The Newbie Anthropologist:
Methodology

Entry to the Field

"Why not go on fieldwork then?" [Barley 1983: 7]

These fateful words open Nigel Barley's entertaining account of how the ethnographer fares in environments to which they are - in the main - utterly unaccustomed. The book details the many disasters that he encountered during his fieldwork among the Dowayo of Cameroon. At first, the physical suffering seems in stark contrast to the kinds of problems the researcher in cyberspace might anticipate. "By collapsing the geographical divide between home and field-site, hitherto an assumed element in anthropology's self-definition, the concept of fieldwork is changing." [Houtman & Zeitlyn 1996: 2]

It may be thought that the worst that can befall the fieldworker on the Infobahn would seem to be a case of RSI, or perhaps a few insults, but there are more similarities than might at first be imagined. Although all the excursions into virtual communities have been from the relative comfort of a chair at home, from that point on, the methodological and experiential differences evaporate. Fieldwork, it would appear, is no respecter of context.

If, in the past, ethnographers have primarily focussed on difficult-to-reach, small-scale communities, communities that might be loosely characterised as sufficiently 'other', then virtual communities fit the profile too. The process of accessing the communities under investigation has been one of periodic encounters with a variety of boundaries. The bureaucratic difficulties Barley encountered when trying to reach his intended fieldwork location reflects the technical difficulties of getting to 'where' virtual communities take place.

The Internet happens 'within' the computer, and yet happens simultaneously 'beyond' the particular hardware that the fieldworker is using. 'Getting online' involves configuring the hardware and communications software to access the network correctly, requiring considerable technical proficiency. This may be considered as constituting a boundary between the physical and the virtual worlds. Cyberspace is not something one can enter in the same way one might enter a country; it is as if one had to solve a series of puzzles at passport control before proceeding.

Language difficulties are also a feature of the Internet. There is a welter of technical jargon that confronts the Internet novice, or 'newbie' as they are referred to in online-speak. Finding one's way around means deciphering cryptic header messages and unfamiliar acronyms, which form a significant proportion of the content of online communication. [see Appendices 4 & 5] There are some dictionaries of the most common acronyms, but their development is so rapid that dictionaries are often out of date before they are published. There is also a use of language which Barry calls 'technobabble' to contend with:

"This paper-based bookware module is designed to support the robust implementation of a friendly, context-driven interface between the developer and the end-user. Did you understand this sentence? If so, you are fluent in technobabble." [Barry, J. 1993: xiii]

Becoming proficient with the technology and getting access to the site of the fieldwork on the Internet can be seen as being as mentally taxing as the journey to distant lands is physically taxing.

 

Which Virtual Communities?

Once the ethnographer has 'arrived' on the Internet, familiar methodological difficulties arise. The range of options that present themselves on the Internet is bewilderingly large. The first task is to define a boundary to the scope of the fieldwork. This is a difficult process on the Internet, since there are no geographical boundaries to set physical limits on what can be studied. In the electronic 'space' of the Internet, everywhere is equidistant from everywhere else.

The criteria by which virtual community boundaries are determined are technical ones; they depend on means of communication rather than physical or temporal location for their limits. This poses difficult questions regarding the extent to which they can indeed be called 'communities'. However, so that fieldwork could commence immediately, this enquiry was guided by Martin Buber's assertion that "community is where community happens." [cited in Turner 1969: 113]

This paper looks at two different kinds of communicative activity on the Internet. First are the mailing lists to which anyone with an email address can subscribe. They are either moderated or unmoderated, such that the content and membership is either controlled or uncontrolled:

• Project McLuhan is a moderated list which produces a monthly posting to all its members. The list is an compilation of all the correspondence which the list operators have received over the previous month.

• DIRECT-L is an unmoderated, list for people with a common interest in a piece of software called Director, which is used to create multimedia programs. It is either posted as a daily digest of all the previous day's activity, or arrives unedited as about two hundred messages a day.

Second are conferencing and newsgroup systems, which allow discussions to take place in a statement and response pattern. Each discussion or 'thread' is archived and can be followed from its origins by a newcomer.

• The Compulink Information eXchange (CIX) is a private computer-conferencing facility based (physically) in Kingston, to the south-west of London. It is accessed directly by telephone, or through telnet., which allows the participant to use CIX's computer system as if it were the one they were sitting in front of.

• Usenet is the way in which conferencing takes place on the Internet. Newsgroups are open to anyone who has the appropriate software to look at them. Like mailing lists, they are either moderated or unmoderated, and there are thousands of them.

