Oct
24
Week five: A reflection of the community
October 24, 2011 | 6 Comments
Week 5 has been taken up with reading on ethnography, searching online for papers or other sites on ethnography and on communities and trying to find an ‘online community’ that would be interesting and ethically viable for an ethnographic study. In terms of my lifestream, I’ve become aware that I tend to use the same particular feeds, twitter and delicious, most. This is because through twitter I can communicate links, ideas etc. directly with my classmates as well as posting to my lifestream, and because I like delicious as a way to bookmark not only for my lifestream but for my own record of sites, papers etc. I use tumblr for quotes only, as it often freezes my desktop for some reason so can be a bit unreliable. I’ve also tried to remember to use youtube this week. Some of my feeds are reliant on how often an RSS comes from a particular website, such as Christopherbaker.net, which can be infrequent. This week I tried to add readernaut but, although I signed up, for some reason I’ve not had an email to validate and on investigating have not been able to sort it out so I will look at using a different reading feed. I’ve also added stumbleupon which is a bit hit and miss but I quite like the random nature of it.
In investigating ethnography, so that I knew what it was I was supposed to be doing this and last week, I started out with Hine to get an idea of ethnography, and specifically virtual ethnography. What interested me here was Hine’s description of ethnographers as moving from looking at distant cultures to looking at more ‘limited aspects: people as patients, as students, as television viewers, or as professionals’ (41). This seemed to reflect a more global than geographical emphasis in digital ethnography, although as I have looked at online communities (and Bell quite rightly problematises this term), I’m not sure that there are not still geographical boundaries, as well as social ones, that circumscribe those communities. For instance, on Twitter, @abuneil highlighted online communities that were of particular interest to those from a Bengali background.
On social boundaries, Bell (2001), considering the arguments against online community, points out that ‘bunkering in [sheltering from RL in a self-selecting online community] means cocooning oneself from the “contamination of pluralism’ found in the RL city’ (106). The ‘community’ I eventually decided to look at for my ethnography, http://www.mumsnet.com/, has been accused of having very particular geographical, class, social and political boundaries. Early on in our discussion for this block’s task to create a virtual ethnography, @DGdotNET asked whether it was possible to be an ‘objective digital ethnographer’, a view Hines also takes saying that ethnography ‘faced challenges concerning objectivity and validity’ (41). At the time I turned to Foucault’s The Order of Things as I do like his notion that our viewpoint is often dictated by fundamental codes, but I also like his view that we create taxonomies through which to view things.
This lack of objectivity could be even more of a problem for the digital ethnographer who may come, as I did, to study their community through a filter of existing media perception. This will be something I will consider in my ethnography as it must be acknowledged:
As well as looking at media reactions to Mumsnet, I’ve been looking more generally at women blogging and particularly at the phenomenon of ‘Mommy blogging’, a problematic label which might be perceived as positive or negative. The logo of Mumsnet, with its reference to Charlie’s Angels, perhaps unwittingly encapsulates this dilemma of female empowerment:
One of the issues I will be considering when looking at Mumsnet is whether it can truly be described as a community and, also, what a community is for. On the first point Bell’s chapter gives some useful insight, in particular I want to consider: the idea of a community existing if ‘participants imagine themselves as a community’ (102); whether Sardar’s view (quoted in Bell, 101) that merely belonging to and posting on a bulletin board does not confirm a community identity is a reasonable one; whether Dibbell’s criteria (in Bell, 110) on ‘social contracts’ as a sign of community holds true of Mumsnet; and the idea of the ‘Bund’ as an alternative to community in relation to how Mumsnet functions. I very much liked the idea of Bund as ‘an elective group, bonded by affective and emotional solidarity, sharing a strong sense of belonging’ as a way of assessing Mumsnet, although the notion of the affective and emotional does play into the hands of those who marginalise Mommy Blogging as confirming the private domain of women as lacking in importance, as against those who claim it as an empowering ‘radical act’.
I wonder…….
I became interested in what a community might be for partly through reading Bell on whether online communities come about as a desire to replace the perceived loss of community in RL cities and his quoting Willson on community membership as self-serving – ‘the benefits of membership are often described in terms of the individual member’s quality of life, rather than in the quality of relations between subjects’ (109). In our idealization of RL community we imagine being part of a whole in which the individual is supported and supports, but is this the case with online communities, or are they, as Bell explores in some critiques, leading to increased individuation?
6 Comments so far
fantastic logo for that mumsnet site – it would be worth an examination in itself! One of last year’s students did her ethnography on the twitter “failwhale” error message and the community that sprung up around it – it was really interesting (and funny). http://edc.education.ed.ac.uk/alisonj/2010/11/04/fail-whale-community-ethnography/
Re library sites you might add – I know several people who swear by ‘library thing’ – so that might work. Great to see you experimenting even more! http://www.librarything.com/