Reflection on Christine Hine's "Virtual Ethnography"

Hines raises some interesting points in building up to her discussion on virtual ethnography, particularly when she discusses the triple-crisis of ethnography proposed by Denzin; however, I feel the real meat of what she says is found under the topic of how to perceive the Internet in terms of a site of ethnographic research - is it more productive in our own research, for instance, to view the World Wide Web as more interactive, or more as a series of static texts on mostly-unchanging websites? While there are a lot of the old HTML-based websites still around, where interaction is minimal at best, I think the changes in technology over the past several years have brought online interaction beyond the IRC channels, message/image boards and newsgroups of 2000, and content of most sites is vastly more interactive. I don't think it always equates to communication, but I think the question of how to view the Internet has become more complex a question even than it was at the time this chapter was written. However, when she talks about examining the Internet ethnographically by tying these "static texts" to the modes of production and consumption, she's hit on an idea that's still relevant; how these new forms of communication are produced, and the ways in which we consume them (the ways we use them to interact with others in the faceless world of the Internet) can give us insights into the culture that has produced them. She also suggests that studying such forms of interaction like newsgroups as texts can provide ethnographic insight to identity construction; this may be helpful in studies of anonymous communication like image boards as well, where authority and "identity" are constructed not necessarily on the basis of how well an argument is made or information is conveyed, but on a more social basis (which post incited the biggest reaction, for instance, such as in the case of the postings on /b/). These are still forms of interaction, though they have been textualized, and they have value as a form of communication; much can be learned from a careful study of them, though perhaps more can be gained from a multi-faceted approach, studying them both as interaction and as text.

While a reflexive method does endanger the privileged position of ethnographer, I do not think this is necessarily a bad thing, so long as the focus of the ethnography itself remains on the members of the culture studied, rather than becoming something akin to the ethnographer's biography of the experience, or an exercise in self-reflection. Also, the use of multimedia to allow the reader to draw their own inferences from the data presented is something I think our project can benefit from; while Hine used the more traditional form of printed text to convey her data, and we can and have benefited from this, the use of multimedia not only draws the academic readers to our work, but also those outside the discipline, and thus more can benefit from our research.

I really appreciate her discussion concerning interconnectedness and the idea of the field site as bound place being problematic, particularly in a study of the Internet; a multi-sited approach to our project can be immensely helpful in painting a more accurate picture of what the "culture of the Internet" is like; a focus on one type of web-based media over another doesn't do the entirety of web-based interaction justice. But how can we really tell the whole story of identity on the Internet, when what that actually means is constantly changing?