Cyber-ethnography

Cyber-ethnography, also known as virtual ethnography, and most commonly online ethnography, is an online research method that adapts ethnographic methods to the study of the communities and cultures created through computer-mediated social interaction. Online ethnography has by far the wider use. As modifications of the term ethnography, cyber-ethnography, online ethnography and virtual ethnography (as well as many other methodological neologisms) designate particular variations regarding the conduct of online fieldwork that adapts ethnographic methodology. There is no canonical approach to cyber-ethnography that proscribes how ethnography is adapted to the online setting. Instead individual researchers are left to specify their own adaptations. Netnography is another form of online ethnography or cyber-ethnography with more specific sets of guidelines and rules, and a common multidisciplinary base of literature and scholars. This article is not about a particular neologism, but the general application of ethnographic methods to online fieldwork as practiced by anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars.

Traditional ethnography study observes the interactions between individuals who are co-located. Ethnographies of online cultures and communities extend ethnographic study to settings where interactions are technologically mediated, not face-to-face. Cyber-ethnography therefore addresses limitations in the traditional notion of a field site as a localized space. It also understands that online communities can create a shared culture through digitally mediated interactions. Although the assertion that ethnographic fieldwork can be meaningfully applied to computer-mediated interactions has been contested, it is increasingly becoming accepted.

Like other early internet researchers, early cyber-ethnographers such as Sandy Stone and Sherry Turkle observed that participants in online role-playing communities enact social performances that can diverge dramatically from their offline personas. This led to the idea that online identities can be segmented from offline ones. Cyber-ethnography was seen as a new kind of methodology that might uncover how the internet would radically change society. However, as the internet reached the mainstream and cyber-ethnographers sought legitimacy, cyber-ethnography was reframed as adaptation of traditional methods into a new context. Understanding the degree to which divergent performances in online and offline settings reflect a segmentation of identity or a continuous identity performed differently in different contexts remains an important consideration for cyber ethnographers.

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