Ethnography for the Internet

Embedded, Embodied and Everyday

Christine Hine

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000189667
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Anthropology

The internet has become embedded into our daily lives, no longer an esoteric phenomenon, but instead an unremarkable way of carrying out our interactions with one another. Online and offline are interwoven in everyday experience. Using the internet has become accepted as a way of being present in the world, rather than a means of accessing some discrete virtual domain. Ethnographers of these contemporary Internet-infused societies consequently find themselves facing serious methodological dilemmas: where should they go, what should they do there and how can they acquire robust knowledge about what people do in, through and with the internet?This book presents an overview of the challenges faced by ethnographers who wish to understand activities that involve the internet. Suitable for both new and experienced ethnographers, it explores both methodological principles and practical strategies for coming to terms with the definition of field sites, the connections between online and offline and the changing nature of embodied experience. Examples are drawn from a wide range of settings, including ethnographies of scientific institutions, television, social media and locally based gift-giving networks.

–1–
Introduction

From one point of view, that of the textbook, doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques and received procedures that define the enterprise. What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, “thick description.”

(Geertz 1973: 6)

Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behaviour.

(Geertz 1973: 10)

ETHNOGRAPHY FOR THE CONTEMPORARY INTERNET

This book is an exploration of some steps we can take to adapt the already complex and tricky process of conducting ethnography in pursuit of “thick descriptions” to suit the conditions of contemporary society, in particular the conditions created by the increasing saturation of everyday life with various forms of computer-mediated communication. Ethnography is prized as a method for getting to the heart of meaning and enabling us to understand, in the round and in depth, how people make sense of their lives. It certainly promises, then, to give us a way to get to grips with some recurrent and topical questions. Has the Internet changed our lives? Has it, fundamentally, changed us? Has it levelled the playing field of social inequality, or have new forms of privilege emerged? Are we conforming more, or less, to social norms in the age of the Internet? Has the Internet strengthened, enriched, or challenged our sense of community? Has the Internet engendered new forms of identity or enabled us to better be ourselves? The ethnographic focus on holistic understanding seems well suited to giving us answers to these questions and helping us to avoid glib simplification. It is also very well suited to giving us a critical stance on over-generalized assumptions about the impact of new technologies. Taking a multi-faceted view, as ethnographers do, and focusing on how lives are lived, how technologies are adopted and adapted to our lives, and how social structures are made seems a promising way to capture what is distinctive about our contemporary way of life, and what is enduring about the challenges we face, and our means of coping with them.

However, what seems at first sight obvious—that ethnographers can usefully give accounts of the modes of life that emerge around computer-mediated communications—becomes more problematic when we start to think about where we are going to send our ethnographers, and what they will do when they get there. The feeling that things might have changed, which prompts the ethnographic interest, at the same time raises challenges for the formulation of ethnographic projects that will truly deliver on the promise to provide the depth of understanding that ethnography allows. It is the core proposition of this book that solving these challenges and delivering on that promise requires some creative adaptations of the ethnographic method. Making these adaptations may take us a long way from a conventional form of ethnography, but I would argue that even though we may change our strategies, it is still possible, in the process, to retain a commitment to some fundamental principles of ethnography as a distinctive mode of knowledge production. In the rest of this book I will be outlining why these strategies are required, demonstrating where they are novel and how they relate to fundamental methodological principles, and illustrating through case studies how these adaptive strategies can help us to illuminate the contemporary social arrangements that arise in and around the Internet. The remainder of this introduction will outline the structure of the book, and describe the contemporary Internet, which provides the stimulus and the challenge for finding new ways of being ethnographic. This Internet is very different, in many ways, from the Internet that I wrote about in Virtual Ethnography in 2000 (Hine 2000), and yet it is also recognizably the same: I will therefore highlight along the way some key points where the approach developed here builds on and deviates from that earlier text, written for a previous Internet age.

