Revitalising Audience Research

Innovations in European Audience Research

Frauke Zeller, Cristina Ponte, Brian O'Neill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317649441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Estudios de comunicación

The revitalisation of audience studies is not only about new approaches and methods; it entails a crossing of disciplines and a bridging of long-established boundaries in the field. The aim of this volume is to capture the boundary-crossing processes that have begun to emerge across the discipline in the form of innovative, interdisciplinary interventions in the audience research agenda. Contributions to this volume seek to further this process though innovative, audience-oriented perspectives that firmly anchor media engagement within the diversity of contexts and purposes to which people incorporate media in their daily lives, in ways often unanticipated by industries and professionals.

Part I
Methodological Revitalisation and Innovation

1
Lost in Transition?

Conducting a Hybrid Ethnography ‘In’ and ‘Out’ of Second Life

Katleen Gabriels and Joke Bauwens

Introduction

As argued at the outset of the age of Internet-mediated communication with its intensified social interaction and new audiences that interchange and share meanings, questions about culture, subjectivity and reflexivity would only gain importance within media and audience studies (see Poster, 1995; Förnas, 1998). Although we are now past the novelty of online communication platforms, a significant part of audience studies is still working on this agenda by questioning how the multiple communicative spaces we are involved in shape our sense of self, other and the world (see, for example, the many studies on Facebook and identity). We believe that studying contemporary audiences boils down to studying formations of people that increasingly transit multiple, intersecting as well as parallel communicative spaces, which inevitably brings about a pluralisation of social relationships (Moores, 2005) in a quantitative (more people to communicate with) and qualitative (other ways to communicate) way. Hence, if we want to understand if, when and how subjectivity is reconfigured, research should consider the particularity of different realms where people build and perform their identity.

One particular subfield of audience studies in which this issue is often addressed is what we could name ‘avatar studies.’ Often, although not exclusively analysed from an ethnographic perspective, these studies show that becoming and being an avatar (i.e. transiting corporeal and virtual realms) triggers reflexivity about one’s basic conceptions of identity (see Heider, 2009; Hongladarom, 2011). With the everydayness of virtual sociality in many people’s lives, dichotomous ideas about the ‘online’ and ‘offline’ as two separate realms have made way for a more holistic approach that aims to understand the interaction between the virtual and the actual in today’s Internet-saturated cultures (e.g. Ess, 2013). This conceptual shift has brought about a methodological debate about studying Internet-mediated cultures in close connection to bodily experiences (e.g. Bakardjieva and Smith, 2001; Haythornthwaite and Kendall, 2010). Drawing on contemporary ethnographies of the Internet, it can be argued that research designs that entail a split between online and offline data gathering, with little or no attention devoted to the interplay between virtual and actual experiences, are far away from how people integrate the Internet in their everyday reality (Slater, 2002; Orgad, 2009; Beneito-Montagut, 2011).¹

At the same time, the so-called hybridisation (Jordan, 2009, p. 182), in which virtual spaces “are fundamentally embedded within specific social, cultural and material contexts” (Orgad, 2006, p. 877), raises fundamental methodological questions about how to study the online and offline as part of the same reality without ignoring the distinct features and impact of the Internet on our lives and actions. Such an approach, as argued by others, needs to consider the particularity of online interactions, observations and settings and how these differ from their face-to-face variants in so-called conventional ethnography (Hine, 1998; Schaap, 2002; Davies, 2008).

From an anthropological and ethnographic point of view, social virtual worlds have often been conceptualised in terms of liminality (Turkle, 1995; Shields, 2000; 2003; Ramiller, 2007), not only for the participants involved but also for the ethnographers aiming to capture the “lived culture, worldly experiences and practical sense making” (Willis and Trondman, 2000 [2002], p. 5). If one steps into the virtual, one has to leave the familiar behind to cross the border to a world in which everyday lives are spaced off (Tella, et al., 1998, p. 241). Participants are disembedded from the rules of society, their identity and status, and re-embedded “out of the other side to be reintegrated into society with their new status and identity in place” (Bell, 2007, p. 36). This liminal experience matches to a certain extent with the attitude which ethnographers are expected to adopt, that is the stranger position (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2006; Agar, 2008; Gobo, 2008). Typically, studying cultures different from their own and allowing that all that is taken for granted is defamiliarised and estranged, the ethnographer is at the beginning somewhat lost. Even when he or she studies groups and settings that are close to him or her, the ethnographer needs to treat them as “anthropologically strange” (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2006, p. 9).

