While jumping from one place to another, trying to polish the final shape of my ethnography, I kept thinking of the lifestream and whether in a way it could be regarded as an ethnographic artefact itself. Could it be perceived as a community, at least in the meaning of texts, documenting my connectivity, connectivity between me and other nodes on the Web or even auto-connectivity between various online facets of myself (following the view of identity as prismatic) as represented on a number of sites feeding into the stream, tumblr for quotes, diigo for bookmarks, this blog for musings, youtube and flickr for things watched and seen respectively, Twitter for whispers or shouts … or is it stretching the idea too much?

I liked what M. Wesch said about subjects vs subjectivity, declarative transmitted knowledge vs  a way of seeing, feeling and understanding, characteristic for a given group or discipline. That could be perhaps extended when doing ethnographic research, looking at the subjectivity of the community, rather than its subjects, which would require overt, not only covert observation of the community. What would be the subjectivity within this field or rather a stream? Maybe the way of understanding the dance between the technology and the human, the student on this course (me) in an attempt to embrace the uncanny and enter the posthuman productive borderland. I would not attempt that without the stream, would I …

I think no matter how objective I had meant to be, I did harbour some a priori assumptions throughout the project. I had problems deciding what ‘community’ means and whether it equals a personal learning network, a term usually used by the chat participants themselves. I quite liked the idea of Bund and thought it suited my purposes but I didn’t know how to relate it to the textual approach to ethnography and the focus on connectivity of texts, other than the sign of the participants’ passion and charisma. With the connectivity approach, it turned out that it is not only the chat but a number of other sites to explore, which would be a great idea but possibly beyond the scope of the project. I’m pleased with my prezi visualisation but I think the text-heavy bit on the community aspects introduced massive disproportion into the final product and affected its coherence. Focusing on the connectivity also meant change to ethical considerations – I am aware I should have got in touch with all the blog authors to ask them for consent to use fragments of their writing. The selection certainly fails to fairly represent the community – due to time constraints I went for blogs of people I know are active participants so hard to talk about randomness of choice.

observing .. them and myself too ...

pic from this site

Anyway, no matter how much I would like to work more on it, especially in terms of content and presentation, I cannot go on any more. Perhaps that was the thing I struggled with most – when to say stop! So unfinished and slightly untidy, here it comes! Voila!

To my virtual ethnography …

This story starts with the reason I have chosen the science bloggers group for this ethnography. I am not a joiner of groups, in fact the only membership I have is with TES, so I did some searching and head-scratching to find one.  It was on reading Jen’s comments on the Holyrood Hub that this task should be enjoyable that I finally made my decision.  I enjoy reading science blogs and have an RSS feed from the Female Science Professor to my Lifestream. When reading the FSPs blog I would see interesting links to bloggers she follows. This in turn would lead me to follow links to bloggers they follow and so on.

The ethnography will be formed from observation and exploring ‘…the social spaces of the Internet’ (Hine 2000);  participating ‘covertly in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions’ (Hammersley and Atkinson quoted in Hine).  Data has been collected from various blogs over a short period of time so at best the results will give a snapshot of life in the science bloggers’ community.  The information used in this research is available publicly from bloggers sites; there has been no violation of trust. Each blogger gives a brief description of themselves and their field of work, though not in any great detail.  The fields range from physiology, pharmacology, biomedical research, neurosciences and teaching to science journalism.  This is by no means a comprehensive list.

Could science bloggers be said to belong to an online community?  Shared interest may seem a tenuous connection to base this ethnography, bearing in mind the diverse fields of science.

Study Questions

My study questions are:

• Are Science Bloggers a community?
• Do users support each other?
• How do users relate to each other?

Are Science Bloggers a community?

No membership is required to join this group. Participants are world-wide and either work in a science related field or have a general interest in science.  One blogger actually asked readers to say who they are, if they have a background in science and what draws them to the blog.  At last count, there were 47 responses.  There are no written rules, participants tend to follow the social code of good manners.  No ‘one’ person is in charge but the voice of reason tends to rein in transgressors. For example,  a blog about attending meetings whilst on maternity leave  resulted in a few ‘husband bashing’ responses which were quelled by postings pointing out that this was not helpful. The group discuss various topics, newsworthy articles and critique work. Bell (2011) states “communities are imagined and held together by shared cultural practice”.  In this respect then Science Bloggers can be termed a community.

