1  

Accepted  for  publication  in  Media,  Culture  &  Society.  Available  at:  http://mcs.sagepub.com.till.biblextern.sh.se/content/early/2014/06/27/0163443714531195.full.pdf+html    

Faraway,  So  Close!    

Proximity  and  distance  in  ethnography  online  

Stina  Bengtsson  

The increasing digitization of everyday life has led to an expanding field of studies of

online cultures and communities. New media technologies have generated discussions

on a further development of ‘multi-sited ethnographies’ (Marcus 1995), putting

forward the blending of offline and online locations, in approaches such as ‘network

ethnography’ (Howard 2002), ‘connective ethnography’ (Hine 2000, 2007, Leander

and McKim 2003, Dirksen, Huizing and Smit 2010), or actor-network approaches to

ethnography (c.f. Farnsworth and Austrin 2010). Several handbooks of online

ethnographies have also hit the market during the last couple of years (c.f. Kozinets

2010, Boellstorff 2012, Miller and Horst 2012). A major part of these texts, however,

deal with epistemological challenges related only to the environment online: different

communicative aspects of online environments, how to understand online identities,

or different aspects of authenticity.

Rarely discussed in the current debate, however, is the researcher as embodied

subject, taking into account the research process offline as well as online.

Researchers, just as much as those we study, do have bodies, exist in offline spaces

and have ongoing everyday lives that must be acknowledged as integrated dimensions

of the research process.

‘Travelling to’ an environment is often thoroughly discussed in the literature on

ethnographic methods and is often put forward as the core element of the much

emphasized closeness of ethnographic methods: entering the field, sharing the

everyday, ‘going native’. In this article, however, I will argue that ‘travelling from’ an

environment is equally important in the epistemology of ethnographic work as

 

  2  

‘travelling to’, particularly stressed by ethnographies in online settings, and widely

ignored by current discussions in the field.

In my own work the ‘travelling to but not from’ dimension truly interfered with the

research process and with my possibilities to fully immerse in the online culture I

studied. I have for example (quite unsuccessfully) conducted online interviews via IM

and chat with a (not that) ill two-year-old child on my lap who unplanned stayed

home from her day-care centre, energetically hammering the keys of the computer

eager to copy her mother’s behavior. I have likewise tried to uphold a smooth and

nice mood in on-going interviews and more informal chats despite having to interrupt

the conversation several times as I desperately tried to make the Curious George (or

another equivalent) disc work on the DVD player, to keep the same child, or one of

her sisters off the computer and off my own personal (and professional) sphere. And I

have turned many invitations to different social events down, as they simply were not

combinable either with other happenings that took place in my life offline, or just not

compatible with what the people around me at that time would think was proper

manners. Keeping up two lives at the same time is rather hard; everyone who has tried

knows this.

These difficulties can all be regarded as individual problems caused by my own

naivety, or even stupidity, and lack of ethnographic experience. I do, however, believe

that there is an important theoretical aspect hidden in these banal examples that the

vast literature on ethnography in online settings has shown little interest in so far.

Historically, texts on online ethnographies have primarily revolved around

closeness as a general ideal in ethnographic epistemology, either as a difficulty in

ethnographic work carried out online due to the specific character of presence in

online settings and of computer-mediated communication, or as an advantage as

online communities are never farther away than your nearest computer or smartphone.

From my own experiences, however, I would like to put forward the importance of

distance, included in a dialectic perspective on ethnography as scientific approach.

With Henri Lefebvre’s perspective on rhythmanalysis (2004) as theoretical vantage

point I am arguing that distance, not from the culture you are attempting to

understand, but from the one where you are normally situated, is and should be

 

  3  

acknowledged as a key aspect of an ethnographic approach and a dilemma

particularly significant in studies of online cultures.

The article begins with a short review of the conceptual discussion in the debate about

ethnography in online settings, followed by an overview of benefits and weaknesses

with such ethnographic work as put forward by previous research. After that I will

look deeper into the aspects of proximity, closeness and distance in ethnography

online, partly from my own experiences of ethnographic research in online settings

but also illuminated by the idea of the everyday life as a rhythm, developed by Henri

Lefebvre (2004). Distance, dialectically interlinked with closeness, is finally put

forward as a key dimension of living a ‘media life’ (Deuze 2012) and a fundamental

dimension of ethnographic research today.

The  ‘pros  and  cons’  of  ethnography  online    Several new histories of ethnographic studies in online environments have recently

been published and I will not add another story to them here (f.ex. Kozinets 2010:

chapt. 2, Boellstorff et al. 2012: chapt. 2). Instead I will briefly discuss the conceptual

debate of online ethnographies that lead into the discussion of online methodologies.

In the early 1990s discussions appeared on media ethnography, touching partly on

research in online environments (f.ex. Lindlof and Schatzer 1998) and media

anthropology (Rothenbuhler and Coman 2005), predominantly relating to offline

aspects of everyday media use. According to Rothenbuhler and Coman media

anthropology distinguishes itself from traditional anthropology by turning “its

attention from “exotic” to the mundane and from “indigenous” to manufactured

culture” (Ibid:1, also Drotner 1994). Ethnography conducted in online environments

thus differs largely from the wider field of media ethnography as many ethnographic

projects conducted online have presented cultures predominantly exotic for the larger

audiences (such as computer games, virtual worlds, etc) thus turning towards a new

kind of exotism.

