Virtual Ethnography

Christine Hine

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780761958963, 9780761958956
• eBook ISBN: 9781446229637
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Cutting though the exaggerated and fanciful beliefs about the new possibilities of `net life?, Hine produces a distinctive understanding of the significance of the Internet and addresses such questions as: what challenges do the new technologies of communication pose for research methods? Does the Internet force us to rethink traditional categories of `culture? and `society??

In this compelling and thoughtful book, Hine shows that the Internet is both a site for cultural formations and a cultural artefact which is shaped by people?s understandings and expectations. The Internet requires a new form of ethnography. The author considers the shape of this new ethnography and guides readers through its application in multiple settings.

1	Introduction

The Human Race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, ‘Keep tomorrow dark’, and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire I have no doubt) ‘Cheat the Prophet’. The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.

(Chesterton, 1904: 1)

We take issue with [the] implicit assumption that some inherent property or characteristic of technology accounts for the impact of technology on our lives. We propose instead that myriad other aspects of our relation with technology must be taken into account if we are to achieve a useful understanding of its consequences. These other aspects include: our attitudes towards technology, our conceptions of what technology can and cannot do, our expectations and assumptions about the possibilities of technological change, and the various ways in which technology is represented, in the media and in organizations. We aim to provide a critical exploration of the view that these latter aspects of the technology are preeminently consequential for the ways in which we organize our work, institutions, leisure and learning activities. This approach requires us to understand different ways of thinking about and representing technology at least as much as differences in the technology itself. Indeed, in what follows we argue for the need to treat the very idea of ‘the technology itself’ with considerable caution.

(Grint and Woolgar, 1997: 6)

Extreme futures and everyday uses

Chesterton in 1904 has a cautionary tale for those who wish to predict the future. The sheer abundance, diversity and originality of predictions in 1904 make it seem impossible for all of them to be wrong, but all of them do turn out to be wrong. The mistake which the futurologists had been making was that they took isolated events that were going on in their time, and extrapolated from there to extraordinary futures. The sole thing that they failed to predict was that the future would be very like the present. Only more dull. Despite Chesterton’s critique, the business of futurology is very much alive today and is still based on extremes. One particularly persuasive current format is the foretelling of strange new futures based around the advent and widespread use of computer-based communication, with Negroponte (1995) and Gates (1996) among the most prominent in a legion of futurologists. To date, far more effort has been expended on predicting the revolutionary futures of the Internet than has been put into finding out in detail how it is being used and the ways in which it is being incorporated into people’s daily lives. This book is a contribution to the ongoing debate about the significance of recent developments in communications technologies. In the book I develop a methodology for investigating the Internet in order to conduct an empirically based exploration of its current uses. The focus in this book is on finding out what the players of ‘Cheat the Prophet’ are up to this time: a task for which an ethnographic methodology is ideally suited.

At the most basic level, the Internet is a way of transmitting bits of information from one computer to another. The architecture of the Internet provides for ways of addressing the information that is sent, so that it can be split up into packets, sent out across the network and recombined by the recipient. All kinds of information are in theory equal: bits are transmitted in the same way whether they represent text, audio, images or video. The meaning of the bits comes from the patterns which they make, from the software which is used to interpret them, and of course from the users who send and receive them. The capacity to send information from one computer to another can therefore be used to provide many different ways of communicating. Communication can be synchronous or asynchronous, it can consist of private messages between known individuals or discussion among large numbers in relatively public forums, and it can be textual or audio or visual. Talking about ‘the Internet’ encompasses electronic mail (email), the World Wide Web (WWW), Usenet newsgroups, bulletin boards, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Multi-User Domains (MUDs) and many other applications (Kollock and Smith, 1999). All depend on the ability of the Internet to transmit information between computers. This view of the Internet as a distribution system for information has been used extensively in predictions of its future impact. It forms the starting point for an extrapolation to revolutionary effects. Here I will demonstrate how one of these projections of radical change works, to illustrate some of the tricks and omissions which it entails.

