As I have indicated elsewhereClick to read more on my page about “Research Methods”. on this site, there are many terms for and understandings of “that space behind the interface of a computer”: virtual world, online environments, cyberspace and many more. These terms are not as innocent as they seem for they carry implicit approaches and notions of “that space”.
Before my research, I thought that sociality behind the screen is all false, games and somehow uprooted from “normal” life since people are able to experiment with identities. Then, intrigued by the persistent activities of religious activists on the net I came to understand that online and offline realities are linked and interact. But I continued to cling to the idea that online spaces are qualitatively different form offline spaces. That also meant that a researcher would need specific methods to produce research data from these spaces: virtual ethnography.
However, having gone further with my research on Muslim activism on the net and having immersed myself into related ethnographies, studies and theoretical works it became more difficult for me to uphold the idea that so called virtual and actual realities are qualitatively and essentially different spaces. Also in the “actual” world we use media and technologies that change our perception of time as well as space (distance) and influence social interaction. Think of telephones, the bicycle or electric light. Therefore we already live in a kind of virtuality and mediated environment. However, I would argue somehow along the lines of McLuhan that we do not notice the filters (i.e. mediations) any more through which we perceive our environment. they have become appropriated and integrated into our nervous system. And I would suspect that the same is happening with new media, meaning what is considered to be new right now, which slowly bleed into us as social beings. This would be the normal course of technology appropriation. Computer-mediated communication is already in many social groups become a part of sociality be off- or online. What I see from the behaviour of many Muslim activists on the net (mainly forums and chat rooms) and the way they speak to me about the use of computer-mediated technologies does not reveal a fundamental separation of virtual and actual realities. In my case, it therefore does not make a lot of sense to continue working with the separation.
At the end, a recent most fascinating discussionFor those interested: Look at the threads on “virtual ethnography” in January and February 2009. Some long-standing researchers like Christine Hine contributed to the debate. Click to get to the archive of AIR-L. that I followed on the list of the Association of Internet Researchers (AIR) dealt a final death blow to the idea of a special set of research methods summed up as “virtual ethnography”. The methods of ethnography/ fieldwork like participant observation can be employed in online space just as they can be used in any other field. Of course, some things need to be adapted due to technologies involved and other special field characteristics of the research environment. But this is also true for any other field in the actual world. Fieldwork in rural setting requires a different adaptation of fieldwork methods than research in urbanized settings, for example.
Due to my skepticism about the usefulness of the term “virtual” I resort to “computer-mediated environments” in order to name “the thing”. This is surely not ideal, but for me it seems to be the best game in town right now. It names the technology that mainly influences and (co-)forms sociality in these environments. The offline/online boundary can be overcome since computer-mediated environments encompasses what people do at the computer as well as beyond the screen. What is important is to look at the different properties of these environments, i.e. what is the context of a chat room or a forum? How does communication appear? How do humans and technologies as non-human actors interact? How do all this, actors, contexts, structures, create a specific form of sociality and practices?
Let’s stick with “plain” ethnography, without the virtual.