One of the first to claim expertise in the field of ethnography online was Christine

Hine who in the late 1990s launched the term virtual ethnography, a concept

 

  4  

thereafter heavily supported in research literature (f.ex. Yee 2010)1. According to

Hine (2000) ‘virtual ethnography’ is “ethnography in, of and through, the virtual”

(Ibid: 65) claiming “[v]irtual ethnography is not only virtual in the sense of being

disembodied. Virtuality also carries a connotation of ‘not quite’, adequate for

practical purposes even if not strictly the real thing (although this definition of

virtuality is often suppressed in favour of its trendier alternative)” (Hine 2000:65).

Later discussions have suggested other terminologies such as ‘virtual anthropology’

(Boellstorff 2008:65), ‘digital anthropology’ (Miller and Horst 2012:5) or

‘netnography’ (Kozinets 2010). In the following I will simply use the term

‘ethnography online’ to refer to ethnographic research conducted in online

environments to mark that I do not regard ethnography in online settings essentially

different from ethnographic research conducted in other kinds of environments, as

their core, intentions and aims remain the same.

In the growing stock of literature on ethnography in online settings there is

surprisingly little attention paid to the advantages of doing ethnography online, apart

from the fact that an expanding part of our everyday lives take place in such settings

and is organised in accordance to digital culture (c.f. Nowak 1996, Deuze 2012). The

spatial and temporal proximity of digital cultures and the constant access to the

research field, provided by new technology, is often put forward as it’s single benefit

(c.f. Hine 2000: 22, Sundén 2012). I will return to this dimension later in the article,

but will first present an overview of the many disadvantages with ethnography online

that has been addressed by earlier research. Besides some rarely discussed issues,

such as the commercial ownership of many virtual environments (f.ex. Paech 2009),

most discussions deal with the same kinds of difficulties.

The field of ethnography online is no longer new, and has changed along with the

changes in technological development since its early days. From its initial attempts, to

contemporary discussions, the question of reduced social presence has been a major

topic. Lindlof and Shatzer thus typically dealt with “the problem of participation”

(1998:184) when claiming that “worlds that CMC ethnographers investigate are

                                                                                                               1  Although f.ex. Kozinets also published early in the field of marketing research (1998).  

 

  5  

simulacra of an indexical kind (there really are bodies out there behind keyboards), in

which a high degree of self-referentiality in the text to on-going and past events helps

to build the sense of a continuous, living project”. (Ibid. 1998:173).

In the same article they, just as a large amount of later articles (c.f. Wittel 2000, Sade-

Beck 2004, Garcia et al 2009, Paech 2009, Duchenaut et al. 2010), also addresses the

problem of “reduced social presence” (Lindlof and Shatzer 1998:178) of the often

non-synchronous communication of new media technologies (Ibid:182 ff).

A similar but slightly different aspect regards data collection and processing. It is

argued that the, often very rich, information that digital technologies provide us with

is not ideal for ethnographic analyses, and that it sometimes also require analytical

skills to be meaningful that most researchers lack (Duchenaut et al. 2010). Hine

(2008) has later put forward the risk that researchers in online environments, due to

their lack of such skills, only focus on the kind of information that are easily provided

by technology (also Hine 2011).

Linked to this is the acknowledged problem of coverage: online communities are

often small, diverse, and quickly changing or liquid, as well as providing users with

possibilities to easily teleport or travel between places, complicating the researchers

possibilities to immerse in a community for a sufficient amount of time (Duchenaut et

al. 2010, also Sade-Beck 2004 Paech, 2009). Connected is also the aspect of

generalizability, a sub-aspect of the above (f.ex. Duchenaut et al. 2010).

Another, often highlighted, dimension is the question of authenticity and trust (Hine

2000, p. 44, Hine 2008). In its early versions this discussion typically dealt with the

fact that we cannot know who the persons behind the keyboards really are, or what

their online behaviour and values mean to their life offline (Turkle 1984, Wittel 2000,

Schroeder 2011), but today it also addresses wider aspects of representation, related to

the question of ethnography as storytelling (Malinowski 1922/1932, Hine 2000: 44,

Paech 2009: 205 ff, Garcia et al. 2009). Authenticity is also reflected upon as a

question of the researchers introduction to the studied community (Garcia et al. 2009).

 

  6  

Related to authenticity, and a key aspect of the anonymity of both researcher and

research subjects (Garcia et al. 2009), is the ethical dimension of ‘Internet research’

(Ess 2009, Boellstorff et al. 2012, among many others). Lindlof and Shatzer (1998)

early discussed how to handle participation in an ethically informed way relating to

aspects such as lurking, adjusting to the environment, etc. Garcia et al. (2009) have,

among many others, put forward the delicate organization of public and private

spheres online, and our responsibility to protect the privacy and anonymity of the

cultures we study online (see also Sade-Beck 2004, Hine 2008).