One of the future effects which has been predicted in the way described above is the end of the book. Books seem an old-fashioned way of disseminating information, when viewed in the light of advances in information and communication technologies. How much more straightforward to store the information electronically and transfer it to the point of use instantaneously, copy after copy, on demand. The sheer force of logic seems unassailable: all we need is the technologies and systems to make it possible, the necessary arrangements for everyone involved to be paid their due amount, and little can then stand in its way. Negroponte puts this point forcefully:

The methodical movement of recorded music as pieces of plastic, like the slow human handling of most information in the form of books, magazines, newspapers, and videocassettes, is about to become the instantaneous and inexpensive transfer of electronic data that move at the speed of light … The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable. (1995: 4)

Small wonder that Negroponte feels the need to apologize to his readers for having written a book. Mitchell (1996) also discusses the implications of electronic communications technologies for the book publishing and retailing industries, as a part of his examination of the role of electronic communications in redefining urban space. Mitchell describes possible future scenarios for transferring packages of information from originator through retailer to user, with information stored centrally, downloaded to a bookstore or even the home, and only then printed out to provide a physical object. Distribution of information instead of printed texts also opens up new possibilities for personalized products based on individual preferences. A similar argument is played out in many different fields. The recipe is simple: take something with a material form; then argue that the same function can be carried out in virtual form; assume that the virtual form will (by force of its own logic) displace the material form; propose a dire threat to the industry that produces the material form and radical changes for the users of the old material form and the new virtual form. The trick depends upon stripping the material form of social significance and imbuing it with purely technical qualities. The equivalence of material and virtual form can then be declared, and the revolutionary prospects appear.

Based on this logic the book is undoubtedly under threat from a development like the Internet. It seems ironic, then, that in 2000, books should be one of the most popular commodities traded on the Internet. It is debatable whether Internet bookshops are making money from their book sales, but certainly book selling is one of the more successful forms of Internet commerce in terms of volume of sales. Rather than displacing the sale of books, the Internet is helping their distribution to thrive, and the revolution of the Internet has turned, for the time being, into a new kind of mail order. There are some obvious reasons why buying books might be a popular use of the Internet. Internet bookshops have certainly attempted to lure customers with financial incentives, but it is unlikely that the appeal of Internet bookshops is based wholly on economic advantages. The convenience of ordering a book online and having it arrive in the post, too, has some appeal provided you do not need to see the book before you buy. Why books in particular should be appealing probably depends also on levels of trust. Electronic commerce has been slow to take off, with high levels of suspicion of electronic systems for handling money and of previously unknown electronic retailers. In circumstances of low trust, it seems quite plausible that a packaged product like the book or a CD, considered always the same no matter whom you buy it from, should be an acceptable thing to buy. The book is traditionally thought of as separate from the retailer: the author is the brand (Lash and Urry, 1994). For now, the packaged nature of the book and its material form may make it the ideal Internet commodity. This casts some doubt on the apparently unassailable logic by which digital information was going to displace the material form. The material form has a long history supporting its claims to be a trustworthy source of information and encouraging its users to think of it and use it in particular ways (Johns, 1998). Virtual forms of information do not have the same cultural understandings to support them.

The equation of the Internet with the end of the book is therefore not as straightforward as extreme predictions make it seem. In the future, electronic systems of information distribution may well become more important and might threaten the economic viability of conventional bookshops and publishers. The rush to get online in the publishing industry certainly signals some fears that their position is uncertain. The material manifestations of information may well alter, bringing consequences for the spatial, temporal and economic circumstances of information distribution. But if this does happen, it will involve much more than the compelling logic of a different way of distributing information. It will involve a shift in the mundane lived experience of buying, owning and reading information. For believers in the extreme predictions of radically altered future societies, people using the technology in mundane ways can easily be sidelined as lacking in imagination or missing the point. Writing in 1978, Hiltz and Turoff predicted of computer conferencing that ‘by the mid-1990s it will be as widely used in society as the telephone today’ (1993: xxv). Reflecting in the mid 1990s on their previous misplaced optimism, they advance an explanation: they had underestimated the importance of ‘social inertia’ (1993: xxix). The explanation retains the technological capacity for revolution, but shifts the effects a little further forward into the future. This book focuses precisely on what Hiltz and Turoff call social inertia: the practices through which the technology is used and understood in everyday settings. These lived experiences will need to alter if radical future predictions are going to be realized.