Do users support each other?

Kozinets poses the question, “How deep, long-lasting, meaningful, and intense are those relationships?”  This group are very supportive, give very good advice and follow career paths wit interest.   A blogger asking for advice on writing a CV and tips on questions to ask, or that may be asked, at interviews, received a number of responses. Advice requested is usually met with quick responses. Helping raise funds for schools shows they have a sense of responsibility which transpires the group.   A blog about an exchange between the blogger and a Press Officer who advised, “I think you have all you need for a blog” received a lot of responses and tweets.  Support for the blogger showed a strong sense of loyalty from the community. In fact, the way they dealt with this they could be described as a ‘Bund’ (Bell).  As in any community, some members form closer attachments than others.

How do users relate to each other?

The group takes a personal as well as personal interest in their community.  They share thoughts and ideas;  tell stories about their pets; share stories of trips and concerts;  give cooking tips, menu ideas, cocktail recipes also book recommendations..  They talk about moving house, changing jobs, concerns at work – they share their lives.    There is an obvious sense of friendship, and humour,  as evidenced by the calaveras.  Some blogs and responses are serious and some are tongue in cheek; read Colin’s response to breastfeeding in public.

Conclusion

Knowing the personality of an individual helps to understand the person  and so to it is with understanding of a community.  The culture of the science blogger community can be termed as a ‘barn raising’ community.  This virtual community “ ..chat and argue, engage in intellectual intercourse.. exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans..“ (Rheingold quoted in Hine).

“An online community is a community if participants imagine themselves as a community” (Baym quoted in Bell).  This group definitely see themselves as a community and I do too.

*Please also see Prezi presentation.

Bibliography

Bell, David (2001) Community and cyberculture, chapter 5 of An introduction to cybercultures. Abingdon: Routledge. pp92-112.

Gatson, Sarah N. and Zweerink, Amanda, (2004) Qualitative “Ethnography Online: ‘Natives’ Practising and Inscribing Community” Research 2004; 4; 179

Hine, Christine (2000) The virtual objects of ethnography, chapter 3 of Virtual ethnography. London: Sage. pp41-66

Kozinets, Robert V., (2010) “Understanding Culture Online” from Kozinets, Robert V., Netnography : doing ethnographic research online pp.21-40, London: Sage

Some Web addresses

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/network-central/about.php?author=11

http://dr-becca.blogspot.com/2010/12/11th-hour-pre-interview-freak-out.html#comments

http://embargowatch.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/how-to-demonstrate-youre-not-about-transparency-and-piss-off-reporters-as-a-pio/#comment-1527

http://embargowatch.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/update-on-aeron-haworth-and-ed-yong-an-apology-accepted/

http://scientopia.org/blogs/drugmonkey

http://isisthescientist.com/2011/10/26/when-does-breastfeeding-become-offensive/#comments

http://physioprof.wordpress.com/about-physioprof/

http://scientopia.org/blogs/proflikesubstance/

http://www.theenlightenedpio.com/2011/02/outing-poor-press-officer-work/

http://scientopia.org/blogs/bridgeblog/2011/11/02/calaveras-2-0/

http://silent-typewriter.com/

Diaspora is a distributed social network running on a collection of open source personal webservers across the Internet.  Diaspora is a community of passionate users who control their own data, control who sees it and who can harvest it. Diaspora is a project that I have been observing from a distance since the announcement by four NYU college students in 2010 that they wanted to to build a Freedom Box and make a step towards changing how we use social networks.  Diaspora used crowdsourced funding via KickStarter to raise over $200,000 which allowed the developers the financial stability to dedicate themselves to the project.  Diaspora is free (“as in freedom”).

In this brief ethnographic study of the Diaspora community, I have employed a combination of participant observation and direct interaction with users in order to better understand the community and its members.  I have posted questions to the community and received a considerable volume of responses given my status as a new (and consequently unconnected) member.  I have attempted to define what it means to be a Diaspora member and what it is that drives people to join the community.

Ethical Issues

Given that Diaspora provides the potential to limit who sees the information that you choose to share, I  have avoided using any user posts or data that came from private sources and have opted instead to publish only data that is specifically marked as being public.  Data produced with digital publishing tools simplifies any ethical decisions for an ethnographer but does not remove the responsibility to always consider any possible, wider implications of material that is published.  With this in mind I have chosen to anonymize any users data and avoid direct quotation where possible.  Any user names or avatars that appear in graphics have been blurred to further protect the identities of those involved.

