Right, here goes: I went for the Sleeping Cats at FlickR.

Again, the quality isn’t great, as I had to compress the video.

Looking forward to your comments.

This week the lifestream is mainly showing up the different applications and tools that I have been looking at in connection with the virtual ethnography. I have been thinking about this project a lot as well as trying to find ways of presenting it. The danger is to focus on the technology rather than on the contents, particularly if you are a bit intimidated by the technology. I’ve been reading Bell’s article on community and cyberculture which presents a very interesting discussion about the term community, both real-life and virtual, and also presents some positive and negative views on online communities. I think this will impact on my virtual ethnography by increasing my reflexive point of view. I will be asking myself whether I think negatively or positively about online communities and I am sure that my ethnography will be quite subjective because of this.

It was interesting to read through Rheingold’s very positive account of an online community. The fact that he is an active member of this community will certainly influence his point of view.

The comments on the discussion board don’t appear in the lifestream so there is less evidence of particpation. It was nice to use the discussion board for a change, but I’m also looking forward to the virtual artefacts appearing from next week and the discussion that will take place on the blogs.

Rheingold, H (2000) Introduction to The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. London: MIT Press. [web site]

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.

This text uses Virtual Ethnography in order to examine the concept of motherhood. The community being researched consists of a group of working mothers in Hong Kong. The author investigates this concept primarily through chats in a dedicated website for mothers called “Happy Land”. She has been a participant in this forum for a year before she starts investigating it. She has also met a lot of the participants off line and the off-line conversations verify and extend the online chats.

The author draws three conclusions:

a)      A lot of the chat shows mothers “performing” in a conventional mode as expected by society. This is shown in chats where mothers talk about their children in a positive way where they dwell on household issues, etc

b)      Some of the chat also refers to discontent. Interestingly, the reaction of other mums in the public forum is to pacify and to support. In offline conversations or private talk there may be different reactions like criticism or urging someone to leave their partner.

c)      Some of the conversations (online and offline) show the participants behaving “badly”, or somewhat subversively. The author interprets these moments as incidents where the mothers free themselves from their identity as mothers.

I enjoyed reading this text, as I’m personally interested in this subject. While the findings are interesting I don’t find them very surprising. I think they correspond very well to experiences I have of offline groups of mothers. I would also say that the larger a group is the less critical people would be with one another. Serious problems would be discussed in one to ones or in more intimate groups, while people in larger groups, particularly when they are new to the group would “represent” themselves in a more conventional way. I wonder whether the banter and “behaving badly” incidents can really be classified as subversive. This might be an opportunity to let off steam in order to “function” better again in the conventional mode.

I was quite concerned about the ethical questions behind this research. The author herself admits that this is borderline. I think if I had been one of the participants I’d have been quite upset about being observed and interpreted. At the very least it would have made me more vary in future to be open about private problems.

In short, although chatroom communication allows users more time to consider what they say and thereby greater opportunities for reflexivity, at the same time they are necessarily limited to certain masterstatuses by virtue of the way websites and chatrooms are set up and operate.

When chat is immediately objectified on the computer screen as one hits the ‘return’ key, the presentation of the self thus articulated and emerged is the product of a much more reflexive, dynamic and interactive process.

Chan, A (2008) The Dynamics of Motherhood Performance: Hong Kong’s Middle Class Working Mothers On- and Off-Line. Sociological Research Online. 13(4). [web site]

The Virtual Objects of Ethnography

This reading gives an introduction to virtual ethnography.  As a definition of Ethnography, the text cites Hammersley and Atkinson:

“…it involves the ethnographer participating, overtly or covertly in people’s daily lives for an exended period of time [...]collecting whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of the research”

This view, however relies on a realist interpretation of reality. Constructivism is challenging this view by denying that there is an objective reality.

This text looks at alternative approaches for the ethnographic study of the internet. It focuses on three areas:

1. Ethnography and the face-to-face

Previously, travel was important as a means of engaging with a different culture. Through participation and experience the ethnographer opened herself up to learning.  For an ethnography of the internet this displacement will be experiential rather than physical. Authenticity of participants cannot be proved, but should only be a problem if it arises as a problem through interaction with other participants.

2. Text, technology and reflexivity

Communication on the internet can be seen as interaction or as text (”as a temporally shifted and packaged form of interaction”, p.50). Texts can also be used as ethnographic material “in the ways in which they present and shape reality and are embedded in practice”. The text becomes “meaningful once we have cultural context(s)  in which to situate it”. (p.52) It might be of interest to follow the construction of a website or to see how contributions in a newsgroup are justified and rendered authoritative. An ethnographic researcher of the internet herself becomes a user of the internet and the account will always have elements of reflexivity. This construction of knowledge however can be challenged as not being a truthful representation of reality. 3 strategies can deal with this paradox:
- Including the member understandings of culture alongside the ethnographer’s account
- Focussing on the ethnographer, reflecting on this particular perpective, history and standpoint
- Embracing the paradox and making clear how the accounts are a constructed act

3. The making of ethnographic objects

Previously, ethnography focussed on physical space. This has come into question by a new concept of mobility. Recently, researchers have been more aware of the partiality and selectivity of their descriptions.

For virtual ethnography a multi-dimensional approach might be intersting (including online and offline relationships).
A different approach might be using “connectivity” as an organising principle. This could be “a multi-sited ethnography, conceived of as an experiential, interactive and engaged exploration of connectivity” (p.61) The new question is “not what is the Internet, but when, where and how is the Internet” (p.62) – the researcher could follow hypertextual links, follow the borrowing of material and images from other sites and other media, follow the authorship and readership of sites, the portrayal of the Internet in other media… The researcher can concentrate on flow and connectivity.

The article ends with 10 principles of virtual ethnography.

My thoughts:

While the idea of following the flow of the internet is interesting, I wonder how doable this is. As the author points out there are no boundaries, the researcher would have to set this out herself. You might be able to unravel the flow of a text from backwards, but never forwards. For instance if someone emailed you an extract from an article you could follow this up, read the article, see whether this was original or taken from somewhere else, etc. This might give you some insight on how we deal with knowledge.

Hine, C (2000) The virtual objects of ethnography, chapter 3 of Virtual ethnography. London: Sage. pp41-66