Entries tagged as ‘cyberspace ethnography’
This item was provoked by a student essay in Cyberspace Ethnography, and is meant as an invitation for readers to post their ideas rather than serving as some sort of definitive statement on the issue.
Speaking of how the self is presented on Facebook, one informant told the researcher in the course:
“The person I am, this changes too. I seek out new experiences with new people. What this means is I come into new ‘truths’. So am I always the same? I don’t think so. I’m changing into a new person. I also like to think I’m finding and making myself in this way.”
Tying in with previous posts on “impermanence” (first, second), I thanked the researcher for provoking the following speculative question:
“I wonder about the extent to which this act of seeing ourselves as caterpillars-becoming-butterflies, the constant metamorphosis we claim to undergo, is more a statement of desire, and one motivated out of fear of death and hope that we will live on in some form or fashion. My very tentative impression is that in societies where persons lack a pronounced fear of death, there is a greater sense of a fixed self in social life, not stasis, not an absence of beliefs in a spirit world or an afterlife, but a sense that the ‘leopard cannot easily change its spots’.”
(Aside from this: I loved the quote of an informant who says of self-presentation on Facebook–”it’s what you like, not what you are like that matters”.)
Feel free to post your thoughts on this topic, especially whether there is any ethnographic substance to support the speculation above.
On the subject of death and blogging, and related to previous posts about Roi Kwabena, see the post on “blogging the dead” at Guanaguanare.
Categories: "OUT THERE" · COMPLEXITY/CHAOS · CONCEPTS
Tagged: construction, impermanence, facebook, cyberspace ethnography, self, change, flux, flow, death, stability, fixity
Please allow me to promote my own little experimental course, being offered this semester at Concordia University in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. The title of the course is “Cyberspace Ethnography,” and I plan to revise and add it to the regular curriculum as a cross-listed Anthropology & Sociology course.
This is a new and fairly experimental course of mine, inspired in very large part by my colleague, Christine Hine, in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey. I am also proud to say that I have worked with Christine by contributing to her edited volume, Virtual Methods, and I was invited by her to present at a seminar she organized on ethnographic research online sponsored by the ESRC and hosted at Brunel University.
The focus of the coursework involves ethnographic research conducted in online environments, virtual communities, and so forth, with students blogging about their research, their readings, and their thoughts on class discussions and the research process. There are no exams, and the great majority of the readings are from open access and online sources.
As I state at the opening of the course website:
“This course on ethnographic approaches to the study of cyberspace interactions is being offered as an experiment, one whose outcomes and future shapes will largely be determined by students such as yourselves. The current focus of the course is on online situations as such, demanding an immersion in the interactive action, thus treating cyberspace as not just a mere appendage or extension of “the real world”. The aim of the course is not to try to fit the Internet into what we already know, or to ask students to uncritically apply established theories and established ethnographic methods to this still relatively new set of arenas for social interaction and cultural representation. The aim is not to uphold a discipline, to find new bottles for old wine. Instead the aim is to ask of what usefulness the discipline can be in answering new problems, new situations, and new questions. Students should let their imaginations run.”
Categories: CYBERSPACE RESEARCH · ETHNOGRAPHY
Tagged: christine hine, cyberspace ethnography, online environments, virtual communities