Precisely these experiences of virtuality in which everything is unsettled albeit not necessarily in the pejorative sense of the word (see e.g. Shields, 2000; 2003) have been the point of departure in our ethnographic study within Second Life (Linden Lab, 2003).² Starting from a moral-philosophical and media-theoretical framework, we studied the meanings of everyday morals, values and practices in this social virtual world. The foreshadowed research problem was if and to what extent virtuality influences our dealing with the other and, related to this, to what extent and with what ethical consequences there is dis/continuity between moral practices in virtual and actual worlds.

We have been involved in the lives of twenty Second Life residents (born between 1943 and 1985) over a period of one year in order to understand how they understand and articulate actual and virtual morality. We aimed to disentangle how residents construct and reflect not only on the in-world daily moral order and the existing in-world moral practices but also on the moral consequences of virtual experiences in their actual lives. Although the turn towards a combined actual–virtual ethnographic approach of internet-mediated cultures is strongly advocated (e.g. Miller and Slater, 2000; Leander and McKim, 2003; Orgad, 2005; Beneito-Montagut, 2011), relatively few studies have researched the meaning and experience of social virtual worlds in that way (not counting a few notable exceptions in game studies; see, for example, Celia Pearce, Bonnie Nardi and T. L. Taylor as discussed in Boellstorff, et al., 2012, pp. 124–126).

From a methodological point of view, the alternating movement between virtual and actual ethnographic participation raises significant issues. Linking up with ethnography’s pursuit of reflexivity, this chapter deals with two particular questions. First, how do, in the words of Gergen (2001), the multiple self-positionings or discursive formations in multiple dialogue sites affect the relationship between researcher and residents? Second, how can we manage the interplay between virtuality and actuality as research sites of one lived and continuous reality? As our ethnographic encounters occurred both in embodied (through face-to-face meetings with actual selves) and disembodied ways (by means of avatar conversations and in-world observations), there are some particularities in integrating these two modes of ethnographic encounter, that is two types of social interaction and data.

The chapter starts with a concise contextualisation of our empirical investigation in the development of research on social virtual worlds. Next, we discuss the specificity of morality in virtual worlds which, as empirically substantiated by others (see below), is to a certain extent a prolongation of the meanings people attach to moral values and practices in their actual social lives. However, in virtual sociality, as Schaap (2002) has argued, “things work just a bit differently” (p. 112). Precisely that somewhat unsettling or at least “strange lapse of reality that cyberspace presents with us” (Schaap, 2002, p. 112) or that particular phenomenological experience of virtual worlds that is enabled by digital technologies as cultural forms (see e.g. Garza, 2002) has been our point of departure.

The Actual and the Virtual: From Dichotomy to Hybridisation

The first-generation theorists of the 1990s mapped the virtual–actual relation in terms of an ontological dualism, also with regard to a Cartesian mind–body split, thereby emphasising how the virtual is radically divorced from the actual (see e.g. Benedikt, 1992; Turkle, 1995). At the end of the 1990s, however, this dualism was gradually disproved by empirical research and phenomenological approaches (see e.g. Markham, 1998; Baym, 1998; 2010; Wellman and Gulia, 1999; Slater, 2002; Kendall, 2002; Leander and McKim, 2003; Bakardjieva, 2003; Tuszynski, 2006; Jordan, 2009). Nowadays scholars in general address “the intersection, crossovers, and synergies” between virtuality and actuality (Haythornthwaite and Kendall, 2010, p. 1083) and openly dissociate themselves from the dichotomous approach that set the tone in the 1990s. Rather than envisioning social virtual interaction as a separate realm, they conceptualise the relationship between online and offline in terms of hybridisation (see Jordan, 2009, p. 181).

