Virtual Ethnography

Field Sites for Virtual Ethnography

The idea of applying ethnographic methods to the understanding of virtual environments became popular in the early days of internet research during the 1990s. Nancy Baym was particularly influential in promoting a view of online environments as potentially rich sites of social interaction. She described a newsgroup used by soap opera fans and formulated an immersive approach that approached the online venue as a cultural site that an ethnographer could set out to describe in its own right. The notion of virtual ethnography became tied quite closely to the idea of online community, with the goal of the researcher being to outline the distinctive qualities of the cultures that prevailed within particular online settings. Questions of shared norms and values, social hierarchies, common languages, and collective goods, as well as the processes through which members identify insiders and deviants, became popular topics within ethno graphic approaches to online settings.

In addition to documenting distinctive features of online cultures, a further important dimension of virtual ethnography has been the development of a reflexive understanding of online experience, focusing on how presence in the virtual environment is achieved. Annette Markham wrote of her own experiences of going online and interviewing people that she encountered there, drawing heavily on a reflexive ethnographic tradition to argue that the internet could, under various circumstances, represent either a tool, a place, or a way of being. This style of ethnography focuses particularly on concerns of self, identity, and presence in the virtual environment. Many virtual ethnographers, even where they focus on documenting the culture encountered within a particular online space, draw on the experiences of the researcher as an important means of insight into the prevailing conditions that allow participants to be meaningfully present to one another.

Many virtual ethnographers have chosen particular online spaces as the field sites for their studies. Such field sites are often defined by a particular communication medium such as a Usenet newsgroup, a MUD (multiuser domain) or MOO (MUD, object oriented), a web-based discussion forum, a chat room, or a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. These technologies offer more or less clearly bounded sites of social interaction for ethnographic study. Some, such as the newsgroup, rely on asynchronous interaction, so that the ethnographer can dip in and out periodically, whereas others consist of real-time interaction and require a more sustained or organized commitment from the ethnographer. In each case, the appropriate form and timing of engagement will be guided largely by the ethnographer's developing sense of the ways in which participants operate in that setting. Some field sites, however, are less clearly bounded, and the ethnographer will need to pay careful attention to the ways in which those sites are defined in an ongoing fashion by participants and the extent to which they draw on diverse media to sustain meaningful interactions. An online game, for example, may involve both in-game communication channels and the use of web forums, external chat rooms, websites, and email. Players may also meet face-to-face periodically or play both across geographic distance and in the closer proximity of LAN (local area network) gaming events. Therefore, it is important for a virtual ethnographer to attend to the constitution of field sites across diverse media.

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