Reading reflections, Mar. 30th

In the chapters of Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method, the authors discussed some methodological issues related to the design of virtual ethnography research and specifically the methods of participant observation and interviews in virtual ethnography research. Regarding the design of virtual ethnography research, they discussed the questions to ask, the fieldsite to study, as well as the connections between online and offline worlds. The authors pointed out that virtual ethnography research usually involves multiple sites or communities that are connected with each other, whereas in traditional ethnography research the fieldsite is usually discrete with a certain boundary.  In addition, the authors pointed out that in some virtual worlds the counting of virtual world populations can be problematic because of how accounts are set up. Indeed, I think the degree to which an account is tied to the person behind the account varies across virtual platforms. For example, in my opinion, on Facebook each account is usually associated with one single person, and a person is usually behind only one account, despite some cases of fake accounts. But in some gaming platforms, it could be more likely that one person owns and uses more than one account, and so the population counted in the platform may not represent the real number of people involved in this platform accurately, as the authors pointed out in the case of Second Life. Another aspect of virtual world research emphasized by the authors, which I am also very interested in exploring, is how virtual world and virtual connections are embedded in and influencing the real world and real-world connections. For example, a concern many people have regarding social media is that the prevalence of virtual communications may mitigate people's need for real-world communications. Another example would be online-to-offline marketing.