Internet Ethnography

Empirisch kulturanthropologische Betrachtung von Online Dating Apps - OKCupid und Tinder im speziellen.

"Smartphone, Internet, Tablet, Rechner und Applikation sind die Devices der neuen libidinösen Infrastruktur. Aus der vollen Angebotsbreite der digitalen sexuellen Ökonomie heraus können für die Kontaktanbahnung spezialisierte Dienste ausgewählt werden. Einmal angeeignet und in den Alltag aufgenommen, wird innerhalb des Territoriums der Wunschmaschinen die Produktion ganz bestimmter Affekte forciert. „Interaktive und kybernetische Maschinen werden zu neuen künstlichen Gliedern, die in unsere Körper wie in unser Denken und Fühlen integriert sind, und sie werden zu einer Linse, durch die wir die Umgrenzungen unseres Körpers wie unseres Denkens und Fühlens selbst neu wahrnehmen“ (Hardt 2002: 5). Im Vergleich zu konventionellen Kennenlernprozessen erscheinen einige Praktiken dem Online Dating spezifisch zu sein. Sozusagen einer Eigenlogik folgend legt die Struktur der Technologie bestimmte Muster der textuellen und bildlichen Selbstpräsentation, Bewertung, Chats und Treffen nahe, die geprägt sind von einer gewissen Repetitivität, Vergleichbarkeit, Rationalisierbarkeit und tendenzieller Entgrenzung zeitlicher und örtlicher Erreichbarkeit. Die soziale Begehrensmaschine dient als legitimes und normalisiertes Mittel zur selbstbestimmten Kontaktaufnahme für eine zunehmend jüngere Nutzerinnengruppe."

This special issue collects the confessions of five digital ethnographers laying bare their methodological failures, disciplinary posturing, and ethical dilemmas. The articles are meant to serve as a counseling stations for fellow researchers who are approaching digital media ethnographically. On the one hand, this issue’s contributors acknowledge the rich variety of methodological articulations reflected in the lexicon of “buzzword ethnography”. On the other, they evidence how doing ethnographic research about, on, and through digital media is most often a messy, personal, highly contextual enterprise fraught with anxieties and discomforts. Through the four “private messages from the field” collected in this issue, we acknowledge the messiness, open-endedness and coarseness of ethnographic research in-the-making. In order to do this, and as a precise editorial choice made in order to sidestep the lexical turf wars and branding exercises of ‘how to’ methodological literature, we propose to recuperate two forms of ethnographic writing: Confessional ethnography (Van Maanen 2011) and self-reflection about the dilemmas of ethnographic work (Fine 1993). Laying bare our fieldwork failures, confessing our troubling epistemological choices and sharing our ways of coping with these issues becomes a precious occasion to remind ourselves of how much digital media, and the ways of researching them, are constantly in the making.

There is a long tradition in which “phatic” forms of interaction are seen as (and characterized by) relatively low levels of “information” and “meaning”. Yet, observations on social media interaction patterns show an amazing density of such phatic interactions, in which signs are shared and circulated without an a priori determination of the meaning. We address the issue of “virality” in this paper: the astonishing speed and scope with which often “empty” (i.e. not a priori determined) signs circulate on the internet. We address “memes” – signs that have gone viral on the Internet – as cases in point. Virality as a sociolinguistic phenomenon raises specific issues about signs, meanings and functions, prompting a shift from “meaning” to “effect”. This effect, we can see, is conviviality: the production of a social-structuring level of engagement in loose, temporal and elastic collectives operating in social media environments.

