The divide between "Internet culture" and "Internet as a cultural artefact" can be confusing at times. This is especially true when the field of study is projected to all do ethnography. That is, when it comes to virtual ethnography broadly.
The notion of virtual ethnography field is a component of evolution. Early theorists refused to take the network and ethnographic context. Simply did not support the cultural character of the Internet. After passing the vision and go through a babbling phase, we reach the moment that seems dominated by the idea of \u200b\u200b"mediation" ( Beaulieu, 2004 ). Applied to the notion of field, the mediation approach moves away from definitions based on concepts geospatial or reticular and focuses on the facts and socio-cultural phenomena made possible by technological artifacts in dialogue with humans.
Having accepted that the Internet can be a field of study as any other ( Hine, 2000 ), it would now determine the possible contexts where conducting a virtual ethnography. To this end, clarifying the statement Hammersley and Atkinson (1994) on the location of ethnography:
"The ethnography can and takes place in a wide variety of places: towns, cities, city neighborhoods, factories, mines , farms, shops, business offices of all kinds, hospitals, theaters, prisons, bars, churches, schools, colleges, universities, courts, agencies, courts, morgues, funeral chapels, etc. "(p. 97).
Well, if you add the statement "Internet" then each named place, you will get as many fields of work for virtual ethnography. The distinction for virtual ethnography is, rather, in the "field work" and not the field itself, which has been defined as virtual and accepted as a region susceptible to receive and generate cultural elements. That is, the main distinctions refer to the field of action rather than location. At the end of the ethnography is not (only) is description, but understanding. It is not (only) account but dialogue. And it's not (only) presence, but insight. The ethnographer / a performs a unique process when working in virtual land to explore and elicit deep cultural values \u200b\u200band practices that are specific to individuals or social groups that inhabit the area.
But back to the beginning and returning to the statement that the post title, the following is an argument that is often used when talking about virtual ethnography:
"New forms of communication enable new staging of common interests. This ideal is the Internet, cyberspace. To make conventional ethnography is necessary to identify an ethnographic context. In this regard we must treat the virtual space as our analysis context. Virtual ethnography should treat cyberspace as an ethnographic reality. "
I analyze this sentence from two angles. The notion of "capture" and the notion of "comparative."
addition to mediation, Beaulieu (2004) introduced capture component to refer to those statements which may account for conversational ethnography. These traps can be text, images or videos, as reflected in his article. However, what essential here is the renunciation of the holistic approach of the network as a whole. Just as classic ethnography addresses a school and not all schools in a country or the entire educational system, virtual ethnography can not take the whole cyberspace as their field of work.
Using a particular argument, Daniel Miller & Don Slater (2000) added:
"(...) for us an ethnographic approach to the Internet is one that sees the network as embedded in a specific place that is also changing (...) Our ethnographic approach is used as an immersion in a particular case as a basis for generalization through comparative analysis (...) an ethnographic approach is also one that is based on a long-term and multi-faceted with a social setting. In that sense, we are relatively conservative in our defense of the traditional canons of ethnographic research. This is particularly important today, when the term 'ethnography' has become something fascinating for many disciplines "(online).
little to add. If anything resume his subsequent reflections on the uses "forced" the ethnographic, cultural studies, sometimes ethnography is used to perform simple or textual analysis to study virtual communities .
Therefore, the idea of \u200b\u200bmulti-set or multi-local (Marcus, 2001) [Ethnography in / of the 'system' world. The emergence of ethnography multilocal, otherness, 11 (22), 111-127], working the field in various situations and locations (physical and virtual), gaining momentum when the space is analyzed is a fluid space (Castells , 2000 ). But leaving aside the presence of the researcher (now permanently unnecessary), the idiosyncratic features of the network should not make us forget the classic ethnographic method "under construction". We
...
0 comments:
Post a Comment