A Flickr Ethnography
This text gives a good illustration of what a virtual ethnography can be like:
There are some comments on how you could structure it:
“Broadly speaking, an ethnographic approach involves providing a description, an analysis and an interpretation of a culture-sharing group” (p.4)
The research centres around six questions (p.4):
“1. Is this a good place to study given the overall cultural themes we are tackling?
2. Can the individuals we see interacting here be described as a culture-sharing group?
3. What might be the main themes emerging from the investigation of this group and how does one go about identifying them?
4. What level of involvement is to be justifiably expected of the researcher? How will the participants’ perspective be given an appropriate voice? What are the ethical issues at stake?
5. How does the personal experience of the researcher come to bear on the analysis and the proposed interpretation?
6. How transferable to different sites is an approach which might work here?”
In the abstract provided Clari only offers answers to the first 3 questions.
1.She describes the flickr site and its differences to a real site. She compares it to a theatre setting. She describes it as a complex “deep” site worth investigating.
2. Clari offers a definition of community (p.7)
“In his Introduction to Virtual Communities Research and Cybersociology Magazine Issue Two, Hamman (1997) defines the sociological term ‘community’ as:
a. A group of people
b. who share social interaction
c. and some common ties between themselves and other members of the group
d. and share an area for at least some of the time.”
In this sense the individuals can be defined as a group.
3.In this section Clari focuses on the user-generated texts.
She comments on
- their signature and their use of icons (p.10): “The use of icons complements the text as a powerful tool in establishing one’s character, one’s identity on this stage: the theme of identity performance, how it unfolds and what affects it, begins to emerge here and will remain important throughout this discussion.”
- the user-contributed tags which tend to “democratize” the picture and share it with a wider audience.
- the user-contributed notes which interact with the actual photo
- the comments of the participants: She distinguishes 3 groupsof comment: comments about the digital object as an artifact – comments about the ongoing interaction – comments on the actual subject of the photograph; all these groups interact with each other and construct meaning around the original object.
Clari defines the following themes which emerge from the interactions (p.25):
“the overarching themes of identity building and performance, of ownership and of power continue to stand out”
My thoughts: You feel quite voyeuristic when reading this ethnography! Maybe this is the nature of ethnographies though, you are “listening in” to what people are saying. I thought this was a very clear example of how you can construct a virtual ethnography. I liked the way she included the use of icons for the participants to construct their identity. This refers back to the text by Kress that we had been reading and the power of pictorial representation vs representation through speech. However, the identities here are made up of a mix of both (particularly as by clicking on the user names you can access their photo collections and view the identity they have created for themselves through these pictures).
The whole notion of having discussions around picture shows once again the power of this form of representation and how open it is to interpretation.
Clari, M (unpublished, 2009) A Flickr ethnography.