It should be said at the outset that I would reject any notion that mediated communication is in some way not appropriate or sufficient as a medium for conducting an ethnographic study. Ethnography, to be sure, was originally founded on the premise that it was important to go and spend time with people, to interact with them and live amongst them, and to develop a firsthand understanding of their way of life. Ethnographic understanding was developed in close proximity, and the early ethnographers shunned the notion that one could rely solely on hearsay and secondary accounts. This foundational commitment to participation and development of first-hand knowledge may render the prospect of conducting an ethnographic study through mediated communications somewhat troubling. Indeed, to rely on only one medium when the participants involved have many different ways of communicating and representing themselves to each other could be problematic, and could jeopardize that holistic, rounded understanding that ethnographers aim to develop. But this does not, in itself, mean that ethnographers should not take part in mediated communications when that is what the people that they are studying do. Where mediated communications are a significant part of what people do, I feel it should be self-evident that the ethnographer needs to take part in those mediated communications alongside whatever face-to-face interactions may occur, as well as taking note of any other forms of document and recording that circulate amongst participants. In subsequent chapters I will be exploring the different kinds of contribution that an ethnographer’s participation in mediated communications can make to his or her understanding, and how different forms of understanding gained from different media can be reconciled, or maintained in a productive tension.

It is important, then, for ethnographers to take part in the diverse forms of communication and interaction that those they study use and not to write off any of these forms of communication as inherently less informative or as un-ethnographic. Acceptance of this point does, however, cause some problems for an ethnographic project, because it challenges the ethnographer’s ability to make sense of situations as a unified whole. Mediated communications are troubling for ethnographers because they often seem to leave us unable to comprehend a situation as a singular entity with all of its ramifications and to find out what it means for its participants. We cannot be simultaneously with both of the participants in a telephone conversation and thus we will only see the changing facial expressions, the multi-tasking activities and the post-conversation response from one perspective. When one of our informants updates his status on Facebook, he may tell us what he meant by it, but we cannot be quite sure what his friends make of what he writes, nor indeed which of his friends may even have seen the status update any more than, as Geertz (1973) reminds us, we can understand from observation of the action alone what is meant when we see someone close one eye to wink. When we watch a fight break out on Twitter we cannot be sure whether any of the followers of those involved are seeing the same fight, at the same time, and understanding it in the same way that we do. The very notion of a singular “situation” as a pre-existing object breaks down when we look closely. The Internet has brought us together in myriad new ways, but still much of the interpretive work that goes on to embed it into people’s lives is not apparent on the Internet itself, as its users weave together highly individualized and complex patterns of meaning out of these publicly observable threads of interaction. An ethnographer in such circumstances must get used to a perpetual feeling of uncertainty, of wondering what has been missed, and attempting to build interpretations of events based on sketchy evidence.

Of course, it has always been true that ethnographers are limited in their ability to see and participate in events. Even in a village, conducting a conventional study based on face-to-face interactions over a prolonged period of time, an ethnographer will be making close connections with one family whilst wondering what is going on in the house next door. Even without bringing mediated communication into the mix, ethnographers were limited in their ability to encompass the whole of the situation: ethnography is conducted on a scale determined by the human perceptual capacity. However much an ethnographer tries, she cannot be omniscient, and some aspects of the situation she studies will always escape her understanding. The concern, then, is an old-established one that predates the advent of mediated communication. However, the turn to mediated communication on such a dominant scale does bring a new complexity to ethnographic proceedings, and raises a very real concern that the limitations on perception within a mediated landscape might threaten the contribution made by ethnographic enquiry or limit the ethnographer’s ability to draw robust conclusions. Ethnographers cannot help but be affected by the general cultural current of concern that mediated communications might not be quite as good as the real thing, and hence develop an uneasiness about the robustness of the forms of knowledge that might be acquired by these means.

It appears, then, that contemporary ethnographers are stuck in a very awkward situation. Some very significant things, culturally speaking, are happening, and ethnographers should be well placed to develop insightful, detailed, and complex accounts of exactly what is going on and what it means. Mediated communication is a highly significant part of many contemporary phenomena of interest, and while ethnography has conventionally favored face-to-face communication, ethnographers exploring these contemporary phenomena would generally wish to embrace mediated communication and understand how these diverse modes of interaction contribute to the cultural milieu. Whatever it is that people do, an ethnographer would generally want to be observing them doing it, and wherever possible doing it with them. Embracing mediated communication means, however, accepting the limits to perception that various forms of mediation confer, and accommodating some consequent loss of ability to develop a holistic and detailed understanding. Doing ethnography through mediated interactions can mean the loss of a secure sense of a geographically based object of study, or involve abandoning the notion that one studies a defined social group or community, depending on how the patterns of communication cross geographic spaces and social boundaries. Ethnography is highly necessary for understanding the Internet in all its depth and detail, and yet it can be challenging to develop ways of conducting ethnographic studies which both embrace all that mediated communication offers and still provide us with robust, reliable insights into something in particular.