This argument suggests that, rather than technology itself being an agent of change, uses and understandings of the technology are central. This is the point which Grint and Woolgar (1997) make in the quotation with which this chapter began. There is a place for a study of the everyday practices around the Internet, as a means to question the assumptions inherent in the prediction of radically different futures. Ethnography is an ideal methodological starting point for such a study. It can be used to explore the complex links between the claims which are made for the new technologies in different arenas: the home, the workplace, the mass media and the academic journal and monograph. An ethnography of the Internet can look in detail at the ways in which the technology is experienced in use. In its basic form ethnography consists of a researcher spending an extended period of time immersed in a field setting, taking account of the relationships, activities and understandings of those in the setting and participating in those processes. The aim is to make explicit the taken-for-granted and often tacit ways in which people make sense of their lives. The ethnographer inhabits a kind of in-between world, simultaneously native and stranger. They must become close enough to the culture being studied to understand how it works, and yet be able to detach from it sufficiently to be able to report on it. This book explores the ways in which an ethnographic perspective can be adapted to cast light on the construction of the Internet in use. Ethnography allows us to focus on what Knorr-Cetina (1983) calls the ‘locally situated, occasioned character’ of Internet use. The aim is to study how the status of the Internet is negotiated in the local context of its use.

Foreshadowed problems

It is always useful for ethnographers to consider and attempt to articulate the assumptions which they take with them into the field. Growing familiarity with the setting may either reinforce these foreshadowed problems (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995: 24) or prompt their wholesale rejection. A continuing examination of the starting assumptions forms one way of learning about the field setting in a way which remains relevant to theoretical debates. The ethnography which is described here takes as its starting point the background of extreme predictions about the significance of the Internet. I have set the scene above for a sceptical approach to these claims. A further set of questions is raised by the work of academic commentators on the Internet, or cyberspace as it is often termed. Kitchin (1998) summarizes proposed effects of cyberspace into three categories: changes to the role of time and space; changes to communication and the role of mass communication; and a questioning of dualisms such as the real and the virtual, truth and fiction, the authentic and the fabricated, technology and nature, and representation and reality. These predictions have been made against a backdrop of wider debates in social theory about the significance of recent social and technical change. The brief and selective survey given here should serve to map the intellectual territory that the Internet inhabits, even if it does not do justice to the complexity of debates. Internet theorizing occurs in a context of disagreements over the most apt characterization of current modes of social organization. It is beyond the scope of this book to intervene in these debates. This is an ethnographic text, and as such its sympathies are thoroughly with the micro-level of analysis rather than the macro-level of such theories, and with understanding the present rather than dissecting the parameters of social change. Periodization debates are used here as a backdrop for statements made about the implications of the Internet and its predecessors and to provide some useful pointers to ways of interpreting the Internet.

The dominant characterization distinguishes between premodern or traditional, modern, and postmodern conditions of social organization. For some, the new communications technologies are a logical upshot of the preoccupations of modern society with rationality and control. For others, the new communications technologies are distinctive in their emphasis on uncertainty, and thus are the embodiments of a postmodern mode of (dis)organization characterized by the fragmentation of concepts such as science, religion, culture, society and the self. Finally, for some, the new information and communication technologies are the agents of such radical changes in social organization that they deserve a period all to themselves: the information society. Thrift (1996b) describes a ‘virus of new era thinking’ which tends to hail technological developments as revolutionary without attending to the history of such claims. Webster (1995) also takes a sceptical approach to claims that the role of information in society demands a distinct periodization. Working through technological, economic, occupational, spatial and cultural definitions of the information society, he finds each potential dimension of change to be insufficient to constitute a radical discontinuity. In those who argue for radical discontinuity, among whom he includes Daniel Bell, Mark Poster and Manuel Castells, Webster finds an underlying, often unstated, reliance on the capacities of the technology to induce social change. Webster’s (1995) sympathies are undoubtedly with the theorists of the modern who stress continuity of social organization.