It is clear from the above that the most significant theme in earlier research is the

difference between embodied (FTF) and online (CMC) communication and

participation; how the ethnographic research process is carried out in online

environments. Much less effort has been put in discussing how the research process is

carried out also related to its offline context, i.e. the researcher behind his or her

technical device (although approaches such as connective ethnographies touches upon

this, c.f. Hine 2000, 2007, Leander and McKim 2003, Dirksen, Huizing and Smit

2010). And even if I agree with Duchenaut, Yee and Bellotti (2010) that “[a] virtual

ethnographer is then, simply, an ethnographer that treats cyberspace as the

ethnographic reality” and that this reality is interesting enough to study in itself, it is

important to also acknowledge the ethnographer as a person of flesh and blood, who

exist in a social and cultural environment. Boellstorff et al (2012), however, address

this, stating:

“Physical world ethnographers often (though not always) travel to remote locations; they are typically removed from everyday tasks and responsibilities that would otherwise compete for their time. By contrast, in studying virtual worlds, we can sit right down at a computer anywhere and engage in research. It is tempting to slot data collection between other obligations and activities. However, that is not how ethnography is done.” (Ibid: 76).

In the next section of the article I will dig deeper into this, so sparsely discussed,

dimension of online ethnography, including aspects outside its mere communicative

and interactive dimensions. I will discuss ethnographic work in online environments

as it takes place in two simultaneously present contexts; the examined culture online,

and the everyday life of the researcher.

 

  7  

Proximity,  closeness  and  distance    Digital technologies have restructured space (f.ex. Qvortrup 2002, Christensen et al

2011). For researchers of online cultures this means that the studied environment is

never far away, and Jenny Sundén (2012) thus claims “The fact that the game world is

never further away than an Internet connection and a computer with the appropriate

game software (such as my own) creates a particular closeness to the field” (Sundén

2012:167, also Hine 2008). In the following section I will discuss closeness,

proximity and distance in ethnography online with the neglected dimension of the

embodiment of the researcher in ethnographic research as vantage point. As the terms

proximity and closeness are linked to each other it is necessary to sort out how I use

them here; closeness is related to intimacy and understanding and represents on the

one hand an ideal within ethnographic research, emphasizing an insight perspective,

but is also part of the methodological aims of ethnographic research: to take part in

everyday life, share the ‘little’ moments, etc. Proximity, on the other hand is more

related to physical and temporal nearness, indicating immediacy in time and space,

although the two terms are not completely separable.

 

Lots have been written about the importance of closeness between researcher and the

studied culture in ethnographic work in general, as well as more specifically in

relation to ethnography online. Both hands-on introductions and more theoretical

discussions deal with this, for example Hammersley and Atkinson’s much-cited

Ethnography: principles in practise (2007) where ethnographic work is put forward

as an approach that occupies with and takes place in everyday settings, focussing few

cases, which facilitates an “in-depth study” (Ibid:3), or Clifford Geertz’s The

Interpretation of Cultures (1973) where one of the main characteristics of

ethnographic work put forward is that it is “microscopic” as it “approaches (such)

broader interpretations and more abstract analyses from the direction of exceedingly

extended acquaintances with extremely small matters” (Ibid:21).

To fully take advantage of the time-consuming and self-transforming approaches of

ethnographic methods (f.ex. Drotner 2000:172), research conducted within this

tradition must result in a close description, and the studied subjects’ own

understanding of the world as vantage point for the analysis. In the earliest days of

ethnography, this was also explicitly political, as the anthropologists’ ambitions to

 

  8  

understand the cultures of the foreign tribes worked in opposition with the colonial

powers’ official representations of them as uncultivated and savage (f.ex. Malinowski

1922:9-10). This political goal (partially) remain today, although the importance of

intimacy and nearness in ethnographic work is often addressed simply as an

epistemological perspective emphasizing an inside view, rather than being explicitly

political.

In Digital Anthropology, Miller and Horst (2012) recommend a dialectic approach to

studying the digital (Ibid:4 ff), returning to Hegel’s theory of the “relationship

between the simultaneous growth of the universal and of the particular as dependent

upon each other rather than in opposition to each other” (Ibid: 5). Put in practise, “the

principle of the dialectic is that it is an intrinsic condition of the digital to expand both

[abstraction and differentiation], and the impact is also intrinsically contradictory,

producing both positive and negative effects” (Ibid: 11). I sympathize with this

approach, especially its latter part, and more specifically how the Frankfurt school has

developed Hegel’s ideas, emphasizing the double-edged dimension of culture (f.ex,.

Horkheimer and Adorno 2002).

A dialectic perspective thus means to take as vantage point the double-edged

dimensions of our existence, be it societal macro structures or the micro dimensions

of everyday life. Here it specifically means that attached to the much-emphasised

dimension of closeness (and proximity) in ethnographic methods there is also

distance. Returning to the founding fathers of ethnography though, distance turns out

to be as fundamental in an ethnographic approach as closeness (and proximity).

In his canonical book Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Bronislaw Malinowski

(1922/1932) addresses this question in the introductory outline of the book:

“Indeed, in my first piece of ethnographic research on the South coast, it was not until I was alone in the district that I began to make some headway; and, at any rate, I found out where lay the secret of effective fieldwork. What is then this ethnographer’s magic, by which he is able to evoke the real spirit of the natives, the true picture of tribal life? As usual, success can only be obtained by a patient and systematic application of a number of rules of common sense and well-known scientific principles, and not by the discovery of any marvellous short-cut leading to the desired result without effort and trouble. The principles of method can be grouped under three

 

  9  

main headings; first of all, naturally, the student must possess real scientific aims, and know the values and criteria of modern ethnography. Secondly, he ought to put himself in good conditions of work, that is, in the main, to live without other white men, right among the natives. Finally, he has to apply to a number of special methods of collecting, manipulating and fixing his evidence. A few words must be said about these three foundation stones of field work, beginning with the second as the most elementary.” (Malinowski, 1922/1932:6, my italics).

