Busher, H. & James, N. (2012) In Cyberspace: Qualitative methods for educational research, in S. Delamont (ed) Handbook of Qualitative Research Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Chapter 16, pp.366-391 ISBN 9781849805094 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Living in virtual communities : an ethnography of life online
2005
This thesis examines some of the issues involved in the development of human relationships in cyberspace. Set within the wider context of the Internet and society it investigates how geographically distant individuals are coming together on the Internet to inhabit new kinds of social spaces or virtual communities. People `live in' and `construct' these new spaces in such a way as to suggest that the Internet is not a placeless cyberspace that is distinct and separate from the real world. Building on the work of other cyberethnographers, I combine original ethnographic research in Cybertown (http: /www. cybertown. com), a Virtual Community, with face-to-face meetings to illustrate how, for many people, cyberspace is just another place to meet. Secondly I suggest that people in Cybertown are investing as much effort in maintaining relationships in cyberspace as in other social spaces. By extending traditional human relationships into Cybertown, they are widening their webs of ...
Living in virtual communities: an ethnography of human relationships in cyberspace
Information, Communication & Society, 2005
This paper outlines some of the issues involved in the development of human relationships in cyberspace. Set within the wider context of the internet and society it investigates how geographically distant individuals are coming together on the internet to inhabit new kinds of social spaces or virtual communities. People 'live in' and 'construct' these new spaces in such a way as to suggest that the Internet is not a placeless cyberspace that is distinct and separate from the real world.
On the Importance of Netnographic Research in Understanding Young People's Virtual/Real Lives
ARTICLE, 2019
The digital age, which has began in earnest with the widespread use of the Internet, is an era of an unprecedented technological advancement in all fields. Triggered by the radical changes brought by this advancement, scholars in the humanities started to investigate the prolific use of technology in all aspects of human activity. In fact, a myriad of researches studying the human interactions with and through new technologies has escalated, and new theorizations aiming at redefining humanity in the digital age were developed. Donna Haraway’s Cyborg theory (1991), for instance, proposes an imaginary world of fusions between animal and machine while Rosi Braidotti’s the Posthuman Project (2012) explains that in the era of advanced postmodernity, the notion of ‘the human’ is re-defined and de-stabilized by technologically mediated social relations in a globally connected world. By putting emphasis on the deeply-rooted changes that are happening to humanity at a high pace, the present paper reflects on new directions in the humanities. More precisely, my focus is to consider how Robert Kozinets’ netnography, as an emerging research method in digital anthropology, can help adults to understand the double life young people are leading. While accentuating the strong impact spending long hours online have on youngsters’ social behavior, I suggest that netnographers could assist teachers and parents in comprehending young people’s disruptive behavior by explaining to them the many changes that occur in youngsters’ comportment because of a process of virtualization.
Identity in the cyberspace: The social construction of identity through on-line virtual interactions
First Dialogical Self Conference, 2000
This paper refers to the recent theoretical advances on the dialogical construction of self, applied into a particular interactive educational 3D virtual world. The aim of this study is to analyze how identities are built and maintained in this type of not-immersive cyberspace, where the 3D interactive environment is completely generated by the computer, planned, and built by a community of learners and practice (Brown & Campione, 1990; Wenger, 1995). During the online connections, users are personified by an "Avatar 1 " and through it they can walk, fly, look around the virtual world, build and manipulate the 3D objects, perform virtual actions, and chat with other users. The assignment given to the community is to construct an educational world, called "Euroland". A selected sample of excerpts from the textual chats generated while visual interactions are taking place is analyzed, supported by related screen-photos, using the ethnographic method (Geertz, 1973; Duranti, 1992). The analysis shows how identities are built in such environment through social interaction and dialogical processes. It is concluded that cyber identities seem to be highly congruent to the development of the recent psychology that considers identities as multiple in their conceptualizations (Gergen, 1991; Glass, 1993), "voiced", and "positioned" (Hermans, 1996). INTRODUCTION The particular cyberspace studied in this paper is an educational 3D, desktop, and Internet based virtual environment populated and built by students, teachers, and researcher. The virtual environment has been developed within a corss-national project (Italian and Dutch), founded by the European community, monitored by the University of Nijmegen (NL), and supported by the University of Rome (IT). Main goal of the project is to set up a community of learners and practice (Brown & Campione, 1990; Wenger, 1995) able to construct cultural 3D objects through mediated communication and active knowledge building. In order to achieve this goal, several communication tools were made available, both text and visual based, synchronous and asynchronous, all embedded into a virtual environment created with the Active Worlds 2 (AW) (http://www.activeworlds.com) technology (Ligorio & Trimpe, in preparation). AW is a desktop 1 The word Avatar comes from the Indian culture and means "reincarnation". The reference is in particular to a God called Visnú that was able to reincarnate himself through several and different faces. In the Internet the word Avatar is used to describe the "object" representing the user and it can be a two or three-dimensional photo, design, picture or animation.
