Ethnography and Education, 2013

Vol. 8, No. 2, 255
272, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2013.792513

Ethnography in a virtual world

Wesley Shumar* and Nora Madison
Department of Culture and Communication, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA
This article situates the discussion of virtual ethnography within the larger
political/economic changes of twenty-first century consumer capitalism and
suggests that increasingly our entire social world is a virtual world and that
there were very particular utopian and dystopian framings of virtual community
growing out of that history. The article also situates the discussion of virtual
ethnography within the anthropological crisis of representation discussion to
suggest there are many parallels between the two discussions. These discussions
suggest that while ethnographers have recognised that all societies are virtual
except, maybe the smallest, new information technologies, and particularly, the
Internet create a persistent virtual space that transforms earlier notions of the
imagined society. Finally, the article suggests that educational ethnographers are
in a position to discuss the new pedagogical issues that arise when attempting to
do ethnography in our contemporary virtual world.
Keywords: educational ethnography; globalisation; global economy; representation; virtuality; virtual/physical; hybrid social spaces

Introduction
This article is a theoretical review of the literature of virtual, cyber and digital
ethnography. We are specifically interested in how this larger discourse has been taken
up by, and included within, educational ethnography. The first part of the paper
frames the development of the Internet, its relationship to the larger political
economy, the discourse on online communities, and online learning within this macrostructural context. Much of this work occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. The Internet
was seen as a separate space and a potentially both utopian and dystopian space.
The second part of the paper moves to a more cultural approach specifically
situating the above discussion of the Internet, ICTs, virtual community and virtual
ethnography within the crisis of representation in ethnography. As much of the
global landscape changed, all ethnographers had to rethink their understanding of
place and group and how they might understand the places and communities that
they were part of.
Anthropological ethnography has always taken a very deconstructionist approach
to its mission. One could say that deconstruction is the main method for
anthropological ethnographers. Gupta and Ferguson (1997) in their contribution
to this tradition pointed out in Anthropological Locations that anthropology had
thoroughly deconstructed concepts of culture and ethnography but had failed to
do so with the notions of the field and fieldwork. In this volume, they then set the
*Corresponding author. Email: shumarw@drexel.edu
# 2013 Taylor & Francis

256 W. Shumar and N. Madison

task of taking on that deconstruction as well. In doing so they raised the critical
point that ethnography is built upon two forms of writing, field notes and finished
ethnography, which depend upon the spatial separation of field and home
respectively.
In this new hybrid world where home and field are no longer neatly separated,
where most contemporary ethnographers have pointed out that there is no online or
off line ethnography, and that all are overlapping, there is a critical pedagogical
question as to how ethnographic writing can be done, and taught to a future
generation of ethnographers. In the final section of the paper we bring out some of
these questions and attempt to frame the conversation that needs to go on within the
ethnographic community.
Ethnography in a changing world
Mark Poster (2001) in his work on the Internet suggests that identity and subjectivity
have been shifting over the course of the twentieth century, and that shifting of
subjectivity aligns with the transformations of the information economy forming a
kind of dual movement in the twentieth century. While Posters work is older, we find
it still remarkably useful for thinking about issues with the Internet. Further, Poster
frames the issues that are addressed by a number of social theorists in a very
interesting way. He suggests that identities shifted from the modern Cartesian
subject, internally coherent and separate from the object world, to a more
fragmented and diffuse identity. These shifts of subject and identity occur within a
three-stage shift in the information political economy: the age of print capitalism, the
age of broadcast media, and now the age of the Internet. While print media reaches
back into earlier centuries and is part of the rise of a democratic culture in the West
(Habermas 1989), we can situate the rise of a more powerful print capitalism and the
establishment of the modern nation state on that print empire to the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries (Ohmann 1987; Anderson 1991).
Poster further suggests that the print dominated informational political/economy
of the early twentieth century supported the Cartesian notion of the modernist
individual
with his self-determination, internal coherent agency and fixed
boundaries
created the democratic subjects, who participated in the world of
print and then acted mediatory. The world of print gives way to the world of
broadcast and the rise of the culture of consumption. Along with this shift is the shift
to a more Eriksonian notion of identity, which, in Posters terms, is a softer self.
Eriksonian identity is more fragmented and confused (Erikson 1968; Poster 2001).
A configuration of possible contradictions responding to a world of image pumping
utilities (Ewen and Ewen 1982) that both simulated a reality and then produced
desires within and through the consuming subject.
The moment of broadcast gives way to the era of the Internet, which Poster
defines as a moment of underdetermination. For Poster, this notion of underdetermination is a way to talk about how digital products are subject to infinite
copying and also infinite revision. The subject re-enters the media field as an agent
who is actively involved. But this is not the same self as the one in the era of print,
because for Poster, the self in the era of the Internet is a truly postmodern self, a self
that is one node in the networked society no longer subject to an objective world
(Poster 2001). What is lost in this moment is the separation of subject and object.