From today’s position there are many points of critique that can be put forward

against this quote, of which some are more important than others in relation to the

discussion conducted here. Firstly, the naïve imagination that a “true” and “real”

picture of tribal life can be obtained by ethnographic methods is noticeable. Others

have put this critique forward from many different directions and I will not go further

into that discussion here, simply referring to the philosophical debate that has been

held during the many decades that have past between the ‘Argonauts’ and today.

Secondly, and of larger importance to the arguments put forward here, is the fact that

the reader, eager to learn the “ethnographers magic” is simply addressed as a he.

According to the times when the “Argonauts” was written it is not meaningful to be

contemptuous or make jokes about this either. Many scholars have debated the

gendering of ethnographic work and the emergence of a “feminist ethnographic”

perspective, defining ‘feminist ethnography’ as an ethnography that acknowledges

women and their specific cultural dimensions and ways of life (Visweswaran 1997,

Lather 2001). Nevertheless, in relation to the point I am making here, the gendering of

the addressed ethnographer in Malinowski’s text is crucial, as gender structures as

well as other power-related structures are present in all cultural spheres. I will get

back to this dimension later in the text, while more to the point for my argument here

is the second, and according to Malinowski the most important, aspect of

ethnographic research in the quote above; that good conditions of ethnographic work

means to live “without other white men”, that is, right among the ‘natives’. This

aspect of ethnographic work is particularly important to address in discussions of

ethnography conducted in online environments, as these can be easily reached without

leaving one’s own everyday life, which therefore enables closeness without distance

(c.f. Hine 2000, Sundén 2012).

Travelling  to,  but  not  from  One of the key dimensions of ethnography online is the fact that the researcher does

not have to (physically) leave his or her home environment. Rothenbuhler and Coman

 

  10  

(2005) put this forward as one of the basic characteristics of the larger field of media

ethnography:

“A key difference with the classic anthropological ethnographies is that media ethnography does not, usually, take place fully outside the researcher’s culture. When researchers turn their attention to their own cultures, even some of the more distinct corners of them, some of the – shall we say – sacred characteristics of the classical ethnographic experiences are missing. One does not travel far to be there, the journey and the life is not strenuous, one does not need to learn a new language or wholly unfamiliar customs, values and modes of behaviour; the researcher is not fully isolated from home, in all its senses.” (Rothenbuhler and Coman, 2005:3).

The time-space compressing aspects of electronic, as well as digital, media make this

development of ethnographic work seem natural (Meyrowitz 1985, Harvey 1990,

Qvortrup 2002, etc). We do no longer need to travel far to take part in distant cultures,

and media technologies today easily bridge the physical distance between the

researcher and a wide array of foreign cultures, using online spaces as their primary

location. According to Malinowski, distance in ethnographic work mainly regards the

researchers distance from their home cultures, arguing that the loneliness embedded

in this force them to approach the studied cultures more eagerly than they would

otherwise do. Malinowski also suggests that this forced socializing and interaction

between researcher and the culture at hand, is the “ethnographer’s magic” marking the

border between mediocre and bound breaking ethnographic research. Several decades

later John Van Maanen addressed the same question, claiming, “Whether or not the

field worker ever really does ‘get away’ in a conceptual sense is becoming

increasingly problematic, but physical displacement is a requirement” (1988/2011:3).

His arguments goes along the same line as Malinowski’s, suggesting that researchers

as methodological tools are sharpened by distance, as their social needs will force

them further and further on towards the deep knowledge that an ethnographic

approach is about:

“In the field, one must cut his or her life down (sometimes to the bone). In many respects ethnographic fieldworkers remove themselves from their usual routines, havens, pleasures, familiar haunts, and social contexts such that the fieldwork site provides a social world. The assumption here is that to get at this world, one has to need it.” (Van Maanen 1988/2011:152)

 

  11  

Being addressed as such a fundamental aspect of ethnography in face-to-face settings

surprisingly little has been said about this in the literature on online ethnography,

although Andreas Wittel (2000) has stated that:

“The displacement between ethnographer and her field result in a lack of a common and mutual perception of the physical context. It does not provide any information of the physical and aesthetic (dress codes) characteristics of the users.” (Wittel 2000).

The argument put forward by Wittel is only valid if it is the people behind the

keyboards that are of interest, and thus not valid for a study of “cyberspace as the

ethnographic reality” (Duchenaut et al 2010). Sundén (2012:172) acknowledges

“[n]ew media ethnography rarely puts the researcher in isolated and lonely situations

(even if spending long hours at the computer sometimes feels that way)”. Christine

Hine, in her much-cited volume Virtual Ethnography (2000), also claims, “the object

of a virtual ethnography is a topic, and not a location” (2000:67)(see also Cowlishaw

2007, cited in Driscoll et al. 2010). Hine questions the importance of distance, arguing

that the idea of physical travelling in ethnographic research has gained symbolic

status within the field, signifying the relation between reader, writer and subject under

study, that are manifested in certain sub-genres of ethnographic writings, such as

arrival stories and notions on translation; more or less paradigmatic models, narratives

and manifestations of values within the research field (Hine 2000:45, 2008:259).