It’s just a small step or the very first few pages of –once again—what I want to do in dealing with Korean society-related issues. This time I am interested in doing a research into a site call ‘Koreabang.com’ which intrigued me. Please refer to www.koreabang.com to get the idea of what it is. My main point of researching into the site is to whether such a site would—to some point—highlight or shed some lights on the foreigners’ perceptions (be negative or positive) about Korea. Considering  the fact that the majority of news being projected into the site is those of ‘OMG’ kind-of-news/articles, my hypothesis is that the perception towards Korea is slightly distorted, should people rely much on this site when it comes to ‘getting to know’ about Korea. ( Please read the English version of my rants about this issue)

Κατασκευάζοντας τόπο στον κυβερνοχώρο: κόσμοι των Μέσων Κοινωνικής Δικτύωσης, όψεις της Ψηφιακής Ανθρωπολογίας και εθνογραφικής έρευνας
Βασιλική Παπαγεωργίου

Περίληψη
Σκοπός αυτού του άρθρου είναι να συνεισφέρει στη γενικότερη θεωρητική συζήτηση για την Ψηφιακή Ανθρωπολογία με έμφαση στη μελέτη των Μέσων Κοινωνικής Δικτύωσης. Σε ένα πρώτο επίπεδο, επισημαίνονται θεωρητικά, αναλυτικά και μεθοδολογικά ζητήματα που έχουν αναδειχτεί σε μια αγγλόφωνη κυρίως βιβλιογραφία τις τελευταίες δύο δεκαετίες. Αυτά αφορούν κατά βάση: α) στο είδος της προβληματικής και των θεματικών που δυνητικά μπορεί να περιλάβει το πεδίο μιας Ψηφιακής Ανθρωπολογίας ή Ανθρωπολογίας του Κυβερνοχώρου, β) στις διαστάσεις μιας σύνθετης καθημερινότητας που συνίσταται πλέον στη διαρκή εναλλαγή της ανθρώπινης δράσης ανάμεσα σε online και offline περιβάλλοντα και γ) στη διαχείριση από τη μεριά των ερευνητών της εθνογραφικής πρακτικής σε συνθήκες εμπλοκής στον κυβερνοχώρο. Υποστηρίζεται ότι ο κυβερνοχώρος νοηματοδοτείται πολιτισμικά από τη δημιουργική δράση των υποκειμένων, που κατασκευάζουν κόσμους και κοινότητες, συγκροτούν ταυτότητες, μέσω της χρήσης των νέων τεχνολογιών και ψηφιακών μέσων και μέσω της ποικίλης εμπλοκής τους και των διαφοροποιημένων πρακτικών τους. Συγκεκριμένα, σε αυτό το άρθρο, η περίπτωση ενός ιστότοπου («ομάδας φίλων» στο Facebook) διαχείρισης φωτογραφικού υλικού γύρω από την πόλη της Πάτρας και η αντίστοιχη online κοινότητα θα χρησιμοποιηθεί για να αναδειχτούν διαστάσεις ενός ανθρωπολογικού/εθνογραφικού εγχειρήματος προσέγγισης του κυβερνο- πολιτισμού/πολιτισμού του κυβερνοχώρου. Προτείνεται η εθνογραφική έρευνα σε online περιβάλλον και η προσέγγιση της συγκεκριμένης σελίδας Facebook μέσα από το συμπληρωματικό σχεσιακό δίπολο αναπαράστασης/επιτέλεσης.

Λέξεις-κλειδιά: Ψηφιακή Ανθρωπολογία, Μέσα Κοινωνικής Δικτύωσης, εθνογραφία, κυβερνοχώρος, κυβερνοπολιτισμός, κοινότητα, κοινωνικότητα

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Constructing place in cyberspace: worlds of Social Media, aspects of Digital Anthropology and ethnographic research
Vasiliki Papageorgiou