 

What kind of Ethnography?

Methods of fieldwork in this area are not well established, and so a great deal has been done in an exploratory manner. This is a situation which is not restricted to the digital domain; many fieldworkers have expressed what seems to be an inherent ambiguity of the experience of ethnographic study. To be a part of a group as well as an observer of its activities induced severe cognitive dissonance in one researcher; she "experienced a gestalt switch every two minutes" [Schiffman 1991: 78] between 'being' a participant and 'being' an observer. In cyberspace, these terms take on a special significance.

An Ethnographic study of electronic communities has many similarities with 'real world' Ethnography, but this is an area where one finds striking differences. The 'space' that virtual communities inhabit requires no corporal presence, and therefore there is no aspect of communication which is beyond a member's control. It is possible to observe social interactions without affecting those engaging them in any way. On the Internet this is known as 'lurking'; an activity that, by making observation invisible to those being observed, seems to offer the possibility of a Positivist objectivity in fieldwork. [see Appendix 2] This has consequences, not just for the practice of ethnography in the digital domain, but for the continued existence of the groups themselves.

The same mechanisms which allow "experience-distant" [Geertz 1974: 119] observation of virtual communities also extend to the presentation of self in what one contributes to the community. A member of a text-based virtual community may call themselves by any name online, in the same way that one might sign a letter with a pseudonym. There is consequently great uncertainty as to the identity of participants, and, furthermore, the membership of the groups is highly fluid as contributors arrive and depart at will. As a result of this, the persistent text artifacts of conversation are all that remain verifiable.

The work of ethnomethodologists, and especially the technique of conversational analysis which Sacks and Schegeloff pioneered became helpful in extracting meanings which are independent of individual participants; "conversational analysis is... more concerned with utterances than with speakers and hearers. It is much less concerned with talk as a relation between persons than it is with conversation as a relation between utterances." [Sharrock & Anderson 1986: 68] However, this study does not focus exclusively on the relationship between messages, but also seeks to illuminate the experience of virtual communities. Such experience is seldom gained without participation.

Participation implies that the researcher abandon the possibility of Positivist objectivity, immersing themselves in the life of the community in order to gain insight into the experience of membership. This "experience-near" [Geertz 1974: 119] activity - acting as if one were a member - enables some level of understanding of the effects of membership. The participation in newsgroups, conferences and mailing lists took place over the course of a year and generated in the region of 15Mb of text - or about 3 million words - during the fieldwork period. In addition, there have also been numerous 'side-channel' communications through emailing participants privately. This allowed comments to be made about the group without the entire group being aware of their content. It is the favoured means of communication for those messages which are not directly relevant to the intention of the group. The DIRECT-L list, for example would consider such discussions to be 'off-topic', or irrelevant to its function as a forum for discussing multimedia.

Data was also gathered through face-to-face conversation and interviews with regular participants of the electronic forums. Some subjects responded negatively to such means of investigation. One, for example, refused to be recorded on audio tape, since he felt that there was something inherent in the editing process which would misrepresent whatever he said. On the other hand, he was perfectly at ease with newsgroup discussions, since newsgroups are always archived. This would, in his view, make it possible for anyone to check the statements that he had made - in their entirety and in their original context. This awareness of media practices is unusual among subjects in more traditional ethnographic fieldwork, but is common among the denizens of cyberspace. It would seem to require a greater level of reflexivity on the part of the researcher; a continuous adaptation of the media practices they employ in response to the wishes of those whom they study.

Heider noted that "there is an old saying that each tribe gets the anthropologist it deserves." [Heider n.d: 309] The implication of this is that the material that is selected for presentation, and the way in which it is presented, is as much a reflection on the person that carried out the study as it is of those who have been studied. Rabinow further suggests that "all cultural facts are interpretations, and multivocal ones at that." [Rabinow 1977: 151] The sheer quantity and complexity of the interactions in virtual communities means that any description must necessarily be partial.

The fieldwork was undertaken in the spirit of the "investigation of patterns of social interaction," [Hammersley & Atkinson 1983: 1] and the interpretation of the activities of the newsgroups, conferences and mailing lists in this paper has been based around reflections on the adequacy of the models which have been proposed as descriptions of community, virtual or otherwise. What is different and challenging about electronic communities, and what Ethnography must contend with, is that, in cyberspace, even if conventional models eventually prove adequate for the researcher's purposes, every facet of their descriptive power will be tested to its limits of its adequacy.

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