To understand the development of ethnographic methods within digital anthropology, I’d like to suggest that we look at a few examples of research and scholarly work in digital anthropology conducted in different decades starting from the 1990s when anthropology expressed more serious interest in digital culture.
The 1990s
The first one is an ethnographic research conducted about a multi-user dungeon :
Ito (1991, 89) describe her firldsite and research themes as follows:
My fieldsite, for the past few years, have been combat-based multi-user dungeons (MUDs), virtual worlds that are among the most imaginative and fantastic social spaces on the net. After providing a sketch of the kinds of MUDs that I study, I will explore virtual embodiment and the reality of these fantasy worlds in three case studies that explore: MUD romance, issues of accountability and consequentiality in online crime, and finally, the perils of machine embodiment through a case of virtual diaspora. The two analytic moves I make are to insist on Internet texts as real social facts, and secondly, to examine how they are embodied and located through technological apparatuses.
While the fieldsite is a MUD, as you can see, for example, in the following quote, some interviews were done in-person, face-to-face: “In a face-to-face interview I had with Frank, he elucidated the ambivalence around killing and violence, and the complex play between the categories of the virtual (“abstract”) and the real” (Ito 1991, 97).
The 2000s
Now, let’s look at an excerpt from a book formulating ethnographic approach to the internet with a focus on Trinidad. Miller and Slater (2000, 1) open their book with:
“Why should we do an ethnography of the Internet in Trinidad, or of Trinidad on the Internet? Because–contrary to the first generation of Intenet literature–the Internet is not a monolithic or placeless ‘cyberspace’; rather it is numerous new technologies, used by diverse people, in diverse real-world locations. Hence, there is everything to be gained by an ethnographic approach, by investigating how Internet technologoies are being understood and assimiliated somewhere in particular (through very complex ‘somewhere’, because Trinidad stretches diasporically over much of the world). A detailed focus on what Trinidadians find in the Internet, what they make of it, how they can relate its possibilities to themselves and their futures will tell us a great deal about both the Internet and about Trinidad.”
They then describe their methodological approach: “The study extended beyond five weeks in Trinidad to 15 months of collecting and analysing Internet data such as websites, interviewing Trinidadians in London and New York, extended email correspondence and participation in chat and ICQ which could be sustained over time as online relationships” (Miller and Staler 2000:22).
As you can see in this research project, the Internet culture, as a digital phenomenon, was studied with a focus on a specific place (although the complexity of the place is acknowledged). Methodologically, online and face-to-face interviews are both part of the design.
The 2010s
So, as we saw, so far, although the topic of the research is digital culture, whether it is MUDs or the internet culture in general, digital ethnography was still concerned with the ‘real’ places were the cultural practices were taking place and with the ‘real’ people who were behind the avatars and usernames.
Now, let’s look at another ethnographic research project conducted inside the virtual world of Second Life. Tom Boellstroff (2008, 4) acknowledges that “it might seem controversial to claim on can conduct research entirely inside a virtual world, since persons in them spend most of thier time in the actual world and because virtual worlds reference and respond to the actual world in many ways. However, […] studying virtual worlds ‘in their own terms’ is not only feasible but crucial to developing research methods that keep up with the realities of technological change.”
Boellstroff (2008, 61) then argues that the assumptions of those who maintain that as ethnographers, we are required to meet and interview with the ‘real’ people behind avatars are wrong:
“To demand that ethnographic research always incorporate meeting residents [of virtual worlds] in the actual world for ‘context’ presumes that virtual worlds are not themselves contexts; it renders ethnographically inaccessible the fact that most residents of virtual worlds do not meet their fellow residents offline. If one wants to study collective meaning and virtual worlds as collectivities exist purely online, then studying them in their own terms is the appropriate methodology, one that goes against the grain of many assumptions concerning how virtual worlds work. Why is the punchline of many studies of online culture the identification of contiuity with the offline? Why does it feel like a discovery that the online bleeds through to the offline, and vice versa?“
The 2020s
As anthropologists become more comfortable with digital tools, digital ethnographic methods were applied to studying any topic or place, especially of value in cases where in-person access is not feasible. This was definitely the case when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted person field research and many had to choose digital methods to complete their field resdarch.
Giving an ethnographic description of an event at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Postill (2017, 62) writes:
“I was not in London. I was at home in Melbourne; 17,000 kilometers away. What’s more, I was not even following the lecture in real-time, for it had been recorded and uploaded onto YouTube the day before (I learned about this video via Twitter). And yet it felt as if I was present there and then, in the thick of it, as much a member of the audience as anyone else. I felt the palpable tension, the anger, the fear, the dogged determination, and the final triumph of argument over intemidation. Perhaps it didn’t feel exactly as if I had been there at the time, but no leap of imagination was needed to feel a great sense of immediacy–even intimacy–with a recorded even that took place a world away.“
And back to 1946!
Although what Postill describes above and what many ethnographer were forced to do due to in-person restrictions after the pandemic benefit from digital tools to conduct remote ethnography, the concept itself is not a new development in the history of our discipline. Most famously, Ruth Benedict conducted a remote ethnography (or ‘culture-at-a-distance) of Japanese culture due to difficulties of in-person research in Japan as an American anthropologist as the result the second World War.
Work Cited
- Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Ito, Mizuko. 1997. “Virtually Embodied: The Reality of Fantasy in a Multi-User Dungeon.” In Porter, David (ed.) Internet Culture. New York: Routledge. 87-110.
- Miller, Daniel & Slater, Don. 2000. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford & New York: Berg.
- Postill, John. 2017. “Remote Ethnography: Studying Culture from Afar.” In: Hjorth, Larissa, Horst, Heather, Galloway, Anne, and Bell, Genevieve (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography. New York and London: Routledge. 61-69.