Reading Response 10/28

I was really interested this week with Hine's discussion of ethnography on the Internet as a study of the embedded, embodied, and everyday. I had never thought before of the idea of the field site being a point of contention for anthropologists, and I really like the idea of an a field site as a more amorphous, abstract connection between between people that does not really have a concrete place to point to. In referring to Amit's works, she claims that "it has increasingly been recognized that the field stie is an artful construction rather than something one simply "finds". This recognition opens up a space for discussion of the extent to which the ethnographer exerts agency over the field she chooses to explore." This is very reminiscent to me of something we spoke of in my class on landscape studies with Professor Frachetti. Instead of talking of places, with concrete boundaries that you either physically exist within or outside, we now have the ability to talk about unique networks of people across space and time and focus on particular "internet" behaviors for which we have no frame of reference in the non-virtual world. No longer are we talking specifically about certain people in certain places; with technology, we are able to avail ourselves of an entirely new body of knowledge regarding human behavior. In fact, this chapter makes a point out saying that one has to be more certain of what wants to study in order to flesh out a high quality product, and goes into an interesting consideration of the ramifications of being a social scientist and necessarily keeping a certain degree of public persona in order to glean information as a participant observer, avoiding the guise of a voyeur, which Hine seems to think of as inadequate anthropology.

In Boelstorff's Coming of Age in a Second Life, the author embarks on an emic study describing the ins and outs of Second Life by using this platform as a subject of study in its own right. Interesting to him are the ideas, ways and techniques with which people create their own alternative realities inside of a second "virtual" space, an alternative to when people were solely linked together virtually. He points to the fact that previous studies studied virtual worlds within their "real-world" counterparts and points to 1) the need to study these worlds separately and 2) the need to study them, as Geertz puts it, as "highly particular." Finally, by paying attention to the more mundane aspects of second life creation, we can achieve greater insight into the internal mechanisms and desires affecting decision making, as opposed to solely being events occurring alongside "real life." Is it possible behavior on one of these platforms is indicative of desires, cares, and worries of people outside them?