Rather than obeying unreflectively to these paradigmatic truths about ethnographic

research Hine (2000) proposes that the journey of ethnography online is experiential

rather than physical. She also emphasizes that whether or not the researcher travels far

away, the insights and experiences that he or she has gained when meeting the culture

under study, can be worth to listen at, and to learn from: “The contrast between

ethnographer and reader that forms a large part of the authority claim of the

ethnographic text depends not just on travel, but also on experience” (Hine 2000: 46).

It seems perfectly reasonable that if the object under study of an ethnographic

approach is a community that lack shared physical location, the researcher’s need for

physical travelling is dramatically reduced. If the research interest is formulated

around the culture and everyday life in an online setting, and accordingly around the

virtual personas of the individuals that populate the space online, rather than their

 

  12  

physical selves behind the keyboards, presence in the locations of the online culture

matters rather than where the researcher’s physical body is situated. The knowledge

and understanding of what it means to be part of an online culture can obviously be

gained without moving your body a millimetre.

Nevertheless, I believe that something is missing in the dispute about the researchers’

travelling as addressed in the arguments above. This dispute mainly deals with the

researcher’s physical movements as a way to make his or her social needs force him

or her to approach closer to the studied culture, and not being able to “take a rest”

from the exhausting ethnographic work or to hide among your fellows between the

fatiguing get-togethers with the ‘natives’, as the possibility to relax in a well-known

setting will keep the researcher from digging for a deeper understanding of their

social world. This argument primarily deals with how the researcher conducts

research in relation to the studied culture, and hence how close the researcher, due to

the physical distance from his or her ‘home culture’, is forced to reach. It thus mainly

deals with the relation between researcher and the ‘new culture’, more than

addressing his or her relation to the ‘old one’; that is the researchers own everyday

life.

All researchers are human beings of flesh and blood but unlike others ethnographic

researchers primarily use their own bodies and minds as research tools, emphasizing

the social and cultural situatedness of knowledge (c.f. Haraway 1988). From my own

experiences of conducting ethnography in online environments I argue that it is

important to stress the physical location of researchers, acknowledging the old

(offline) culture’s impact on a researcher’s attempts to share a new culture and the

spatial and temporal proximity and distance among them.

A couple of years ago I initiated a research project around the virtual world Second

Life. I was initially inspired by the (mainstream) media hype over the virtual

environment in the mid- and late 2000s, a phenomenon that may have been especially

vital in my home country, XXX, that held a virtual “embassy” for a couple of years

(2007-2012) and where several public institutions launched virtual offices in the

virtual world during this time. I was interested in this entire media circus; the hopes

and ambitions of those who worked with the institutions, their experiences of getting

 

  13  

online in this technological and cultural setting, but also of the experiences of the

‘private’ users of the virtual world. There had for quite some time been a vivid

national community in the virtual world already when the (traditional) media lay their

eyes on Second Life and the several offline institutions were launched. My ambition

was to, via an ethnographic approach, get a broad and deep understanding of this

unique and interesting phenomenon from many different angles. As the publically run

institutions quite fast became fairly empty of people as well as of activities it was

easier to conduct the most part of my interviews with those involved offline. They had

offices offline, and due to their status as officials they had no problems with showing

their offline identities to me. With them I thus made proper appointments on office

hours, and I also most often met them in their office buildings. The virtual buildings

in Second Life where there for me to visit at any time I wanted so getting a grip of the

aesthetics and functions of the virtual environments were also quite easy.

But besides this, I also wanted to understand how the ordinary users in the virtual

world reacted and felt about this institutional ‘invasion’. I had ambitions to get this

understanding from an inside point of view, addressing the (national) online

community as a broad phenomenon, and as an everyday life in its own right (c.f.

Boellstorff 2008, Duchenau et al. 2010). There had been some initial quarrels between

the institutions and the native amateurs that populated Second Life, especially

regarding the “embassy” in the virtual world, but also around a virtual city (see

Author 2011 and 2013). To understand the clashes between the offline institutions and

the online cultures, I needed to conduct ethnographically informed research, and thus

started to take part in events and meetings in the virtual world. I made interviews with

users, took part in parties, attended courses and tried to understand as much as

possible about what this particular part of the virtual world was about. It was very

exciting, fruitful and also very convenient as my own private life included small

children at that time. This kind of research methods, and the location of the culture

under study, actually seemed compatible with a life with pre-school children, without

having to leave them for long research periods away from home. But as Boellstorff et

al. (2012) have claimed, to conduct ethnographic research we:

“must be on the scene, immersed in local activity, if we are to understand it. We cannot miss key events [xxx] just because there is something we might want to do

 

  14  

more in the physical world. We do not know when interesting things will occur inworld, and we must be present to experience them.” (Ibid:76)

This, indeed, is true. And it was not at all as convenient to conduct ethnographic

research online as I initially had imagined. My offline life constantly forced me to

take a step back from my new online acquaintances and friends and their activities, as

my own everyday life, my life offline with family, friends and loads of social

obligations where impossible to ignore as I physically remained in the middle of it.

