Laura Robinson and Jeremy Schulz's article: New avenues of sociological inquiry: Evolving forms of ethnographic practice (in Sociology, and available through the Kean Library's Sage database) provides an overview of ethnographic work to explore/document/theorize online interactions and communities.
They characterize these ethnographies as falling into three waves: pioneering, legitimizing, and multi-modal.
The authors describe pioneering ethnographies as representing new media primarily as offering space for identity play and deception. This focus created/was created by conceptualizing online and offline worlds/identity performances as fundamentally different and separate. This assumption contributes to an "exoticizing perspective" that was "further complicated by the primacy of text" in early internet representations of self, Researchers who sought to incorporate offline behaviors often relied on accounts from informants (sometimes online, sometimes offline) to "fill in" or "verify" offline behaviors/identities.
Legitimizing ethnographies assumed an "essential continuity between off- and online identities" = an integrationist perspective, and they used this perspective as a basis for "translating offline methods to conduct fieldwork in online spaces" 689. They redefined "fieldsite" "participant observation" and interaction" so as to include cyberspace as a site, participating in online textual exchanges and otherwise taking part in online community activities as participant observation and interaction. What is more, legitimizing cyberethnographers argued that "where in the offline world the ethnographer must translate the fieldsite into fieldnotes or text, online members took on the ethnographer's task by translating the offline range of interactive cuing mechanisms into textual format. . . . [They also claimed that] . . .cyberethnographic practice produces one fewer lens of distortion, because the text is the interaction that is recorded verbatim as data" 691.
Multi-modal ethnographies arose with the advent of Web 2.0 and the myriad possibilities for non-textual interaction. Within this wave, participant observation includes active content production (as in full participation within a community that goes way beyond posting text). Unsurprisingly, this wave is questioning the "viability of traditional modes of dissemination of both results and primary data => move to multimodality. The focus of these studies has turned toward "how online interaction generates physical co-presence or activities in the offline world" => and the move toward connective ethnography as discussed by Leander (that is, real lives need to be documented as well).
How is this relevant to our study?
1) It positions our methods of data collection and representation within the evolution of ethnographic studies. There are still very few multimodal ethnographies, and even fewer which use analysis of modality as an important feature of meaning making within the communities they study.
2) It provides points of reference for questions we might ask about our data. For example, if legitimizing ethnographers argued that their participants' text eliminated one "lens of distortion" (ie the ethnographer's textual representation of what prticipants said) - what does this imply about videos, audio recordings, etc produced by participants? Are these artifacts "seamless" "direct" representations - or are they "changed" by the many online (in a new context, surrounded by the ethnographer's text rather than embedded within their original context) and offline (readers will be in very different places - mentally and physically - when reading the video file, screenshot or whatever) differences that will be embedded in the ethnographer's practices for viewing, saving and re-representing the file. Are these significant? What sort of "lens" do they interpose?
3) It directs us to existing ethnographies to use as models and counter-examples. I have already ordered Kendall's Hanging out in the Virtual Pub, and Boellstorff's Coming of Age in Second Life - and will be glad to loan them. I also ordered Pink's latest book, Doing Sensual Ethnography. I don't expect anyone to read all of our references from cover to cover - but scanning them can give us a feel for cyber-ethnographer's focus, methods, and representational practices.
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