Critical Junctures and Ethical Choices in Internet Ethnography (original) (raw)

Ethnography in a brave new world: exploring research in cyberspace1

Abstract: Can we establish the importance of a ethnographic choice through the deconstruction of the method assemblages mainly used in web-based research? How can we face the related ethical problems? In this paper we will face these questions, drawing from the advancement in CMC and Internet research in the last decades. The presence of utopian and dystopian views about ICT suggest us to search for a point of view able to overcome this dichotomy.

Ethnography in the Digital Age

An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource, 2015

This essay explores the ways in which ethnography, both as a methodology and a product of research, has adapted to the rapid growth of digital technology and the new venues for research that it has spawned. On the one hand, digital technology affords social scientists new means of recording, storing, and analyzing data. On the other hand, digital media have been responsible for the creation of new venues for research, mostly on the Internet in the form of websites, blogs, social networks, and multiplayer online games. As a methodology, ethnography, with its beginnings in the anthropological study of non-Western societies, has proved to be highly adaptable to the task of making sense of, and giving meaning to, computer-mediated communications in its various forms. This has led to its adoption in the study of online sites by researchers from a number of different disciplines attempting to come to grips with the cultural nuances of digitally formed communities. Ethical problems posed by more powerful forms of surveillance and access to personal information are discussed. The boundaries between public and private domains have become increasingly blurred, resulting in complex issues relating to informed consent. As a product, digital ethnographies allow for nonlineal, hyperlinked presentations that permit new forms of engagement between authors and readers not afforded by traditional published monographs.

Ethnography in the Digital Internet Era (final draft jan 20 2016, published 2017)

The ethnographic mindset is instrumental in helping those who design our future interfaces and infrastructures understand the complexity of the human experience. How might our products be used as interventions rather than just descriptions, to encourage different structures and interfaces for social practice? In this chapter (draft of forthcoming piece in Denzin & Lincoln's 5th edition Handbook of Qualitative Research), I trace certain terminological shifts in how internet research has been conceptualized. I then offer a working heuristic that illustrates research stances toward internet phenomena, which in turn illustrates some of the ways research stances may be shifting. I move to a more concrete discussion of how shifting one’s stance can impact not only one’s methods in the field, but also the outcome and audience of one’s inquiry. I conclude by emphasizing the urgent need to recognize that our scholarship matters in the larger sense, and to accept the opportunity and ethical responsibility to use our research abilities to not simply describe or explain what is or has been, but to speculate about and shape what we ought to become.

Ethnography in a brave new world

2014

Can we establish the importance of a ethnographic choice through the deconstruction of the method assemblages mainly used in web-based research? How can we face the related ethical problems? In this paper we will face these questions, drawing from the advancement in CMC and Internet research in the last decades. The presence of utopian and dystopian views about ICT suggest us to search for a point of view able to overcome this dichotomy. Considering research as a situated practice, we focus on ethnography as the method which can help us to discuss the a priori assumptions we can find both in the utopian and dystopian views, as well as in the methodological accounts about on-line research. So, we consider as an example the Complementary Explorative Multilevel Data Analysis by Galimberti and Riva, to show how it construct the reality observed before starting the observation itself. Stressing the situated character of organizational research, we propose the Internet a library-of-people metaphor in order to catch with an evocative image both ethical and methodological issues studying cyberspace. In conclusion, telling stories about our PhD researches, we show how ethnography is able to deconstruct methodological accounts like the CEMDA, crossing micro and macro levels, and give insights about the construction of the relationship between the researcher and the groups studied. highly "connections" oriented (Latour, 2005). We want to argue against the "Internet as psychological laboratory" perception (Skitka, Sargis, 2006), in which neopositivistic approach is still predominant and in which researchers try to study strange middle-earth places populated by college students samples. One of our paper main influence is that cyberspace-based organizational research should be focused on the Internet as a discursive-created phenomena: it is a collection of discourses and texts as practices (Stanley, 2001). The process of constructing multimedia-texts is a part of web creation process for people engaged in it. Internet could not exist without off and on line conversations in and about this enduring "proto-cyberspace" (Hakken, 1999). This paper follows the discursive psychology tradition also, considering language as an activity di per sé, rather than a simple mirroring tool to represent the out-there reality. When people talk and write in and about the Internet they are not only reflecting about Internet reality, they are participating, through their text and argumentations, in a social life. From the sociological point-of-view, this paper is inspired by a practice-based approach: cyberspace is the result of an ensemble of hybrid practices constructing it. The technological discourse and the social one participate to the coproduction of cyberspace, both in the on-line side and in the off-line one. People writing code and stabilizing standards are involved not only in the construction of technological cyberspace, but also of society (Lessig, 1999).