There is of course more than one reason why I found it so troublesome to conduct my

ethnographic study and thus soon had to cut down on my initial ethnographic

ambitions. Given the structure of my own everyday life some would (probably) say

that it was stupid to even believe that this would work at all. And maybe they are

right. The vivid discussion in the 1990s about a ‘feminist ethnography’ mainly dealt

with ethnographic work on female cultures, raising various perspectives on that

(Visweswaran 1997, Lather 2001), but never dealt with a feminist perspective on

women as ethnographic researchers, in a (still) patriarchal society. I will not get

deeper into a discussion abut the conditions of female researchers here, and my case

certainly had its specific conditions (as they always have), I just want to point to the

fact that when researchers stay in their own everyday life while conducting

ethnographic research, the structural frames of our own private lives co-exist with the

frames of the culture we strive to understand. I do however believe that there are

general insights that can be learnt from this, insights that address the epistemological

relation between proximity and distance in ethnography online. In the following

section I will try to understand my own experiences (and shortcomings) as an

ethnographer of online cultures from the angle of everyday life theory.

Everyday  life  as  a  rhythm  According to the French Marxist Henri Lefebvre everyday life is organized along

axes of time and space. In the third part of his ‘everyday life trilogy’ rhythmanalysis

(1992/2004), he points to the importance of acknowledging time, supplementing, but

not replacing his former emphasis on space (Lefebvre 1991), for a better

understanding of everyday life. He argues “[e]verywhere where there is interaction of

a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm” (1992/2004: 15). To

understand the everyday life, and thus its rhythm, he continues, the analyst must:

 

  15  

“call[s] on all his senses. He draws on his breathing, the circulation of his blood, the beatings of his heart, and the delivery of his speech as landmarks. Without privileging any one of these sensations, raised by him in the perception of rhythms, to the detriment of any other. He thinks with his body, not in the abstract, but in lived temporality”. (Ibid: 21)

One cannot but notice that the researcher, also here, is addressed as a he. Besides this

there are many similarities between an ethnographic approach and the method of

rhythmanalysis and as it is described above, emphasizing closeness, partaking, and

the analysis as a multidimensional, embodied, process. Hence, it is also impossible to

neglect the dilemma that the notion of the everyday as a rhythm addresses in relation

to ethnography online, where travelling to a foreign culture and an unfamiliar

everyday rhythm is not automatically followed by a travelling from another everyday

rhythm, but leaves the ethnographer with a necessity to adjust to two different

rhythms at the same time.

As raised by both Hine (2000) and Sundén (2012) one of the greatest benefits of

ethnographic work in online environments is the temporal proximity between the

researcher’s everyday life and the studied culture online, as online communities are

instantly reachable from wherever you are in the world, when time online is regarded

equivalent to time offline (if regarding time as durée, that is experienced in our

human minds, instead of temps, that is the time of the watch, Bergson 1886/1988).

But, if regarding time as external to human beings, several temporal structures can

exist simultaneously in online environments just as in the offline world (Duchenaut et

al 2010). According to this, and to get as much visitors from other countries as

possible, some of the institutions I studied in Second Life adjusted to several time

zones concurrently, keeping office hours according to their national time, but was also

staffed a couple of hours late at night to adjust to visitors from other countries (Author

2011).

Naturally, for a researcher of flesh and blood and with an on-going everyday life in

the background, these parallel structures, or rhythms, causes specific problems; you

will have to adjust to two different rhythms of everyday life at the same time. This is

 

  16  

vital also as virtual worlds in general, and perhaps Second Life in particular, have

temporal structures that is fast and variable, requesting frequent and longer visits to be

meaningful. Tom Boellstorff has quoted a user of Second Life who claims, “the

fundamental rule of Second Life is that everything changes constantly” (Boellstoerff

2008:83). My experiences are similar, and I would to this also like to add my

impressions of the often spontaneous and impulsive organization of time that I met in

the community in Second Life. According to this temporal logic, unplanned group

invitations to parties and other events, suddenly dropped in late on Friday and

Saturday evenings or nights often stating something like: Paaaaartyyyy!!!!!! See you

at Rainbow Fields!!!!!!! NOW!!!!!.

Boellstorff et al. (2012) point at the fact that some researchers are more productive in

their tasks when hearing family and friends clattering in the room next door (Ibid: 72),

something which is most obviously true. Another side of this is however that even the

most devoted researcher can find it problematic that from time to time leave family

and friends alone at the dinner table to go to the room next door to join a spontaneous

get together in a virtual world, as part of one’s research project. Or even to leave your

partner alone with a half-boring crime story on the television every other Friday night,

even if it is just to hide behind a closed door in the room next door.

Another fundamental part of virtual ethnography is the spatial proximity between

researcher and keyboard, often put forward as a benefit for the ethnographer of online

cultures (f.ex. Hine 2000, Sundén 2012). There are many ways to benefit from this

proximity that also facilitates for researchers other than the white male, middle-aged

anthropologists of the early 20th century to conduct outstretched analyses with

ambitions for deep understanding. But, this travelling to, but not from, also causes

new problems. When something happens you are present in your home environment,

and have to act in the two everyday spaces you live in at the same time.

You are of course not obliged to attend all of the events and happenings that take

place in the culture you are studying, as do none of the other participants in that

community. But still, experiencing and adjusting to the temporal structure, and taking

part in rituals and events in the culture under study is indisputably important. And

considering how Malinowski described his loneliness on the Trobriand Islands and

 

  17  

how his longing for social company forced him closer and closer to the studied

natives, there is a fundamental difference between ethnography in face-to-face and

online environments in this respect.

