Virtual communities is the theme of this block and our task is to build an ethnography, something I haven’t attempted before. In order to get an understanding I read and re-read the recommended readings. If I understand Hine (2000) correctly, an ethnography is an anthropological approach to studying cultures and should ‘share a a fundamental commitment to developing a deep understanding through participation and observation’. I don’t think this ethnography will offer ‘the promise of getting closer to understandingthe ways in which people interpret the world and oranise their lives.’ (Hine 42) At best it will offer a ‘snapshot’ of a particular moment in time with a particular group of people.
I spent a good deal of time trying to find a suitable ‘community’. For Bell (2001) “…community arises from shared interests’. Flickr has numerous groups that share a common interest so I tried looking there. Unfortunately, this site is blocked. Such group’s wouldn’t qualify as a community by Sardar’s interpretation, quoted in Hine; ‘Belonging and posting to a Usenet group, or logging on to a bulletin board community, confirms no more an identity than belonging to a stamp collecting club…’ So how will I be able to recognise which is a ‘group’ and which a ‘community’? Kozinets (2010) states that ‘the ways in which group norms develop and the importance of group identity are very similar in online and off-line groups.’ Hmm, so it’s not going to be so easy then. After searching through various groups I settled on Food.com and posted my idea to the Holyrood Park discussion forum. It wasn’t that interesting to me but I felt my choice was limited.
When Jen said that this task wasn’t being assessed and should be fun it made a huge difference to my approach. I have the FemaleScienceProfessor as an RSS feed to my lifestream. I enjoy reading her blogs and the comments made by other science bloggers. I now plan to do my ethnography on Science Bloggers. I find this group more interesting and will it will be fun finding out whether or not they can be classed as a ‘community’. To do this I shall follow the form suggested by Hammersley and Atkinson’s (quoted in Hine 41) by “ …participating, overtly or covertly in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said “.
I had hoped to store images in my Flickr account but that still isn’t working. I don’t think it has anything to do with censorship because it linked with my lifestream at the beginning. I have a Picasa account but haven’t tried it out yet.
Bookmarking is also proving problematic. Again, at the beginning my link with Delicious was working. As I couldn’t fix the problem I resurrected my Diigo account but it doesn’t appear to be working either.
I know that my YouTube link is working. After looking at the Rheingold video and checking out the WELL site, I had a search and found another Rheingold video that I added to my favourites. That has appeared in my lifestream.
I notice that my colleagues are busy tweeting and I haven’t contributed as much as I’d like. Either Twitter is extremely popular or my Internet can’t handle the traffic, but I receive this sign quite often.
Getting a ‘snapshot’ of a community is a useful analogy Grace, and I think it’s a great way to start thinking about research methods. I think small studies are a great way to ‘scope out’ a community (I’m doing on at the moment!), and also to think about the ways in which established social science methods might relate to the ‘virtuality’ of the online.
I think answering the question ‘is this group a community?’ is really interesting, and it gets to the core of what I think ‘virtuality’ brings to social science research. Rather than starting with the idea that you can actually come to understand what is going on in a given social group, I think digital communication forces us to challenge the assumptions of what a ‘community’ is…and that’s surely a good thing!
Also, as Jen mentioned in a comment earlier, the Twitter ‘fail whale’ page spawned its own ‘community’, discussed in an ethnography last year: http://edc.education.ed.ac.uk/alisonj/2010/11/04/fail-whale-community-ethnography/