Ethnography in the Cyberspace: Problems and Prospects

International Journal of Information Systems and Engineering

This paper outlines some of the issues involved in conducting ethnographic research in the Internet specifically social media such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. With the advent of Internet and social media, online environments have emerged where millions of people come together in virtual communities to interact, collaborate, share and consume information. The emergence of these online communities has dramatically changed individual engagement and collaboration patterns. It is no longer sufficient to look at individual or small group activities in the real world as many individuals have browsed, searched, communicated and collaborated within the dynamic online social networks. Extending studies from traditional human relationship in the real world to the virtual world is imperative to better understand human behaviour. Ranging from simple textbased news groups to virtual multi-users environments, the Internet has provided new settings and rich sources of information for conducting ethnography research. However, online ethnography also raises the issues of managing scale, researcher presence and field relations when doing research in the digital world.

Ethnography for the Internet: embedded, embodied and everyday

Choice Reviews Online, 2015

Observing and Experiencing Online/Offline Connections 89 5 Connective Ethnography in Complex Institutional Landscapes 6 The Internet in Ethnographies of the Everyday 7 Conclusion The thoughts presented in this book have developed over many years, and it is therefore impossible to note all of the people who have helped along the way with useful comments and insights on ways to study the Internet. I apologize, therefore, for not thanking many people individually. I am conscious that I owe a huge debt both to the many colleagues in academic circles that I have interacted with and discussed these ideas with over the years, and also to the many participants in the field sites I describe in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, many of whom gave generously of their insights and were willing to give up substantial time and effort in order to help me to understand what was going on from their point of view. I am particularly conscious of a debt owed to Nicola Green for an introduction to Freecycle and for many enlightening conversations about it along the way, to Vince Smith for sharing his vision of the possibilities and perils of cybertaxonomy, and to Thordis Sveinsdottir for fascinating insights into what immersive online fieldwork could be. The fieldwork described in Chapter 5 was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council grant R000271262-A. Although I cannot list here all of the academic conferences and workshops that made a difference to my thinking about ethnography for the Internet, I'd like to mention three events in particular that stand out in my mind. Nanna Schneidermann and Elizabeth Williams Ørberg with Steffen Dalsgaard organized a workshop on Facebook: Fieldwork at Aarhus University, and I gained an enormous amount of insight from hearing about the experiences of participants at that meeting. Janet Vertesi brought together a fascinating array of scholars for a meeting on the Ethnographer in the Network at Princeton University, and again, discussions with participants at this meeting were hugely stimulating. Finally, the series of workshops on Digital Methods as Mainstream Methodology (http://digitalmethodsnmi.com/) funded as a Network for Methodological Innovation by the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods and organized by Steve Roberts, Yvette Morey, Helene Snee and Hayley Watson provided a series of really useful occasions for meeting with like-minded scholars and hearing about some fascinating examples of digital research. viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As ever, I owe a debt of gratitude to my family: to Simon for forbearance and support in the face of another *&*!%! **%!^! book, and to Esther and Isaac for accepting me being boring at weekends and for allowing me to hog the computer when it should really be being used for watching videos of pandas falling out of trees or for playing Club Penguin.

Ethnography for Investigating the Internet

Seminar.net, 2016

Several concepts are used to describe ethnographic approaches for investigating the Internet; competing concepts include virtual ethnography, netnography, digital ethnography, web-ethnography, online ethnography, and e-ethnography. However, as the field matures, several writers simply call their approach "ethnography" and specify new fields of practice. In this paper, we will explore the content of ethnographic approach for investigating the Internet and the direction in which this new field of ethnography is moving, that is, whether it is the study of blended worlds or online worlds. We start by introducing the emerging field sites or fields of practice. Then, we describe how participant observation and other data collection techniques are carried out. Next, we describe how ethnographic practice is understood within the emerging field. Finally, we discuss some possible changes in the ethnographic landscape: unobtrusive methods, the communal-commercial relationship, and te...