It can be argued that I, in my particular case, should have understood that true

ethnographic work and family life is not compatible and that this was an impossible

task to undertake. To a certain extent I do agree; my case was perhaps extreme. But at

the same time, every researcher, as well as any other human being, has a life

whichever phase they are in that life. And things happen; children get ill, somebody

close to you dies, someone else needs you. And as the rhythm of our private everyday

lives may not be synced with our professional ambitions unplanned things can

happen.

Conclusion    When being requested whether her life in Second Life was an everyday life,

comparable to the one she had offline, one of my respondents who had spent time

regularly in Second Life for more than six years, lived in a long term online

relationship, and also worked (unpaid) in the virtual world, answered:

“No, it’s not an everyday life. Even though we struggle to establish one. But it’s not possible since our time is so limited. Other relations in RL sets the limits.”

This quote indicates that the outcomes of my ethnographic attempts and the

difficulties that I met when conducting my research should not be regarded as

failures, but as general findings of what it means to take part in a digital culture.

Based on her experiences of doing ethnography online Hine also argues that being

separate in (offline) space, and sometimes also in time, but still sharing a culture and

community via new technology is a vital part of the experiences of the online

ethnographer and of the kind of interaction and communication that are built into life

online that we need to share to fully understand the perspective of the people under

study (Hine 2000:46). Being at several locations at once, adjusting to numerous

different time zones, and socializing simultaneously with people in different cultural

contexts are aspects of modern media and society that Joshua Meyrowitz brought up

already in the mid 1980s (1985), although generally intensified by digital media (c.f.

Deuze, 2012).

 

  18  

I do, however, believe that the question of proximity and distance in digital cultures is

worth to also consider methodologically more fundamentally than what has been done

so far. One of the most basic characteristics of online cultures is the fact that they

(often) lack physical location. As foci of research this means several things; firstly

that we cannot, or do not have to, travel physically to reach them, but also that they

are instantly reachable from any physical location offline (that provides us with

sufficient internet connection). These dimensions have often, in previous debates,

been addressed as a special asset of ethnography in online cultures, and as something

that strengthens the ethnographer’s possibilities to reach a deep understanding of the

culture at hand. In earlier discussions of (traditional) ethnography, however, leaving

one’s home to conduct ethnographic research have been put forward as a key

dimension of the researcher as methodological tool, as our social needs force us to

move closer to the culture under study, deepening our understanding of it.

Malinowski’s (1922/1932) ideas about closeness and distance in ethnographic work

hence dealt with the importance of keeping a distance to one’s own everyday culture

to force the researcher to approach the culture under study.

In the above discussion, however, I have argued that regarding everyday life as a

rhythm, temporal as well as spatial dimensions of this proximity of digital culture can

be seen as contradictory to the ethnographic ideal of closeness. Staying at home, in

your ordinary everyday life while conducting ethnographic research, means having to

adjust to two different everyday rhythms at the same time, something that may harm

your possibilities to sufficiently immerse in the new culture. The epistemological

challenges of ethnography are thus fundamentally restructured by the spatial

proximity of digital cultures emphasizing the importance of distance, dialectically

interlinked with closeness in ethnographic research. Everyday life regarded as a

rhythm, including spatial, temporal, social as well as bodily dimensions, highlights

fundamental aspects of life online that certainly opens doors to a new discussion

about what it means to conduct ethnographic research in online environments.

References:  Bengtsson, Stina (2011) Virtual Nation Branding: The Swedish Embassy in Second Life". In Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, Volume 4, Number 1, s. 1-26.

 

  19  

Bengtsson, Stina (2013) “The producer as vendor: producing public space in a virtual world”. In Tobias Olsson (Ed.) Producing the Internet: Platforms, Communities, Actors. Göteborg: Nordicom. Bergson, H. (1886/1988) Matter and memory. New York: Zone. Boellstorff, T. (2008) Coming of Age in Second Life: an anthropologist explores the

virtually human. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boellstorff, T., B. Nardi, C. Pearce and T.L. Taylor (2012) Ethnography and virtual

worlds. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Boellstorff, T. (2012) Rethinking digital anthropology. In Miller, D.and H. Horst

(eds) Digital Anthropology. London and New York: Berg. Pp. 39-60. Campbell, J. E. (2004) Getting it On Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality and

Embodied Identity. New York: Harrington Park Press. Carlsson, U. (ed) (1996) Medierna i samhället: Igår, idag, imorgon. [The media in

society: Yesterday, today, tomorrow] Nordicom-Sverige 8. Göteborg: Nordicom.

Christensen, M., A. Jansson and C. Christensen (Eds.) (2011) Online territories: Globalization, mediated practices and social space. New York: Peter Lang.

Cowlishaw, G. (2007)Changing Our Minds. For Ethnography: Anthropology and the Politics of the Present. Conference, 20 April 2007. University of Technology, Sydney.

Deuze, M. (2012) Media Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dirksen, V. Huizing, A. and Smit, B (2010) 'Piling on layers of understanding': the use of connective ethnography for the study of (online) work practices. New Media & Society,12(7): 1045–1063. Driscoll, C. and M. Gregg (2010) My profile: The ethics of virtual ethnography. Emotion, Space and Society, 3:15-20. Drotner, K. (1994) Ethnographic Enigmas: ‘The everyday’ in recent media studies.

