Ethnography always has been adaptive, and ethnographers always have explored myriad cultural connections, but sometimes we risk forgetting these facts. —Christine Hine   There's no there there. —Gertrude Stein (speaking of Oakland, California)

Winter Semester, 2008 03 credits 07 January – 07 April, 2008 Meeting days and times: Mondays: 6:00pm—8:15pm Campus: SGW, Room H-603

A PRELIMINARY MANIFESTO
This course on ethnographic approaches to the study of cyberspace interactions is being offered as an experiment, one whose outcomes and future shapes will largely be determined by students such as yourselves. The current focus of the course is on online situations as such, demanding an immersion in the interactive action, thus treating cyberspace as not just a mere appendage or extension of “the real world”. The aim of the course is not to try to fit the Internet into what we already know, or to ask students to uncritically apply established theories and established ethnographic methods to this still relatively new set of arenas for social interaction and cultural representation. The aim is not to uphold a discipline, to find new bottles for old wine. Instead the aim is to ask of what usefulness the discipline can be in answering new problems, new situations, and new questions. Students should let their imaginations run.

New media, such as those contained in the World Wide Web, are unlike mass media. With new media the consumers are often also the producers. The previous recipients of messages mediated by broadcasters is a reality that has been significantly eroded by a new generation of persons who produce messages, the narrow casters, engaged in customized production and consumption. We have moved from a communicative media world of one-to-many to one that is many-to-many.

There are different approaches to the ethnographic study of the Internet. Some see culture being produced within the Internet, while others see the Internet itself as an artefact of preexisting culture. In this course, the director argues for the former approach, one that grants that there is something special and unique that occurs in online environments that demand to be understood on their own terms.

Ethnography has, according to prevailing notions, involved the sustained presence of an ethnographer in a so-called “field setting”, intensively involved in the everyday lives of the inhabitants of the site. As Christine Hine argues, however, when the Internet becomes the focus for our studies, it is imperative that we examine not only how it is used for communicating, but also what it means as an object within people's lives and as a site for the achievement and sustenance of community-like formations.

Given some of the tensions that have already been alluded to, we will find that we repeatedly encounter the following problems, distinctions, and oppositions:

• Real Life (RL) vs. Virtual Reality (VR): the assumption that what happens in cyberspace is not quite real, not authentically real, and is disconnected from real social life in part because of the disembodied nature of online representations

• Face to Face (F2F) vs. Text to Text (T2T), Computer to Computer (C2C), Person to Person (P2P): in traditional ethnography, the face to face dimension has long been privileged as a means of accessing truth and reality that speculations from the armchair could not afford, in fact a scientific endeavor that privileged the notion of tangible reality, of directly observable empirical phenomena, of “being there”; cyberspace ethnographers outside of traditional ethnographic schools have challenged such notions of ethnography, and we should examine these arguments further and make our own decisions as to where we may be personally inclined

• Offline vs. Online

• Consumption vs. Production

• Situated vs. Mobile

In addition we will need to grapple with debates surrounding the meanings of “virtual ethnography” and “cyberspace ethnography” and what these portend for our understanding and envisioning of the future of ethnography.

Does the study of cyberspace tell us what we already know, but just in a new medium? Or does it tell us something about a medium that we did not know? Or something new about what we already knew?

As one will see from the schedule of class sessions, this course can only touch on a select number of issues and debates. In their projects, students should feel very welcome to investigate closely related areas of interest that form part of the field of cyberspace studies. Such interests can include:

• post-humanism

• cyborgs

• utopias

• digital divides

• open access/open source

• the presentation of offline ethnography online

• how anthropology is represented on the Internet

• anthropology blogs

• identity, deception, self-disclosure

• (counter)critiques of online ethnography

• time and space online

• online collaboration and co-production

• truth and risk

• globalization

• social protest

PURPOSES AND GOALS
One of the instructional purposes of this course is to intensively engage students in developing critical skills that will serve them in various careers and/or in graduate studies. The ability to sift through data; apply theories; write concise descriptive and analytical accounts; presenting one's work to an audience; and to develop a research paper are just some of the fundamental features of this course. “Ethnography”, in various guises, has become a “hot” commodity in many spheres of media and market research--this course will equip students with a well-structured understanding of ethnography of new media and will guide them in developing ethnographic research projects.

EXPECTATIONS
It is expected that by the end of this course, the student will have gained a greater appreciation for a wider variety of ethnographic approaches to the study of new media. Students should be able to demonstrate research skills, the application of concepts, and the ability to cover and grasp readings. Students will be expected to keep up to date with assigned course readings, participate in discussions, and work independently outside of class time in pursuing their own research projects.

As an experimental course, materials presented by the course director are not conclusive, complete, and finite; indeed, the lectures will aim to be more conversational, more probing, raising questions, and adding material not covered by the assigned readings. However, the emphasis in class will be on collective readings and collective discussion, not the transmission of information from the podium.

This course is experimental in other ways:

1. there are no tests or exams;

2. there are no readings to purchase, as they are all from online and open(ed) access sources;

3. student creativity is especially encouraged—research only what fascinates you the most about cyberspace.

Given how imaginative, creative and talented students can be, I expect that we will have a great time hearing about some fascinating things during the presentations. There are few such courses, anywhere, and that alone already places you among a small and cutting-edge group of researchers and thinkers.

Ask yourself what it is that you find most fascinating, intriguing, exciting, and/or important about the Internet; why that is so; and, how that might form the subject of your research project. The sky is the limit here, and you should allow yourself complete freedom of manoeuver when thinking about the Internet and your interests.

Download a printable syllabus