Background

In researching the nascent Diaspora community prior to joining, I became aware of a strong sense that the development team considers this project to be something of a social movement rather than a mere social network.  Co-founding developer Daniel Grippi uses the phrase “a spark to start a fire” in the second video below.  This language sounds highly politicized and obviously hopeful for great things to come.  Since joining I have frequently noticed this same sentiment from Diaspora members themselves and must confess that I hold similar views and aspirations for the success of such a movement.  Hine tells us that “ethnography is appealing for its depth of description and its lack of reliance on apriori hypotheses”, (Hine C. 2000. “The virtual objects of ethnography”).   My sentiments therefore have caused me some difficulty in remaining fully objective in my research, and it is something that I have been continually conscious of and careful to avoid.  That said, the initial motivation for the development of Diaspora is indeed based on a politicized view that users have rights and are not just a product to be sold to marketing companies.  Diaspora adheres to the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy’s Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights.  Its very beginnings are inspired by Columbia University law professor Eben Moglens now famous lecture “Freedom in The Cloud’, first presented at NYU in early 2010 in which he describes centralized social networks as offering “spying for free” (from Wikipedia).  The projects main tenants of Choice, Ownership and Simplicity (see home page on https://joindiaspora.com/) serve to empower its users in a manor unheard of amongst profit driven social networks.  The following videos are what I believe to be key points in the emergence of Diaspora and what I hope will be a new movement for user empowerment online.

• Eben Moglen’s “Freedom in The Cloud’ presentation at NYU Feb 5 2010.  In this lecture Moglen introduces his concept of the Freedom Box, a device like a personal webserver that allows the consumption of network services without the traditional dangers.  This lecture has a profound affect on the Diaspora founding members.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA

• Diapora founding members report to the Internet Society’s New York Chapter on their work inspired by Moglen’s ideas.  NYU Apr 22 2010.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRTzRAtDujU

• Diapora pre-release promotional video showing the growth of the project and some cool features.
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SehPS5J1lQA

Arrival Story

Taking the title of the introduction to Gatson and Zweerinks paper “Ethnography online: ‘natives’ practicing and inscribing community” to heart, i.e. that there there is “no such thing as non-participant observation”, I decided that the best approach would be to create a new account and dive right into the community as any newcomer would.  I posted the Diasporian equivalent of “Hello World” to my stream and announced ‘Hi, I’m #newhere’.  The use of this hashtag is something of a debut for new members, an announcement that they are ready to participate, meet and interact with others and begin to the form bonds that will connect them to the community.  I’ve speculated during this course that because of the ease involved in joining a virtual community, the traditional ethnographic arrival is less meaningful until the active creation of “connections” (ie friendships, followings or any one of the many terms used by social networking sites) occurs.  The following Flickr set shows this process as a series of steps.  It is in a sense my own arrival into the community and the beginnings of my real membership.  In the spirit of the community, these images are released under a Creative Commons, Attribution license.  The wordpress instance on which this blog post is written does not allow the insertion of iframe or embed code, but you can see a slide show of the set here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielgriffinnet/sets/72157628030760816/show/

Or a direct link (useful for viewing annotations and commenting) here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielgriffinnet/sets/72157628030760816

What is a community?  Is Diaspora a Community?

During the course of the last two weeks we have been discussing the notion of community and how it relates to groups of people whose primary method of communication is digital.  Indeed we have questioned whether such groups are indeed communities at all or whether they are simply loose collectives of people gathering around a common focus.