This turn in thought has severely weakened the belief in virtuality’s transformational powers, assuming that the virtual is a realm where existing forms of identity and community significantly alter. However, the mutual influence between online and offline forms of social life remains an important field of interest and raises questions about how hybridisation is affecting the way people make sense of their lives (see e.g. Bakardjieva and Smith, 2001; Jordan, 2009, p. 182). Consequently, recognition of the virtual–actual interrelation on a conceptual level needs to be addressed on a methodological level too (Orgad, 2009). Hybridisation forces researchers to rethink conventional ethnographic method leading to “a new type of ethnography” (Jordan, 2009, p. 181, p. 183). Subsequently, compelling questions are, Which methodological issues the combination of virtual and actual modes of data gathering bring about? and How we can capture and comprehend this complex hybrid social reality adequately?

In line with the theoretical development in the body of thought on the virtual–actual dialectic, most 1990s ethnographic research studied virtual space as an autonomous field site and subsequently generated ‘online’ data this way.³ Although they received a lot of criticism (Slater, 2002), the so-called virtual ethnography approach (Hine, 1998) is still believed valuable if the enquiry takes place in virtual worlds (Beneito-Montagut, 2011, p. 719). For example Boellstorff (2008, p. 63) contends that virtual spaces are meaningful on their own and that it becomes problematic if one takes actual-world sociality as an explanation for virtual-world sociality, because the latter is not a simple derivation of the first. He strongly opposes the view that the ultimate objective of a virtual ethnography must be the addressing of the actual world, “which is taken to be the only ‘real’ social world” (2008, p. 62), because this view oversimplifies the interrelation between actuality and virtuality. If a researcher insists on meeting face-to-face this might point at a belief that the virtual is somehow inferior to the actual.

Researchers departing from notions of authenticity (Turkle, 1995) and attaching great importance to social contexts have often turned to actual ethnography approaches to study online user experiences (Bakardjieva and Smith, 2001). In particular social-determinist criticisms against the post-modernist ideas about ‘free-floating’ identities have pushed researchers into offline modes of data gathering that acknowledge the social and material roots of people’s everyday practices. In fact, many hybrid ethnographies, combining online and offline methods of data collection, depart from this assumption. The position of Miller and Slater (2000/2001, p. 5), who conducted a hybrid ethnography on the everyday use and integration of the internet in Trinidad, is built on the idea that virtual spaces are “continuous with and embedded in other social spaces”. To this aim, they combined both virtual and actual methods to meet and address the “diversity of relationships that people may pursue through the communicative media that they embed in their ongoing social lives” (Miller and Slater, 2000/2001, p. 55). Others also included online and offline encounters with informants in their ethnography. Orgad (2005; 2006; 2009) conducted a four-year hybrid study including actual and virtual interviews with breast cancer patients. In the first stage, Orgad conducted online interviews with patients who were active on breast cancer–related online spaces; in the next stage, she shifted to a face-to-face relationship with her informants (2006, p. 882). This transition from virtual to actual meetings was important to gain knowledge regarding why these women engaged on breast cancer forums and to attain understanding in the relation between their actual and virtual experiences (Orgad, 2009). Whereas Orgad (2005; 2006; 2009) moved out of the virtual into the actual, Bakardjieva and Smith (2001) followed the opposite direction by first meeting their informants at their home settings where they subsequently looked into their computers to study their virtual practices. Still, although many scholars have called for a combination of both approaches, that is from the virtual to the actual and from the actual to the virtual (see e.g. Leander and McKim, 2003; Beneito-Montagut, 2011), few hybrid ethnographies have systematically included both transitions so far. Drawing on the methodological literature and seeking to bridge this gap, we included both transitions in our study (see below).

Hybrid Moralities

Numerous people nowadays have avatars in virtual multi-user surroundings such as Second Life and World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004). Many of the moral issues related to virtuality are not new but have taken on a new meaning because of technological specificities. For instance, it is argued that communication in virtual surroundings makes people less humane as the physical face, a precondition for moral responsibility, is missing (Lanier, 2011, p. 36, p. 69; Turkle, 2011, p. 11, p. 18). In addition, graphical representation makes the re-creation of unethical and illegal practices possible, such as the portrayal of virtual paedophilia in three-dimensional user-created virtual spaces, raising questions about the moral status of virtual practices (Søraker, 2011, p. 61; Strikwerda, 2011). ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Introduction: Revitalising Audience Research: Innovations in European Audience Research
• PART I Methodological Revitalisation and Innovation
• PART II New Fields of Research, New Challenges
• Contributors
• Index