Ethnography of mediated communications thus seems to be both necessary and doomed, simultaneously. We need ethnography in order to help us understand what is going on, but the very nature of the change taking place seems to evade ethnographic understanding. There is hope, however, because ethnography is at its heart a highly adaptive approach that suits itself to the conditions that it finds. An ethnographic study cannot be wholly designed in advance, for the methods of inquiry that an ethnographer develops are uniquely suited to the specific situation being studied. It is a boot-strapping method, which builds itself afresh in each location, based upon the ethnographer’s emerging understanding of the situation. If we accept, therefore, that in some circumstances living with a lack of certainty and an enduring ambiguity about what things mean is an inherent part of the conditions in which participants find themselves, then experiencing and embracing that uncertainty becomes an ethnographer’s job, and pursuing some form of absolute robust certainty about a singular research object becomes a distraction, and even a threat, to the more significant goal of working out just how life is lived under these conditions in which such stability is at best a very temporary achievement. The paradox then slips away—an ethnographer can focus best on understanding modes of life through immersion in them, learning their values and practices from the inside, and focusing on making active and strategic choices about what to study and how to study it.

This book is focused on ethnography for the Internet, rather than ethnography of the Internet, because the Internet cannot be grasped as a complete entity that one could study in its entirety. One cannot do an ethnography of the Internet as a meaningful research object in itself, although many potential research objects can be made from it, and are either contained within it or connected to it in some way. This book is also not focused solely on ethnography through the Internet, because in order to understand mediated communications one is also often led to study face-to-face settings in which they are produced and consumed, and to comprehend the settings in which they become embedded. The book focuses instead on ethnography for the Internet because ethnography is an adaptive approach that is different for each circumstance in which it finds itself, and I am discussing the strategies that may be useful in an ethnography adapted for the circumstances that the contemporary Internet provides. In the next section I will briefly describe some significant aspects of that contemporary Internet, before moving to a more detailed account of the distinctive forms of knowledge that an ethnographic approach to the contemporary Internet can provide.

THE CONTEMPORARY INTERNET

As the twenty-first century moves into its teens, the Internet has become a mass phenomenon. According to the biennial Oxford Internet Survey, which draws on a representative sample of the UK population, the proportion of UK individuals with Internet access reached 78 percent of the population over 14 in 2013 (Dutton et al. 2013). This figure has steadily risen since the Oxford Internet Surveys began in 2003, when 59 percent of the population claimed to be Internet users. There remain, however, a small percentage who have never used the Internet and cannot see themselves doing so, and there is also a small but significant number of ex-users of the Internet. In 2003 there was also a significant gender gap, with 64 percent of men and 55 percent of women claiming to be Internet users. By 2013 this gender gap was no longer statistically discernible, with 79 percent of women and 78 percent of men in the survey using the Internet, a difference within the error margin of the data. There are, however, some more enduring inequalities, with likelihood of being an Internet user correlating to age, level of formal education, and income. In the UK the Internet demographic, as captured by the Oxford Internet Survey (Dutton et al. 2013), reflects a national population for whom various kinds of opportunity are structured by education and access to resources. The Internet is a mass phenomenon, but it is not universally available, and there are still some underlying inequalities that structure access.

A similar picture of a steadily growing Internet population plays out across the globe, although the proportion of users in different countries does differ widely, depending on such factors as economic resources, technological infrastructure, and literacy levels. The International Telecommunications Union estimated that in 2011 Internet penetration globally was 32.5 percent of the population, but that this overall statistic broke down into Internet penetration of 70.2 percent across the developed countries and 24.4 percent in the developing world (International Telecommunications Union 2012). The differences can be very stark indeed. Data from the International Telecommunications Union for 2012 had levels of Internet penetration across Scandinavia at over 90 percent of the population, whilst many nations in Africa and Asia were listed as having less than 20 percent of their population online. This International Telecommunications Union report also estimated that less than 2 percent of individuals in Somalia, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea had access to the Internet (International Telecommunications Union 2012). The Internet is indeed a mass phenomenon in North America, Europe, and Australia, but much less so in Africa and much of Asia, and in many areas of the globe is still completely out of reach as a practical proposition for much of the population.

In much of the world, then, t...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The E3 Internet: Embedded, Embodied, Everyday Internet
• 3 Ethnographic Strategies for the Embedded, Embodied, Everyday Internet
• 4 Observing and Experiencing Online/Offline Connections
• 5 Connective Ethnography in Complex Institutional Landscapes
• 6 The Internet in Ethnographies of the Everyday
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index