In his book The Virtual Community, Howard Rheingold references graduate student Marc A Smiths work on the concept of collective goods as a useful tool to determine whether a particular group constitutes a community.  “Every cooperative group of people exists in the face of a competitive world because that group of people recognizes there is something valuable that they can gain only by banding together. Looking for a group’s collective goods is a way of looking for the elements that bind isolated individuals into a community”, (Rheingold, 1993).  Smith proposes that the collective goods which create a community are social network capital, knowledge capital, and communion.  When I first read this quote I became very excited because although I have only recently become a Diaspora member, I have already encountered or observed these phenomena at work.  From its very inception, Diaspora has been a group based not around some minor theme or activity (not to say that such groups cannot themselves be considered communities), but rather focuses on a momentousness and potentially paradigm shifting goal, to empower the user and move control of the network away from traditional structures.  In this sense it is a textbook example of a gemeinschaft community.  Its members are generally technologically savvy and seem to be willing to help or offer advice readily to new members.  In my “#newhere” introduction, I asked the community what it is that interests them most about Diaspora.  Obviously the reach of such a question is fairly limited given my new arrival and the very small number of connections that I had, however the question did produce several interesting responses from other members.  Almost every answer that I received focused to some degree on the facts stated in Diaspora member David McCauly’s now widely circulated Dozen Reasons to Switch to Diaspora.  The typical user (in my experience) is well informed and interested in subjects related to the Free Libre Open Source Software development movement.  They have found a place online which cherishes and strictly upholds these values.  In their fellow members they may see many traits that they recognize within themselves, and from this there quickly grows a sense of connection, or the emergence of a shared communal identity.  One user response to my post was particularly succinct, giving the following reasons paraphrased here: it is non-commercial, open source, protects privacy and has some pretty interesting people.

Conclusion

Given my personal interest in the subject matter, I have attempted to remain as unbiased as possible during the course of this study; however my findings do indeed appear to echo my preconceptions.  The Diaspora community is composed of many unique individuals, all of whom are connected through their passion for social freedom and personal empowerment.  They are for the most part highly technically literate and vocal on subjects relating to the use and misuse of technology.  As a group, they represent and share the ideological viewpoint that it is not only possible, but essential that we “provide privacy in normal life, and safe communications for people seeking to preserve their freedom in oppressive regimes”, (http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/).  Again I am reminded that an ethnographer should attempt to ignore any preconceived notions and to remain as objective as possible, however I must admit to identifying strongly with these statements and to holding very similar views myself; perhaps I too have found a new home online…

References

Diaspora Foundation Homepage http://diasporafoundation.org/

Hine, C. (2000)  The virtual objects of ethnography.

Rheingold, H. (1993)  The Virtual Community.  (online, retrieved 01.11.11)
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html

Gatson, S and Zweerink, A. (2004) Ethnography online: ‘natives’ practising and inscribing community.

Wikipedia Diaspora page, (retrieved 01.11.2011) 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_%28software%29

My ethnographic study was of the GA-MMA group… the Gerry Anderson Model Makers’ Alliance. The study is at:

http://atate.org/mscel/ethno/

Please leave any comments here.

The Hine reading, as well as my personal study for the week got me thinking about the concept of arrival stories within ethnographic research and so I began considering what represents an arrival (and here) within a cyber-community.  In the online community with a prescribed signup process, membership is a highly defined concept, i.e. if you have an account you are by definition a member.  Group membership therefore is insufficient to define ones connection within an online community.  Perhaps the missing element is the idea of reputation within the group, or a general acceptance that the new member is willing to work within the established community guidelines and participate in a productive way.  If this is true then the “arrival” is the creation of connections within the group rather than mere membership.

I’m really looking forward to getting involved with Diaspora and developing these ideas further.

I considered ethical matters, and discussed acting as a “new member” as a probe on how the community reacted. But after discussion on the course forum, I decided against this on ethical groups of misleading a community I am already a member of and potentially making someone in the community spend real time to assist a fictional new member.

I addressed straight away, a potentially serious blocking technical issue which was how to obtain all the messages in a form I could process and analyse locally without individually reading and seeking the threads I feel I want to follow (e.g. on how new members are treated and supported, or otherwise) in the 500 or so postings available publicly. I have installed a message grabbing and archiving software and obtained the message traffic (deliberately without member login to ensure no members only or private messages are included). An initial Wordle tag cloud of this is shown here… which already shows some interesting themes related to the most popular topics discussed, craft modelled, etc.

I know there are lots of online communities out there but I am struggling trying to find a suitable one for my ethnography.  I have spent quite a few hours searching, unsuccessfully. Made a start with looking at something I’m interested in but they either didn’t meet the criteria or they just weren’t interesting enough. The ones produced by last year’s cohorts are pretty impressive.  Such a variety of topics; cats, MacRumors, fallen fruit, Japan.  Presented in creative, interesting formats too.  I had a look at the WELL community site. I haven’t really been involved in online communities, except for expat and teacher forums, so it didn’t occur to me that a subscription may be required in some.  When I tried to look at what Flickr had to offer, this is the message I receive:

Back to the drawing board.