So how do you do Anthropology online?

I was asked this excellent question on this blog and I'll try to come up with a sensemaking answer, since its an important question too.

First of all, a lot of really good stuff has been written about this. Christine Hine has written the book "Virtual Ethnography" from 2000. Being 10 years old, som of it seems a little outdated since the Internet and more importantly our use of it has moved fast since then, but it is still a completely brilliant and interesting read with a lot of fundamentally important considerations regarding a social science-approach to the online parts of our lives.

Also, Tom Boellstorff wrote an excellent book about Second Life called "Coming of age in Second Life" that has many interesting point about method when working in virtual worlds.

And there are many more. That being said I will now make a little overview of my own understanding of this.

Anthropologists use ethnographic methods for gathering data. That usually means a mix of in-debth interviews and a lot of Participant Observation. Participant Observation is generally an ongoing mental battle of becoming as much a part of what your studying as you can while keeping your objective researcher eye. This balancing act is not easy and there are typically collapses into going completely native along the way. As an anthropologist is her own tool in the field it can be quite hard to do this thing without loosing it a bit. We generally use writing as a way of getting our minds back, once we're out of the field. Some hold it together better than others. And I guess it depends on the field you choose to study too.

Now there has been some discussion as the internet arose as a social field in its own right, whether doing fieldwork online could be called "real" fieldwork and even Christine Hine in her book from 2000 writes that it is almost real ethnographic work, although she aknowledges that the understanding of ethnographic work has moved far from having to be isolated on an island with people who might eat you for a few years.

Now I think it is generally acknowledged that online fieldwork is very real indeed. The discussion whether internetgroups/subcultures/specific virtual realms can be studied isolated and on their own terms or if they have to be understood in relation to offline contexts is now up for debate. It is the difference between seeing the Internet phenomenon in question as a Culture or a Cultural artifact. Hine I believe argues for doing a bit of both. But it will always depend on the case and the field in question and indeed, what we try to learn about it.

I hope this goes a little way to answer the question.