Abstract
This article aims to contribute to the general theoretical debate on Digital Anthropology with emphasis on the study of Social Media. Initially, theoretical, analytical and methodological issues developed in a mainly Anglophone literature over the last two decades are highlighted. These are related to: a) the type of themes and arguments that the field of Digital Anthropology/Anthropology of Cyberspace may cover, b) complex dimensions of the modern daily life characterised by constant rotation between online and offline environments and c) researchers’ management of ethnographic practice in online environments/cyberspace. It is argued that cyberspace becomes meaningful through the creative action of subjects who construct worlds, communities and identities by exploiting new technologies and digital media, in their diverse engagement and differentiated practices. Specifically, I will use the case of a Facebook website (“friends group”) which manages photographic material concerning Patras and of the corresponding online community, in order to illustrate dimensions of an anthropological/ethnographic endeavor to explore cyberculture. Thus, this paper reflects on implications of conducting ethnographic research in a social networking website and explores users’ participation in a specific Facebook page utilising the binary pair of the relational and complementary concepts of representation/performance.
Keywords: Digital Anthropology, Social Media, cyberspace, cyberculture, ethnography, community, sociability.

El artículo presenta ejemplos de cómo se desarrollan en los entornos de producción audiovisual no profesional (homecasting) procesos de enseñanza-aprendizaje y de creación de comunidades de intereses efímeras y fluctuantes. Los videos de amor seleccionados y analizados forman parte de las exploraciones del trabajo de campo realizado para el proyecto de tesis doctoral titulado Homecasting: Visualidades contemporáneas. Acerca de contenidos audiovisuales de producción casera publicados en el portal YouTube (2014), en el cual se propuso la metáfora urbana como principio teórico-metodológico y la observación flotante como técnica específica para la indagación.

At a critical time of democratic reform across many parts of Southeast Asia, Subang Jaya is regarded as Malaysia's electronic governance laboratory. The focus of the study is Subang Jaya's field of residential affairs, a digitally mediated social field in which residents, civil servants, politicians, online journalists and other social agents struggle over how the locality is to be governed at the dawn of the" Information Era." Drawing on the field theories of both Pierre Bourdieu and the Manchester School of political anthropology, this study ...

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the methodological and epistemological assumptions that have foregrounded the author's research into discursive activism in Australian feminist blogs, and a discussion of her research methods and why they were appropriate to this study. In particular, it seeks to discuss internet research methods and approaches toward the study of a feminist network online in order to make a case for methodological approaches that are feminist in themselves and aimed toward discursive change. The author recognises the political and personally affective nature of research.Design/methodology/approach – The project design and methodology of the study draws on traditions of feminist online ethnography and feminist standpoint methodology, using a combination of face‐to‐face semi‐structured interviews, modified grounded theory, network analysis, and participant observation.Findings – The author used a community‐curated online “carnival” to minimise problems of researcher navigation, and expl...

La relativa novedad de la etnografía digital como metodología de investigación, junto con los desafíos que plantea a las aproximaciones clásicas del trabajo de campo, la participación y la representación, da como resultado un repertorio de ilusiones profesionales a través de las cuales los etnógrafos digitales justifican su trabajo cuando se enfrentan a la cultura disciplinaria de la antropología. Este ensayo está basado en la experiencia reflexiva del autor de investigar el uso de los medios digitales en China y actualiza el artículo de 1993 de Gary Alan Fine: "Diez mentiras de la etnografía", identificando tres mentiras de la etnografía digital. Ilustrando cada una de estas mentiras a través de una figura arquetípica: el “tejedor de campo en red”, el “ansioso participante-merodeador” y el “fabricador experto”. Este artículo defiende la necesidad de confrontar ilusiones metodológicas y aceptar las tensiones detrás de ellas como herramientas heurísticas para realizar investigaciones etnográficas sobre, a través y alrededor de los medios digitales.

Adults usually suspect teenagers not to care about their online privacy, although it has been shown that they manage privacy settings more frequently. Actually, adolescents develop a strategic management of privacy in order to translate it to social prestige. This article empirically shows how they rely on strong ties and get advantage on their online privacy in order to produce social and symbolic capital, namely, to show to peers that they grew out of childhood. It also shows that this production relies on a subtle balance between the public and private spheres. Indeed, they must conduct a representation of their private life on a public sphere in order to convince peers, who serve as an authority of legitimation, that they have an exclusive privacy.