Taxes, Adulthood, etc.

While I haven’t been able to complete all of this week’s readings prior to my Sunday blog musings (taxes, adulthood, etc.) I found the discussion of ethnography and computer-mediated communications exactly what I have been looking for as the authors addressed many of my previous concerns and of course raised more questions. The openness with which Garcia et al. (2009) and Hine (2008) spoke about the complexities of conducting ethnographic research was refreshing. Here are established members of the research community engaged in a conversation related to an emerging field of study. Each author was careful to point out that our connection to the internet is greater than ever and an integral component of many peoples’ lives therefore any social research should at least explore the effects of CMC – including the effects of exclusion from online communities.

I particularly found the discussion by Garcia et al regarding the positionality of the researcher in online communities enlightening. I continually grapple with the participant/observer relationship and in the cyber realm it is not different. Garcia et al. (2009) carefully outlined the many ways a researcher can enter the cyber realm and how he or she might best participate. Of course the resounding answer they established was that is it simply depends on the researcher and the context in which he or she is working! But that is the case in most researcher instances.

Hine’s (2008) discussion of defining the field was thought provoking and something I had never put much—any--thought to. This is also addressed by Garcia et al (2009) but in a different way. Each article mentions both the virtual realm as well as the physical being possible field sites for the ethnography. It seems Garcia et al. are caution the ethnographer to be careful and encourage that he or she predefines the field prior to commencing an ethnographic study. Hine is not as specific and if I read him correctly, he was speaking more towards defining the cyber areas for investigation. With the interconnected nature of our lives, particularly given Web 2.0 technology I could see it becoming more difficult to establish set boundaries for the field. Therefore the choices of what areas to investigate will greatly impact the study. I could also see an attempt to conduct an ethnography across several social networking sites overwhelming. Each article mentioned data collection and the accordance of increased access to the interactions. Ethnographers in a cyber-realm can easily archive communications and return later for analysis. This could easily snowball into the collection of massive amounts of data which if not properly analyzed might prove overwhelming!

More to come as I process all of this!

Garcie, A. C., Standlee, A. I., Bechkoff, J & Cui, Y. (2009). Ethnographic approaches to the Internet and computer-mediated communication. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 38(1), 52-84.

Hine, C. (2008). Internet research as emergent practice. In S. Nagy Hess-Biber & P. Leavy (Eds.), Handbook of emergent methods (pp. 525-541). New York: The Guilford Press. 

Here’s a picture of Vic – he’s enthralled with my research!