual analysis.

Accepting a multi-sited or connective notion of ethnography opens up many different ways of designing and conducting an ethnographic project. Choices and movements are made on the basis of strategic and often arbitrary decisions, which dictate the shape and boundaries of the resulting ethnographic object. We end up with a multitude of different sites and sources for studying the Internet, even if we rely only on those most obviously and intuitively relevant. A first attempt at cataloguing sites in which the Internet is enacted and interpreted produces the following non­ exhaustive list:

web pages

accounts of making web pages

instructions on how to make web pages

programs to help in making web pages

reviews of web pages

media reports on Internet events

magazine s and newspaper supplements devoted to the Internet

fictionalized accounts of Internet-like technologies

computer equipment retailers

software developers

stock markets

newsgroups

MUDs

IRC

video conferences

accounts of the purpose of newsgroups

Internet service providers' advertising and introductory materials

Internet gateways and search engines

homes and workplaces where the Internet is used, and the practices we find here

training Courses

conversations between friends, families and work colleagues

academic Internet studies like this one.

A holistic understanding of the Internet seems a futile undertaking in the face of this list. However hard the ethnographer works, she or he will only ever partially experience the Internet (Thornton, 1988). The challenge addressed in Chapter 4 is to incorporate as many of these sites and Sources as practicable while retaining a coherent but explicitly partial ethnographic project. What follows is the story of one journey through which an Internet was made, by following connections motivated by the foreshadowed problems in Chapter 1.

The principles of virtual ethnography

'This chapter and the preceding one have reviewed literature on ethno­graphic methodology to develop an approach to the Internet which embraces the complexity offered by this form of mediated interaction. In the next three chapters I attempt to flesh out the conc1usions reached in this literature review by discussing a project designed to put this approach into action. First, however, it is worth reiterating the principles for virtual ethnography which form the foundations for the experiment in ethno­graphy described here.

1.- The sustained presence of an ethnographer in the field setting, com­bined with intensive engagement with the everyday life ofthe inhabitants of the field site, make for the special kind of knowledge we call ethnographic. The ethnographer is able to use this sustained interaction to 'reduce the puzzlement' (Geertz, 1993: 16) which other people's ways of !ife can evoke. At the same time, ethnography can be a device for inducing that same puzzlement by 'displacing the dulling sense of familiarity with which the mysteriousness of our own ability to relate perceptively to one another is concealed from us' (1993: 14). Virtual ethnography is used as a device to render the use of the Internet as problematic: rather than being inherently sensible, the Internet acquires its sensibility in use. The status of the Internet as a way of conmu­nicating, as an object within people's lives and as a site for cornmunity­ like formations is achieved and sustained in the ways in which it is used, interpreted and reinterpreted.

2.- Interactive media provide a challenge and an opportunity for ethno­graphy, by bringing into question the notion of a site of interaction. Cyberspace is not to be thought of as a space detached from any connections to 'real !ife' and face-to-face interaction. It has rich and complex connections with the contexts in which it is used. It also depends on technologies which are used and understood differently in different contexts, and which have to be acquired, learnt, interpreted and incorporated into context. These technologies show a high degree of interpretive flexibility. Interactive media such as the Internet can be understood as both culture and cultural artefact To concentrate on either aspect to the exc1usion of the other leads to an impoverished view.

3.- The growth of mediated interaction renders it unnecessary for ethno- • graphy to be thought of as located in particular places, or even as multisided. The investigation of the making and remaking of space through mediated interactions is a major opportunity for the ethnographic approach. We can usefully think of the ethnography of.mediated inter­action as mobile rather than multi-sited.

4.- As a consequence, the concept of the field site is brought into question.
If culture and community are not self-evidently located in place, then neither is ethnography. The object of ethnographic enquiry can usefully be reshaped by concentrating on flow and connectivity rather than location and boundary as the organizing principle.

5.- Boundaries are not assumed a priori but explored through the course of the ethnography. The challenge of virtual ethnography is to explore the making of boundaries and the making of connections, especially between the 'virtual' and the 'real'. Along with this goes the problem of knowing when to stop. If the concept of ethnography (and/or culture) as having natural boundaries is abandoned for analytic purposes, we can also abandon the idea of a whole ethnography of a given object. Stopping the ethnography becomes a pragmatic decision. The ethno­graphic object itself can be reformulated with each decision to either follow yet another connection or retrace steps to a previous point. Practically it is limited by the embodied ethnographer's constraints in time, space and ingenuity.

6.-. Along with spatial dislocation comes temporal dislocation. Engage­ment with mediated contexts is interspersed with interactions in other spheres and with other media. Virtual ethnography is interstitial, in that it fits into the other activities of both ethnographer and subjects. Irnmersion in the setting is only intermittently achieved.

7.-. Virtual ethnography is necessarily partial!. A holistic description of any informant, location or culture is impossible to achieve. The notion of pre-existing, isolable and describable informants, locales and cultures is set aside. Our accounts can be based on ideas of strategic relevance rather than faithful representations of objective realities.

8.- Virtual ethnography involves intensive engagement with mediated interaction. This kind of engagement adds a new dimension to the exploration of the use of the medium in context. The ethnographer's engagement with the medium is a valuable source of insight. Virtual ethnography can usefully draw on ethnographer as informant and embrace the reflexive dimension. The shaping of interactions with informants by the technology is part of the ethnography, as are the ethnographer's interactions with the technology.

9.- New technologies of interaction make it possible both for informants to be absent and to render them present within the ethnography. In the same way, the ethnographer is both absent from and present with informants. The technology enables these relationships to be fleeting or sustained and to be carried out across temporal and spatial divides. AII forms of interaction are ethnographically valid, not just the face-to face. The shaping of the ethnographic object as it is made possible by the available technologies is the ethnography. This is ethnography in, 01 and through the virtual.

10.- Virtual ethnography is not only virtual in the sense of being disem­bodied. Virtuality also carries a connotation of 'not quite', adequate for practical purposes even if not strictly the real thing (although this definition of virtuality is often suppressed in favour of its trendier alternative). Virtual ethnography is adequate for the practical purpose of exploring the relations of mediated interaction, even if not quite the real thing in methodologically purist terms. It is an adaptive ethno­graphy which sets out to suit itself to the conditions in which it finds itself.

Principles 1 to 9 should follow fairly self-evidently from the discussions of this chapter and the previous one, and follow on from some of the main currents in ethnographic thinking discussed in those chapters. Principle 10, however, probably needs further explanation. Ethnography always has been adaptive to the conditions in which it finds itself. This ma)". help to explain the traditional reluctance of ethnographers to give advice to those about to start fieldwork. There are no sets of rules to follow in order to conduct the perfect ethnography, and defining the fundamental compo­nents of the ethnographic approach is unhelpful. The focus of ethnography