Mediating ethnography: Objectivity and the making of ethnographies of the internet
Social Epistemology 18 (2 & 3):139 – 163 (2004)
| Abstract | This paper aims to contribute to current discussions about methods in anthropological (especially ethnographic) research on the cultures of the internet. It does so by considering how technology has been presented in turn as an epistemological boon and bane in methodological discourse around virtual or online ethnography, and cyberanthropology. It maps these discussions with regards to intellectual traditions and ambitions of ethnographic research and social science, and considers how these views of technology relate to modernist discourse about the value of technology for producing a particular kind of objective knowledge. For this article, I have examined a number of monographs and methodological texts in which the internet, as both a new setting and a new technology for doing ethnography, is shown to raise new issues for ethnographic work and for theorising anthropological approaches. In this material, questions of presence, field relations (including trust and confidentiality), and new possibilities for observation are especially prominently discussed. Anxieties about whether the internet can be a field at all are also expressed. In my analysis, I place these issues and dilemmas facing the researcher in the context of the intellectual tradition of ethnography as applied to technology. The main themes found to subtend these discussions of ethnography's 'way of knowing' are the notion of 'field', technology, intersubjectivity and capture. The paper ends with a reflection on the kind of knowledge about the internet that ethnography can be expected to produce, given these methodological prescriptions | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,701 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesA. T. Nuyen (2001). The World Wide Web and the Web of Life. International Journal of Applied Philosophy 15 (1):47-57.
Charles L. Bosk (2008). What Would You Do?: Juggling Bioethics and Ethnography. University of Chicago Press.
Matteo Turilli, Antonino Vaccaro & Mariarosaria Taddeo (2012). Internet Neutrality: Ethical Issues in the Internet Environment. Philosophy and Technology 25 (2):133-151.
John Weckert (2000). What is so Bad About Internet Content Regulation? Ethics and Information Technology 2 (2):105-111.
with Ray DeVries (2008). Bureaucracies of Mass Evasion: Irbs and the Ethnography of Ethics. In Charles L. Bosk (ed.), What Would You Do?: Juggling Bioethics and Ethnography. University of Chicago Press.
Michael Herzfeld (1987). Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe. Cambridge University Press.
Elizabeth H. Bassett & Kate O'Riordan (2002). Ethics of Internet Research: Contesting the Human Subjects Research Model. Ethics and Information Technology 4 (3):233-247.
Thomas A. Lewis (2010). Ethnography, Anthropology, and Comparative Religious Ethics: Or Ethnography and the Comparative Religious Ethics Local. Journal of Religious Ethics 38 (3):395-403.
Peter R. Grahame & Kamini Maraj Grahame (2009). Points of Departure: Insiders, Outsiders, and Social Relations in Caribbean Field Research. Human Studies 32 (3).
Jamshid Tehrani (2006). The Uses of Ethnography in the Science of Cultural Evolution. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (4):363-364.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads12 ( #93,408 of 549,124 )Recent downloads (6 months)0How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
