Ethnography and the Internet

Ethnography has long been used to understand online communities and mediated practices. Some early examples include Elizabeth Reid’s (1991) examination of IRC and Nancy Baym’s (1993) study of the community and practices in a Usenet newsgroup about soap operas. While humanists began

mapping out a vision of cyberculture (Haraway 1991b; Stone 1995), ethnographers focused on cultural practices under way. Much of cybertheory was branded techno-utopian by ethnographers because it focused on how the Internet could free people from their corporeal limitations (Stone 1995), their social restraints (Turkle 1995), and the political regimes that regulated them (Barlow 1996). Ethnographers argued that such visions might be a guiding light, but they did not reflect how people actually experienced mediated life. Lori Kendall (2002) documented how people who engaged in online forums create online representations that bear close

resemblance to their offline selves; she showed how social constructs like gender are reproduced and reinforced online. Jenny Sundén (2003) further challenged the disembodiment rhetoric by showing how the body plays a crucial role in people’s mediated experiences. She argued that neither “postmodern utopianism (the online world as disengaged from the physical)” nor “realistic determinism (the online world as a copy of the ‘real’)” quite get at the ways in which online identities extend the physical while also being configured by the digital (Sundén 2003: 109). Kendall and Sundén—and their contemporaries—acknowledge that mediating technologies alter

the role of bodies and identity, but they challenge early cyber-utopian visions of the Internet as providing freedom from traditional physical constraints.

As ethnographies of mediated practices emerged, scholars began struggling with the relationship between online and offline contexts, both theoretically and

methodologically. Some viewed the Internet as a new kind of “third place” with its own cultural dynamics (Bruckman and Resnick 1995; Soukup 2006), while others saw the Internet as a tool that inflected everyday life in interesting ways

(Haythornthwaite and Wellman 2002). Christine Hine (1998: 14-40) articulated this best when she explained that the Internet can be understood as both a culture and a cultural artifact. As a culture, the Internet possesses a set of norms and practices that are unique and that should be studied separately from unmediated life. As a cultural artifact, the Internet exists within the broader cultural context in which people live.

Which approach ethnographers take fundamentally shapes their fieldwork and analyses. This divide is one of the core concerns underlying Internet ethnography and raises all sorts of methodological questions about boundaries, privacy, and ethics (Buchanan 2004; Markham and Baym 2008).

Much of what early ethnographers of the Internet grappled with concerned the idea of whether the Internet was or was not a separate space with a culture of its own. If discussed at all, unmediated life was invoked when scholars questioned the ways in which the “virtual” was like or unlike the offline. While this approach has value, there was very little discussion of how mediated and unmediated interactions

are often seamless. Early on, ethnographers began challenging this approach by emphasizing the importance of taking context into consideration, even when doing studies of online communities (Kendall 2002). Others began highlighting the continuities between what might be seen as online and offline contexts (Bennett 2004; Miller and Slater 2000).

To methodologically account for the relationship between online and offline practices, ethnographers began “tracing the flows of objects, texts, and bodies” as they moved between mediated and unmediated environments (Leander and McKim 2003: 211). Some scholars collected and analyzed both online and offline data (Haythornthwaite and Wellman 2002; Orgad 2008). Others emphasized interactions or communities and followed the relationships between people and activities as they moved between online and offline environments (Hodkinson 2002; Kelty 2008;

Wilson 2006). Ethnographers studying subcultures, social phenomena, and communities of practice incorporated multisited fieldwork techniques into their methodologies so as to trace activities that took place in different mediated and unmediated environments. Even those who focused specifically on mediated practices found that tracing secondary, unmediated interactions enhanced their research. For example, T. L. Taylor (2006) joined gamers for in-person meetups to get a better understanding of their mediated dynamics. Ethnographic studies of mediated cultural practices increasingly moved among different field sites and devised different techniques for following peoples, practices, and communities across different mediascapes.

The interplay between online and offline peoples and practices also led scholars to focus on the ways in which the cultural foundations of mediated and unmediated environments are co-constructed. From Nina Wakeford’s (2003) study of how local cultural dynamics are embedded in global communication through London Internet cafés to Mizuko Ito’s (2005) discussion of the mobile phone as a “technosocial tethering,” ethnographers examined how technological practices are influenced by cultural practices, physical place, and the ways in which geographically determined cultural practices configure technologies. In other words, as technological systems are socially constructed through usage (Bijker et al. 1987), the sociotechnical

practices that emerge shape the cultural landscape of both mediated and unmediated environments.

As more ethnographers interested in the Internet began employing multisited and social constructionist approaches, the claim that the Internet was a culture in and of itself began to fade and few protested its disappearance. This issue reemerged for debate in 2008 when Tom Boellstoroff (2008) defended his decision to locate his fieldwork wholly inside Second Life, an immersive virtual world. Boellstoroff argued that it is critical to study virtual worlds in their own right as a culture with their own context and that “to demand that ethnographic research always incorporate meeting residents in the actual world for ‘context’ presumes that virtual worlds are not

themselves contexts” (Boellstorff 2008: 61). While he acknowledges that some questions require multisited fieldwork, he challenges the assumption that

unmediated practices inform mediated ones. His challenge forced me to reflect on my own assumptions.

Boellstoroff’s decision to bound his fieldwork by virtual interactions is driven by his claim that most Second Life participants do not interact with one another outside of the virtual environment. His argument is that Second Life is a contained culture because people’s only interactions with one another take place there. As I worked out why I found this argument disturbing, I faced two issues. First, I

questioned his claim. Other accounts of Second Life detail people’s finding partners and friends online whom they connect with offline (Au 2008). Furthermore, in many online environments, people regularly connect with people they meet across a variety of Internet contexts (Parks and Floyd 1996; Rheingold 1994, 2002; Taylor 2006) and, more commonly, they interact online with people whom they know from unmediated environments (Ellison et al. 2007). I was not convinced that Second Life was unique and truly self-contained. My second concern was more philosophical. Ethnographers studying unmediated cultural practices had started to shift away from bounding projects by geographic proximity, emphasizing that global and networked forces shape even supposedly local cultural dynamics (Appadurai 1996; Piot 1999). Clifford (1997) argued that ethnography must adapt to the ways in which cultures are not isolated. Given that ethnographers looking at small villages had moved away from seeing these communities as bounded cultures, I failed to understand how a community that explicitly defined itself as people’s second lives could be examined without attention to those people’s “first” lives.

While I disagree with Boellstoroff’s approach, his critiques of the way in which online/offline fieldwork implicitly prioritizes the offline are valuable. Offline fieldwork should not simply be a mechanism to assess if people’s mediated

representations of themselves are accurate or to understand how lived, gendered, and raced experiences of everyday life affect mediated practices. The offline is not simply the “backstage” to the mediated “front stage.” Rather, different

geographically and socially constructed contexts are entwined. Conversations and experience move among media, space, and time. I agree with Boellstoroff that we must take the experiences people have in mediated environments seriously and understand how that context shapes cultural practice. Yet we do ourselves a

disservice if we bound our fieldwork by spatial structures—physical or digital—when people move seamlessly between these spaces. Both mediated and unmediated fieldwork should have as their goal a rich understanding of the networks of people, objects, and practices.