This week I have been focused on producing the virtual ethnography. The aim of the ethnography was to determine how far a group of people who regularly meet online can be seen to be an ‘online community’. However more processes than that product have unfolded.
First of all, I am surprised at how ‘sucked in’, or should I say ‘involved’, I became in the goings on of the group. This is partly because I spent so much time on the site, looking at their photos and reading their comments. However, what also played a part in my becoming involved in the group, albeit in a silent – lurking way, was getting to know the group members via the content and style of their comments. I found myself really quite liking ‘Lump of Hesitation’. She, I assume she is a she, is the conciliatory voice on the site. She attempts to soften the harder edges of other group members. I have to say that her tag does not do her justice, which I find quite frustrating. I want to know what she looks like.
But listen to all this – ‘Lump of Hesitation’ could be a man; could be more than one man; could be more than one woman; could be a teenager. I don’t know – I am making assumptions from purely mediated cues – the text of the posts and the tag. And even so, I have become sucked in. So, where is my academic objectivity? Where is the cut off point between online and offline? Between real life and cyberspace? I have breached it, if it was ever there. And that is, for me at least, one of the major ‘learning outcomes’ of this module – to break through the boundaries in my own head that made me dismiss the online in relation to the offline. My ‘outsider’ status is weakening, slowly, but evidently, and now I find myself to be one of those people who talk about ‘applications’ – (but not yet ‘apps’ – I haven’t gone that far). Interesting times.