Theorists of modernity provide a specific framework for understanding the development of communications technologies. Modernity, to summarize crudely, is characterized by a stress on rationality and control, by organization through surveillance and by a stress on the nation state as a means of controlling social life. It is also characterized by the importance of expert knowledges such as science. Modernity has had some key technologies: the clock, the calendar, the map, the computer. For Giddens (1990) the clock and the calendar contribute towards the formation of ‘empty’ dimensions of time and space. Time becomes a universal concept, allowing for coordination across distance. Space is separated from the physical locations known as place. The separation of time and space and their transformation as factors in social ordering is referred to as time–space distanciation. This process is enabled by disembedding mechanisms: systems of exchange and knowledge which are independent of particular locations in time or space. In this way of thinking, the new information and communication technologies are an extension of an existing concern with greater control through greater knowledge and coordination across time and space. The new technologies form part of the trend towards abstraction and are extensions to the capacity to organize and know which is a part of modern life. The Internet has yet to be explicitly addressed by theorists of modernity like Giddens (1990; 1991) and Thompson (1995). However, the general framework of a relationship between mediated interaction, social organization and space–time is thought-provoking. History suggests that technological developments can have far-reaching cultural implications for the lived experience of space and time (Kern, 1983). The Internet might be seen to augment possibilities for restructuring social relations across time and space, but as a part of modern preoccupations with social control rather than a threat to them. A study of the everyday uses of the Internet might therefore do well to look at the time–space relationships which are enacted in its use.

Postmodern theorists have it that the foundations of modernity are increasingly in crisis, and that the bases for organizing social life are undergoing a radical shift. A fragmentation of such modern concepts as the self, society and culture accompanies a loss of faith in the ‘grand narratives’ of science and religion (Lyotard, 1984). Social relations in space–time are also implicated in postmodern thought, though here the increasing compression is thought to lead to fragmentation rather than potential for rationalization and control (Harvey, 1989). For postmodernity, the new communications technologies are part of a process where doubt is cast on authenticity, representation and reality, the unitary self and the distinction between self and society. Poster (1990; 1995) identifies in the new media the provision of new conditions for subject formation, which amount to a decentring and dispersal of the subject. He also identifies the blurring of the boundaries between human and machine and between reality and virtuality as post-modern phenomena. In the Internet postmodernity seems to have found its object, in an ‘anything goes’ world where people and machines, truth and fiction, self and other seem to merge in a glorious blurring of boundaries. For some, cyberspace signals the breakdown of modernity (Nguyen and Alexander, 1996), is a postmodern context for playing with the self (Turkle, 1996), or is intrinsically a playful medium (Danet et al., 1997). For a study of everyday usage, this raises some obvious questions about the ways in which issues of authenticity and identity arise and are managed and about the ways in which the boundary between the real and the virtual is experienced, if indeed there is any idea left of ‘the real’ (Baudrillard, 1983).

Webster (1995) advocates social theory as an antidote to the simple social impacts view of information technologies, which proceeds largely from a straightforward technologically determinist view that technologies have particular social effects. Webster sets up social theory as an enriched way of thinking about the complexities of the relationship between technologies and societies. Even Webs...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Internet as Culture and Cultural Artefact
• 3 The Virtual Objects of Ethnography
• 4 The Making of a Virtual Ethnography
• 5 Time, Space and Technology
• 6 Authenticity and Identity in Internet Contexts
• 7 Reflection
• Glossary of Internet Terms
• References
• Index