Participant observationWikipedia: “Participant observation is research strategies which aim to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given group of individuals (such as a religious, occupational, or subcultural group, or a particular community) and their practices through an intensive involvement with people in their natural environment, often though not always over an extended period of time…” click to continue reading the wikipedia entry on “participant observation”. and interviews are the main methods for collecting data during my ethnographic fieldwork. Since I am interested in knowledge practices= meaning-generating practices
Click to read more on knowledge practices on my page “Theoretical background”. of Muslim activists in computer-mediated environments I do research within on- and offline environments.

Defining the field in computer-mediated environments

Defining a field for my fieldwork has been one of the difficult questions in this research. And that for two reasons:

• Trying to define computer-mediatedor online, cyber, virtual etc. environmentsor worlds, realities, spaces etc. in opposition to the actualor real, physical, offline, material etc. worldor environment, reality, space etc. I quickly enter slippery territoryThe difficulty of defining refers to both parts of the expression: on the one hand “computer-mediated”, “virtual”… and on the other hand “environment”, “world”… . In everyday situations, people (including myself) usually do not make a difference when talking about these phenomena.: When accepting the basic ideas of constructivismalso constructionism
  Social constructivism stems from cognitive psychology. Learning, so the basic argument, takes place and is shaped through the interaction with the environment and the self. Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) is the founding father of this school of thought which later on, mainly during the “cultural turn”, entered social science and humanity in general. Click to read more. there is nothing in our lifeworld that is natural, essential, purely physical or unmediated. Everything we know of is already perceived and therefore automatically filtered and reconstructed through our experiences, normative frameworks, dispositions…, in short through all the normative baggage that we have acquired all through our lives and through the filters of the artefacts (computer, glases, pen etc.) that we use. So what is the difference to computer-mediated environments? Actual and virtual worlds are crafted and, to cite Tom BoellstorffBoellstorff’s book “Coming of age in Second Life” represents one of the (so far) few anthropological works that take on sociality in virtual worlds in its own terms. He has done a two-year fieldwork in Second Life using his avatar “Tom Bukowski”. Click to read the first chapter of his brilliant ethnography., the result of “human action that engages with the world and thereby results in a different world”. This points out that the usually employed binary artificial/ crafted/ made-up vs. natural/essential is not doing a good job when trying to define virtual and actual environments or worlds.
• An ethnographer needs a field just like a fish needs water. However, this implies a need to roughly delineate the borders around a field, a social space or locality, that is “researchable”. But what are localities and social spaces? Where do I draw the border if I want to research the social space of Muslim knowledge production in Germany and the Netherlands? Locating the fieldThe volume edited by Coleman and Collins provides a good overview over the current discussion. Coleman, Michael Simon/ Collins, Peter (eds. 2006). Locating the Field. Space, Place and Context in Anthropology. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Click to get to the relevant page of Berg Publishers. is already problematic in research not involving “virtual” social spaces. How can one in the face of never ending hyperlinks, cross-references, copy/paste and networking activities of whatever kind within computer-mediated environments draw boundaries that are meaningful? When can I say: This application or computer-mediated environment is inspired by the salafiyyah but the next link to another site, chat room or You Tube is not?

As you might already guess, there is no final answer to these questions. Therefore let me briefly sketch out how I delineate the social space of knowledge production within CMC environments where Muslim activists in the Netherlands and Germany engage with their faith.

Mapping a web sphere of activism

In order to define my fields, I go by what activists are actually doing online. I start in online forums dealing with Islam where they engage in discussion on their faith. Online forums bundle activities because forum participants announce activities elsewhere in the web (i.e. chat room sessions, new interesting static web sites, other forums etc.) and in the actual world. From there, I follow the links and enter the web sphereA web sphere is a hyperlinked set of dynamically defined digital resources spanning multiple websites deemed relevant or related to a central theme or object. See Forte, M.C. (2005). Centering the Links: Understanding Cybernetic Patterns of Co-Production, Circulation and Consumption. In C. Hine (ed). Virtual Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet. Oxford: Berg Publisher. 93-106. of Muslim activism inspired by the salafiyyah. Furthermore, I also ask activists about what they do in the virtual world. This leads me to many places in the Internet that are only accessible for Muslims. Some forums mention this in their guidelines. Other sites are only accessible upon invitation or through personal acquaintance. Since I do not want to sneak into these sites and pretend that I am a Muslim these places will stay closed for me. Therefore, I cannot claim to map a complete web sphere. Mapping should in the present case not be understood in terms of an objective representation of all spaces and their exact categorization. Internet and other networks seldom function as conventional geographic spaces. It is rather about tracing actual practices of Internet users.

Yet again, also this method of mapping the web sphere is somehow discretionary and arbitrary. After all, it is me who definesclick to read my post on the issue of labeling salafiyyah or Islam. Researchers are not and cannot be objective. In fact, nobody can be objective according to the constructivist assumptions. But this does not make research impossible: It is essential that we are conscious of our own arbitrariness and perceptive filters. And, as simple as it sounds, it always helps to go back to our “research subjects”, the participants of our research, and to ask them about our research findings.

It is difficult to find a satisfactory answer to the questions concerning the relation between the virtual/cyber worlds and the physical/actual worlds or whatever term you prefer. I avoid the term “real world” as the opposite of virtual world because the virtual is not any less real than the actual. Gamers or inhabitants of Second Life would vehemently refuse to call their activities in virtual environments “unreal”. Usually, online or virtual spaces imply metaphorical, de-territorialized and disembodied spaces created within communication networks. The term offline is employed to denote the physical reality that hosts the body, the materiality and the physicality of a person. However, although virtual spaces might be made up by invisible electronic and digital processes, it involves also the sensory of a physical human body and technological structures that transfer, decode and encode information. Brenda LaurelQuoted in Coyle, R. (1993). The Genesis of Virtual Reality. In P. Hayward & T. Wollen (eds.) Future Visions: The Technologies of the Screen. British Film Institute. 162. underlines that virtual reality means “that you take some subset of your senses with you into another environment”. Within the site of the human body with its sensory organs virtual and physical reality merge and interact.

The prevalent sense of a virtual space of an entirely different quality than that of the so called real world does also not match results from researchFor example Green, Nicola. (1999) “Strange yet stylish headgear. Virtual reality consumption and the construction of gender.” Information, Communication and Society 2(4): 454-475. Or Marshall, J.P. (2007) The Mobilisation of Race and gender on an Internet Mailing List, V1.0. Transforming Cultures Journal, 2(2). Available at: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/TfC/article/view/638/569 [Accessed October 31, 2008]. on gender construction and ethnicity in virtual spaces either. These works show that users borrow from what they know, from the familiar stereotypes and existing concepts of exclusion and inclusion. The social dispositions and resources of a person are taken to the virtual world and shape, amongst other things, knowledge practices in these environments.

But still: There is something different about the spaces we encounter, inhabit, reach out to, interact with, enter… do something with… behind the interface of the computer screen. That is at least the idea we have. But what is the exact quality and difference of this space? Are we dealing with multiple spaces each with its own properties? Is a differentiation of these spaces possible, helpful and necessary? Since this is an ongoing discussion I will surely postClick to get to my first post on this issue. more often on this issue.