The Anthropology of Online Communities by Samuel M. Wilson and Leighton C. Peterson (original) (raw)

Internet have enabled the emergence of new sorts of communities and communicative practices-phenomena worthy of the attention of anthropological researchers. Despite early assessments of the revolutionary nature of the Internet and the enormous transformations it would bring about, the changes have been less dramatic and more embedded in existing practices and power relations of everyday life. This review explores researchers' questions, approaches, and insights within anthropology and some relevant related fields, and it seeks to identify promising new directions for study. The general conclusion is that the technologies comprising the Internet, and all the text and media that exist within it, are in themselves cultural products. Anthropology is thus well suited to the further investigation of these new, and not so new, phenomena. 0084-6570/02/1021-0449$14.00 449 This content downloaded from 14.139.211.194 on Mon, 15 Jun 2015 10:48:59 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 450 WILSON 0 PETERSON products, will an anthropological approach to these phenomena necessarily differ from other types of anthropological investigation? As is the case in other academic disciplines, anthropology's interest in Internetbased social and communicative practices is relatively new, and a coherent anthropological focus or approach has yet to emerge. Despite the early interest in new media and Internet phenomena and an emerging anthropological literature, there have been relatively few ethnographic works on computing and Internet technologies within anthropology. The relative scarcity of mainstream anthropological research on the Internet and computing reflects the fact that anthropology has not played a central role in studies of mass media in the past; anthropologists have positioned media as peripheral to culture (Dickey 1997) or have viewed technology in general as a context for, rather than a central part of, culture (Aronowitz 1996, Hakken 1999, Latour 1992, Pfaffenberger 1992). As a result, much of our understanding of new information and communication technology comes from other disciplines through research into online computer-mediated interactions within the framework of the Internet, whose locus of interaction has been commonly referred to as cyberspace. Nevertheless, anthropologists remain intrigued, as they long have been, by the nexus of culture, science, and technology. Indeed, anthropology is uniquely suited for the study of socioculturally situated online communication within a rapidly changing context. Anthropological methodologies enable the investigation of cross-cultural, multileveled, and multisited phenomena; emerging constructions of individual and collective identity; and the culturally embedded nature of emerging communicative and social practices. Recently there have been calls for an ethnographic approach to the issues of new media, an approach that is timely and indispensable as we begin to theorize the sociocultural implications of new communication technology (DiMaggio et al. 2001, Escobar 1994, Hakken 1999, Kottak 1996, Miller & Slater 2000). The following sections address anthropological and related research dealing with the following broad investigative topics: the ways in which information technology and media are themselves cultural products, the ways that individual and community identities are negotiated on-and offline, and the dynamics of power and access in the context of new communications media.