WHAT IS VIRTUAL ETHNOGRAPHY?

Ethnography is a discipline within the social sciences whose literally translation equates with
study of the people. Traditional ethnography employed techniques such as interviews and
participant observation to gather a diverse set of data for the researcher to analyze with the
aim of developing a comprehensive perspective on the object of his or her studies (Tedlock,
1991, pp.69-70). This object of research is usually a peoples way of life comprising its
norms, customs and culture. Traditional ethnography concerned itself with the study of
ethnocultural communities through a direct embedding of the scholar within the physical
community. However, new methodology and ethics are needed for the ethnographer to focus
his or her academic efforts in studying virtual, rather than physical, communities.
Virtual ethnography is similar to traditional ethnography as both disciplines are
concerned with the study of community, but virtual ethnographic research is conducted on
the world wide web and concerns itself with the study of online communities such as
websites and forums. This diversion from traditional ethnography is a consequence of the
recent technological developments that caused mediated communications to play an
increasingly important role in societal interactions, posing both challenges and opportunities
to traditional ethnographic methods whose primary object of study have always focused on
direct face-to-face communication (Hine, 2015, p.3). Thus it is important for digital
ethnographers to adapt traditional research techniques to social interactions mediated by the
cyberspace.
Traditional ethnography has been based on participant observation to provide a firsthand account of different peoples way of life. However, the ability of the ethnographer to
observe everyday face-to-face communication is hindered by the use of mediated
communication, making it impossible to observe all the multiple facets of a situation and the
different ways this situation is perceived by different people. However, the ethnographers
research has always been bound to the researchers perceptual capacity as perception is
subjective and depends on specific circumstances. Moreover ethnography itself is a highly
adaptive discipline because of its nature (Hine, 2015) so virtual ethnography can maintain
some adherence to tradition and develop innovative methods to understand the complex
reality of communications in the information age.
Internet is indeed a multi-faceted way of communication that is too complex and too
diverse to be studied as a single whole as the internet has undergone through significant
transformations since its early days in the 90s. More specifically, the internet became more
accessible to ordinary people and made it easier for anyone to express their opinion or to
gather information about a wide range of topics. The mass penetration of internet in todays
society means that more people are using the internet and infusing them with their own
opinions based on their subjective experiences. For these reasons it is not possible to do an
ethnography of the internet, but ethnographic methods are still valuable tools to make
ethnography through the internet and gain insights on the working of online communities.
(Hine, 2015, p.5)
For virtual ethnography to thrive as an academic discipline, it is important to balance
both tradition and innovation by reinventing those models without erasing their fundamental
characteristics. Traditional field methods imply that research is carried out by a lone
ethnographer who enters a field site and becomes an observer of the community with
varying degrees of involvement in the community. Another method is autoetnography, in
which the researcher is a native of the particular situation that is an object of study. Finally,
there is multisited or extended-case ethnography in which the aim is to compare theory with

empirical observation to understand macro aspects of ethnography as a discipline and micro

dynamics of the particular field site. (Gatson, 2011, pp. 246-247)
Online ethnography requires a combination of at least two of these methods for the
research to be effective because of the inherent complexity of mediated communications.
Autoethnography is a particularly widespread method because online ethnographic research
is often carried out by insiders of digital communities that may or may not be members of
academia. Multisited online ethnography is also viable when the researcher explores
different sites, both online and offline, to present a broader perspective on a research topic
(Gatson, 2011, pp. 248-250). Like traditional ethnography, studies of online communities can
encompass one or many topics with varying degrees of depth depending on the scope of the
research.
The differences in traditional and online ethnography requires a revision of ethical
guidelines and on what kind of boundary-establishing behaviour (Gatson, 2011, p. 251)
should be employed in the research. While traditional ethnography has always based its
ethics on informed consent and awareness of power differential to structure the relationship
between the observer and the object of observation, the complexities inherent to the internet
pose a significant challenge to this concept.
All content on the internet is meant to be consumed by an audience and thus subject
to public scrutiny so that the researcher does not control the flow of information from a
secluded community as it used to be the case in traditional ethnographic research. The very
nature of virtual ethnography challenges the position of the academic, mirroring the loss of
control that writers have on their content once it is uploaded on the internet. (Gatson, 2011,
pp. 252-253)Because of the aforementioned issue, ethnographers must develop new ethical
guidelines for each research project they decide to undertake in spite of the permeable
boundary between themselves and the object of their research, while taking the perspective
of media-literate citizens into account.(Gatson, 2011, p. 262)
To sum up, ethnography is confronted with the multi-faceted nature of
communications in the information society. There is not necessarily the need of a radical
rupture between traditional and virtual ethnography, but it is important to adapt traditional
methods and ethics to the mechanics and nature of mediated communications so that
academics are enabled to develop their own holistic perspective on the matter because of
the purposive and adaptive nature of the discipline which is well suited to deal with the
complexity of societal interactions in both the cyber and physical spaces. (Hine, 2015, p.54)

REFERENCES
Gatson S. (2011). The Methods, Ethics, and Politics of Representation in Online
Ethnography. In: Denzin, N./Lincoln, Y. (eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research, London:
Sage, pp. 513-527.
Hine, C. (2007). Multi-sited ethnography as a middle range methodology for contemporary
STS. Science, Technology & Human Values, 32(6), 652-671.
Tedlock, B. (1991). From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The
Emergence of Narrative Ethnography. In: Journal of Anthropological Research, 47(1), pp.
69-94.

INFORMAL PRESENTATION
- Present ideas for a research topic
- Discuss how topics relate to the DAE
- Show examples which could serve as field sites and explain how you could investigate
those ethnographically
VIRTUAL ETHNOGRAPHY PROJECT
- See what the aims of the project are in regard to particular areas (cybersecurity, privacy, ecommerce etc...)
- Compare with the opinions of r/ Europe on these matters through participant observation
and surveys
- See if there is a gap between Europe's aims and Reddit's opinions
- Methodology, scan /r Europe for keywords (digital, internet, privacy, cyber etc...)