The New Frontier

Our readings for this week introduce us to the study of the online world. These readings give us a foundation on which to begin understanding the space created by new technologies and the emergent social structures and cultures that are produced in/through/with the use of this new virtual terrain.

The chapter from Christine Hine's book that we read, 3: Ethnographic Strategies for the Embedded, Embodied, Everyday Internet, gives ethnographers more to think about when considering research about the internet. She challenges anthropologists to stay true to a holistic view by being open to the "unanticipated aspects of meaning making". Hine looks at the way that the internet complicates the traditional conception of an ethnographic field site. She suggests that researchers adopt an understanding of mobile and multi-sited fields. Hine also addresses the question of how involved should a researcher get. In anthropology there have been questions about the benefits and harms of "going native" and thereby losing objectivity; however, Hine argues that learning-by-doing is advantageous for research of the internet because in taking an autoethnograpic approach, it "allows for the very individualized nature of engagement with a reality constituted though various forms of mediated and localized face-to-face interaction and material context to be explored in a far greater degree of depth than can be achieved by asking other participants for retrospective accounts alone or from simply observing what they do". Research of the internet challenges traditional forms and strategies of ethnographic research and forces anthropologists to push their openness and explore the uniqueness of new spaces created online. Tom Boellstroff's ethnography of Second Life is, as he argues, entirely human. He is concerned with the ways in which virtual worlds encapsulate human culture. Boellstroff builds off of Castronova' definition of a "virtual world": any computer-generated physical space...that can be experienced by man people at once; places, inhabited by people, enabled by online technologies. He is concerned with cybersociality and the creation of a virtual third place. He builds off of traditional, foundational anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, and argues that, in the same vein as Hine, the everyday life of this virtual space should be paid attention to as a product and producer of human culture.

I think that these readings are very helpful as we begin our second ethnographic assignment. It forces us to think like anthropologists, removing ourselves from our own biases and understandings of what culture should look like, and forces us to explore a new space on the terms of those who occupy it. What is interesting is how this space, this form of interaction, offline to online, from one site to another, complicates the practice of participant observation. To understand the holistic experience of virtual worlds, it seems that it is necessary to become apart of it. Is this really research or does it cross into the territory of a personal memoir/exposé? Is the necessarily a bad thing to have the enthographer so engrained in the process? I don't think its that big of an issue, but as always there needs to be a balance of voices and views.