Cultural studies, 8(2), 341-357. Drotner, K. (2000) Less is more: Media ethnography and its limits. In Hagen, I. and J.

Wasko (eds) Consuming audiences? Production and reception in media research. Creskill N.J: Hampton Press.

Duchenaut, N., N. Yee and V. Bellotti (2010) The Best of Both (Virtual) Worlds: Using Ethnography and Computational Tools to Study Online Behaviour. EPIC 2010 Proceedings, pp. 136-148, by the American Anthropological Association.

Ess, C. (2009) Digital Media Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Farnsworth, J. and T. Austrin (2010) The ethnography of new media worlds?

Following the case of global poker. New Media & Society, vol. 12 no. 7: 1120-1136.

Fielding, N., R. M. Lee and G. Blank (eds)(2008) The SAGE handbook of online research methods. Sage: Los Angeles.

Garcia, C. A., A. I. Standlee and Y. Cui (2009) Ethnographic Approaches to the Internet and Computer-Mediated Communication. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 38(1): 52-84.

Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers.

Hagen, I. and J. Wasko (eds) (2000) Consuming audiences? Production and reception in media research. Creskill N.J: Hampton Press.

Hammersley, M. and P. Atkinson (2007) Ethnography. Principles in Practice. Third Edition. London: Routledge.

 

  20  

Haraway D. (1988) Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3. (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599.

Harvey, D. (1990) The conditions of postmodernity. An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hine, C. (2000) Virtual Ethnography. London: Sage. Hine, C. (2007) Connective Ethnography for the Exploration of E-science. Journal of Computer mediated Communication, 12(2): 618–634. Hine, C. (2008) Virtual Ethnography: Modes, Varieties, Affordances. In Fielding,

N., R. M. Lee and G. Blank (eds): The SAGE handbook of online research methods. Sage: Los Angeles.

Hine, C. (2011) Towards ethnography of television on the internet: A mobile strategy for exploring mundane interpretive activities. Media, Culture and Society, 33(4), 567-582.

Horkheimer, M. and T. Adorno (2002) Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical fragments. Stanford: Standford University Press.

Howard (2002) Network Ethnography and the Hypermedia Organization: New Media, New Organizations, New Methods. New Media & Society, vol. 4, 4: 550-574.

Kozinets, R. V. (2010) Netnography: Doing ethnographic research online. Los Angeles: Sage.

Kozinets, R. V. (1998) On Netnography: Initial Reflections on Consumer Research Investigations of Cyberculture. In Advances in Consumer Research, Volume 25, ed., Joseph Alba and Wesley Hutchinson, Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, pp. 366-371.

Lather, P. (2001) Postbook: Working the Ruins of Feminist Ethnography. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 27(1), pp. 199-227.

Leander, K.M. and K.K. McKim (2003) Tracing the Everyday “Sittings” of Adolescents on the Internet: A Strategic Adaptation of Ethnography Across Online and Offline Spaces. Education, Communication, Information 3(2): 211–40.

Lefebvre, H. (1974/1991) The Production of Space. Translation by D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, US: Blackwell.

Lefebvre, H. (1992/2004) Rythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life. Translation by S. Elden and J. Moore. London and New York: Continuum.

LeValley, J. (1997) Doing It in Cyberspace: Cultural Sensitivity in Applied Anthropology. Anthropology of Consciousness, 8(4):113-132.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966) The savage mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lindlof, T. R. and M. J. Schatzer (1998) Media Ethnography in Virtual Space:

Strategies, Limits, and Possibilities. Journal of Broadcasting and electronic media, 42(2): 170-189.

Van Maanen, J. (2011) Tales of the field: On writing ethnography. Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Malinowski, B. (1922/1932) Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea. Second Impression. London: Routledge.

Marcus, G. E. (1995) Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 24: 95-117.

Meyrowitz, J. (1985) No sense of place. The impact of electronic media on social behaviour. New York: Oxford University Press.

 

  21  

Miller, D. and H. Horst (eds)(2012) Digital Anthropology. London and New York: Berg.

Nowak, K. (1996) Medier som materiell och mental miljö. [The media as material and mental environments] In Carlsson, U. (ed) Medierna i samhället: Igår, idag, imorgon. [The media in society: Yesterday, today, tomorrow] Nordicom-Sverige 8. Göteborg: Nordicom, pp. 150-168.

Olsson, T. (ed) (2013) Producing the Internet: Platforms, Communities, Actors. Göteborg: Nordicom.

Paech, V. (2009) A method for the times: a mediation on virtual ethnography faults and fortitudes. Nebula, 6(4): 195-215.

Qvortrup, L. (ed) (2002) Virtual Space: Spatiality in Virtual Inhabited 3D Worlds. London: Springer.

Rothenbuhler, E. and M. Coman (eds)(2005) Media Anthropology. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Sade-Beck, L. (2004) Internet Ethnography: Online and Offline. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0.

Schroeder, R. (2011) Being there together: Social interaction in virtual environments. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sundén, J. (2012) Desires at Play: On closeness and Epistemological Uncertainty. Games and Culture, 7(2): 164-184.

Turkle, S. (1984) The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. London: Granada cop.

Visweswaran, K. (1997) Histories of feminist ethnography. Annu. Rev. Anthropol., (26): 591-621.

Wittel, A. (2000) Ethnography on the Move: From Field to Net to Internet. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 1(1), art. 21.