Cyberanthropology-Being Human on the Internet
2011
CyberAnthropology is an approach that submits anthropological and philosophical questions (as well as sociological, political and linguistic questions including questions of constitutional law arising from them) to different fields associated with the internet - which has not been done in this specific transdisciplinary way in previous research. We analyse changes, developments and continuities between the lifeworld of users and new
Forthcoming, Annals of Anthropological Practice, special issue, "Involve me and I Learn," guest editors Toni Copeland and HJ Francois Dengah II Since 2008, at Colorado State University, I've been collaboratively researching virtual worlds with my students in a variety of experimental methods seminars. My " ethnographic research and teaching laboratory " (ERTL), ambitious in scope, conducts original and even cutting edge research, while teaching students field methods in the process. The research and teaching unfold primarily in Internet-based games—such as World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2—persistent online networked social spaces of hundreds and even thousands of players. As a teaching tool, online virtual worlds provide a convenient way to get students quickly into the " field, " with online games being for some students (but not all) akin to foreign cultures. In this article, I discuss strengths and also challenges of ERTL, illustrating in the process how my lab's linked research and teaching model illuminates one way forward for empirically-minded anthropologists hoping to move beyond the lone ethnographer.
Real Worlds, Virtual Worlds – Young People in Chat Rooms
We often hear and read sentences like: the way people interact is not as before; the multimedia society where we live is changing the nature of the human being; the use of the Internet in the daily life of the individual makes him isolated of the rest of the community; the technological evolution pushes the individual for the ghetto of the techno-cyberculture, without any values. We live imbued and enclosed by an interconnected world. The power of communication lies in the fact to make it in real time, of immediate and simultaneous form, independently of the geographical distance. The technological and social advances allow the birth of a social platform of communication, in which communication is possible in the most varied expressions. This is a exploratory research comparing two groups (16-17 years old), who interact frequently off and on-line (real and virtual world), from an anthropological point of view, using sociometric techniques. The purpose is to verify if their impressions of the other(s) and their behavior, as well, changes while interacting on-line.
Ethnography on the Cyberian Frontier
2011
Virtual worlds are persistent, multiuser , computer generated environments, established and maintained via internet technologies. Cyber-ethnography is the adaptation of the ethnographic method to the study of virtual worlds. The collective and interactive nature of life in contemporary digital space has incited the interest of a new generation of ethnographers and awakened the discipline of anthropology to the possibility of studying a form of sociality that exists beyond the confines of the physical realm. Virtual world communities are crafted through an amalgamation of technology and human sociality; by studying these emergent worlds ethnographers are able to observe culture in the making. After twenty years of development, virtual worlds have emerged as distinct domains of human being worthy of study in their own right. However, as a discipline cyber-ethnography is still trying to establish itself and demonstrate the contributions it can make to both anthropology and the arts and social sciences in general. The developments within cyber-ethnography have mirrored advancements in computing technologies and reflect wider debates within the discipline of anthropology. The following review shows how online ethnography can help us understand our digital life-worlds. The article begins by defining virtual worlds, describing the virtual field site Entropia Universe, and documenting the development of the discipline. It culminates with an exploration of being and place in cyberspace, drawing on ethnographic data from the virtual world Entropia Universe. Defining virtual worlds Virtual worlds have proven to be some of the most interesting domains for ethnographic research on the internet. Virtual worlds can be distinguished from other online domains through their use of avatars, virtual landscapes, and synchronous communication. These worlds can be either text-based or graphical, but all use avatars (digital representations of self) as the main means of interaction. Virtual worlds, the other important component of cyber-ethnography, consist of digital landscapes, created either through textual description or graphical depiction, which provide users with " a sense of geography and terrain " (Bell 3). This sense of geography has resulted in a linguistic distinction between virtual worlds and other online spaces; users talk about being " in " virtual worlds, whereas people talk about being " on " blogs, forums, or social networking sites. A further difference between virtual worlds and other online realms is synchronous interaction. Within virtual worlds users interact in real time. Other forms of online interaction, such as emails, status updates and comments, or forum posts, are asynchronous; users cannot
Virtual Culture: Work and Play on the Internet
Citeseer
