Cyberethnography

I have always wanted to work on a project that would let me do cyberethnography, and as luck would have it, I have never come across one. But on the upside when IFTF did a science and technology scan for the UK government, I wrote about cyberethnography and how it is done, what are the tools that are available. It is a little dated, I wrote this is in 2005 just after I started working full time for IFTF, so bear with me on this.

Anthropologists have traditionally conducted fieldwork by living in distant cultures, conducting interviews, and observing participants. As people conduct more and more activities online and leave digital tracks (pictures, blogs, emails, and such), anthropologists have begun to study human behaviour in cyberspace. Cyber-ethnographers participate in and observe blogs, Web sites, and chat rooms. They analyse how people form social networks or groups online and establish cultural identity. Visual anthropologists, media and cultural studies scholars, ludologists (who study video games from social science/humanities perspective), and science and technology scholars are among those who are building cyberethnography. See http://www.cas.usf.edu/anthropology/cma/CMAnthropologists.htm for an example of the wide range of emerging cyberanthropologists.

Anthropologists have traditionally conducted fieldwork by living in distant cultures, conducting interviews, and observing participants. As people conduct more and more activities online and leave digital tracks (pictures, blogs, emails, and such), anthropologists have begun to study human behaviour in cyberspace. Cyber-ethnographers participate in and observe blogs, Web sites, and chat rooms. They analyse how people form social networks or groups online and establish cultural identity. Visual anthropologists, media and cultural studies scholars, ludologists (who study video games from social science/humanities perspective), and science and technology scholars are among those who are building cyberethnography. See http://www.cas.usf.edu/anthropology/cma/CMAnthropologists.htm for an example of the wide range of emerging cyberanthropologists.

Cyber-ethnography is part of the move to reconceptualize the traditional notion of 'the field'. In cyberspace, the boundaries of the observed field are both virtual and embedded in place, discursive and geographical. New methods for understanding the nature of virtual experiences and environments will explode as the variety and frequency of cyber-experiences grow.

What is the implication?

Increasing need for anthropologists to learn new skills to explore a new domain -- online personal media -- by transforming traditional methods such as participant observation and traditional tools such as firsthand contextual information about place.

The entire original post is available at: http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/2/280