This book is a collection of articles on various aspects of the formation and functioning of virtual groups on the Internet. The Internet communication infrastructure enables communication among geographically dispersed groups of people. Although the underlying technology is recent, it is fairly well understood. However, the dramatic rise of Internet access in recent years has led to new conditions of communication, the sociological implications of which are not well understood, as there has simply not passed enough time to observe the use people make of the technology. The book reports on several projects which aimed at filling this gap. The intended audience of the book includes anyone interested in computer mediated communication, with emphasis on group communications, such as newsgroups (open to anyone at large), multiuser virtual worlds (MUDs), mailing lists (with a restricted set of participants). The book is very diverse in terms of methodologies used in the individual chapters. Some chapters are based on empirical research, using data collected from newsgroups or mailing lists (Jones, Witmer & al, Mabry, Berthold&al) and applying statistical tools to draw conclusions, others present technology for virtual cooperative interaction (Chen & Gaines, Doyle & Hayes-Roth), and yet others discuss frameworks for studying Internet-based communication (Voiskounsky). Statistical tools used range from classical hypothesis testing (Witmer & Katzman, Mabry), tabulation and classification of results (Jones) to sophisticated use of self-organizing artificial neural networks to study typicality of messages (Berthold & al). The book's main strength is that it brings together for the first time in a single volume a very diverse set of articles on social aspects of computer mediated communication. As such it can serve as a reading in a graduate sociology course on the topic, or as a starting point for further study and research in the area. On the other hand, the book's weakness is its extreme diversity in the range of topics and methodologies used. This is, of course, characteristic of any research area in its infancy, and the sociology of the Internet is no exception. Studies in the book lump together purposeful activity (like working together on a project) and recreational communication (like participation in newsgroups). These are probably two very different activities that deserve study on their own. The book would have greatly benefitted from an effort on the part of the authors to group together or classify the included contributions, and motivate and glue together the different parts. This perhaps reveals the major weakness of computer-mediated-communication: that the kind of "brainstorming" that leads to cross-fertilization of ideas is still only possible with physical person-to-person contact,
The Cyberians : an empirical study of sociality in a virtual community (with Julia Velkovska)
1999
This paper presents some field results of a study of an on-line community : the cyberians. Backed up by our empirical findings we discuss the concept of community in order to gain a better understanding of the sense of the still problematic notion of virtual community. We suggest a set of issues defining, in our opinion, virtual communities and allowing their empirical study. We follow two main lines of investigation : the construction of Self and the relationship to the Other in the CMC settings and the social structures of the virtual community of the cyberians. This paper 1 discloses the first results of a research on the practices of an active minority : the " cyberians 2 ", Internet users clients of Cyberia, a French access provider. We selected a population who is active on newsgroups and has its own homepage. Five newsgroups are reserved to Cyberia clients, and namely one dedicated to technical help. This newsgroup is quite active : an average of around 200 messages are posted every day, to be compared with the average of 24 messages a day calculated on 500 newsgroups by . We started with an ethnographic account and analysis of productions of cyberians on the net : their homepages and their messages on the newsgroups. Those provide new communication spaces, which are opportunities for relations in public in Goffman's sense (presentation of self, meeting and interacting). Three issues are of concern to us here : the presentation of self, the building of the relations with others, and the construction and social life of Internet communities. We tried to use the classical sociological notions on community, and see to what extent they were useful for the study of " virtual " groups. We hope to contribute to clarify the term " virtual community " and facilitate its empirical description. We use the notion of sociality in Alfred Schutz's (1976, p. 230) sense as " the common intersubjective world of communication and social action ". This definition highlights the founding value of common-sense shared knowledge for the constitution of social groups. The notion of sociality refers here to the social constructs which enable communication and interaction. When studying cyberian everyday life, we tried to see whether there was a specific form of sociality in the situation of CMC 3 (forms of relationship to the Other, shared system of references, etc.). We shall first briefly review the notions of community, classical and virtual, and we shall retain what seems relevant for our problem (section 1). Methodology (section 2) is followed by the analysis of the presentation of self and of relation to other in Internet setting (section 3). Finally, we consider community level, and describe the role structure, the social network, and some components of common knowledge (section 4).