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While we can debate Posters conception of the self and his periodising of the
information economy, there are many useful ideas here that echo ideas, which other
social theorists have been discussing about in the same period. Manuel Castells work
on the network society also dates back to the 1990s, although his trilogy on The
Information Society has been revised several times. For Castells, at the core of the
changes in the global political economy is the development of a networked society
made possible by the revolution in information technology. This idea is itself
developed by a number of theorists. As the post-war regime of accumulation,
referred to by Harvey (1990) as Fordist/Keynesianism, broke down, there was a
scramble to move past the economic stagnation that began in the late 1960s and
continued through the 1970s (see note 1). As Harvey pointed out, the development of
new informational technologies allowed corporations to restructure production,
leading to what he called flexible accumulation.
Harveys flexible accumulation led to the fragmentation and decentreing of the
workforce, which was the beginning stages of the process of globalisation. Originally
the flexing and outsourcing of productive work was a set of informal strategies
pursued by organisations in search of a way to maintain profit margins. But these
processes became more formalised as they increased in number and as technological
innovation made global visions possible. The world moved to a period, where the
most creative visions of putting together systems of production, distribution and
consumption won out. For Harvey, capital accumulation always occurs within a
spatialised context, where the regime of accumulation works out an imagination of
how the productive, distributive and consumer forces are to be organised and
articulated (Lefebvre 1991). These orderings always include symbolic as well as
physical elements and are always contradictory, because capitalism is inherently
contradictory.1 The movement from flexible accumulation to globalisation brought
with it huge transformations in the ways that all sorts of things necessary for
accumulation were organised, and led to a global system of flows (Sassen 1998) that
Appadurai very importantly defined as a system of disjuncture and difference
(Appadurai 1990).
Elsewhere, the First Author has discussed the impact of some of these changes on
higher education (Shumar 2004). As production began to globalise, it coincided with
a tendency for the cultural economy to heat up. Cultural products in the digital age
are infinitely reproducible and can be modified and transformed into many different
variations. Further, the circulation of these digital goods is cheaper and easier than
so many other durable products. While education has not traditionally been seen as a
commodity, it too has become a cultural product that is packaged and sold in the
marketplace. This is currently one of the main pressures on online educational
efforts. On the one hand, new technologies create new opportunities for interaction
and new ways for teaching, mentoring and learning to occur. On the other hand
there is a pressure to reify these online interactions and sell them as products in the
educational cultural economy.
In a related way a number of scholars have talked about the impact of
globalisation on education (Burbules and Torres 2000; Lipman 2003; Spring 2009).
Lipman (2003) specifically talks about the impact of the global economy on the
spatial rearrangements in Chicago and the transformation of the south side of
Chicago by the global cultural economy. These transformations have both moved to
dislocate residents from communities as there are newly gentrifying areas and they

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also have discipline workers for the new information economy. She argues that these
global and local political economic changes are behind much of the energy for new
forms of accountability in urban schooling. What is very nice about the work is that
we can see that seemingly remote transformations in the global economy have very
real and large effects in local Chicago schools.
Ethnography and the virtual in historical perspective
As we shifted to a globalised network society there were particular discourses of
utopian and dystopian visions of the future. Dystopian visions of the global
marketplace focused on the loss of a say in the process of production as first,
working class and then later, middle class jobs became mobile in search of the
cheapest markets worldwide. The anxiety over these shifts was very nicely captured
by Dion Dennis (2003) in his online publication, The Digital Death Rattle of the
American Middle Class. Dion discusses how the movement of working class jobs to
other countries that many sociologists and other social scientists began to talk about
in the 1980s and 1990s, had reached the middle classes by the early 2000s. It was
becoming increasingly clear that the middle class in the United States was being
dismantled in large part due to the ability to move middle class jobs to other
emerging economies, where engineers and computer scientists and the like are used to
being paid a lot less. The trend of the loss of middle class as well as working class jobs
in the United States is now more than a decade old. These trends have affected other
first world countries too.
If the loss of jobs to the global market was one of the main fears in recent time,
there have also been concerns about the loss of collective groups in society (Bauman
2000), and the decline of democracy in an era where all social life is mediated by large
corporations. This left the public politically ineffectual at organising and communicating around the problems of the time. But another significant dystopic discourse
was the dissolution of not just the public (Habermas 1989) but of all physical social
connections between people in this new network society (Putnam 2001; McPherson,
Smith-Lovin, and Brashears 2006).
The dystopian discourse was a dominant discourse of the 1990s, but on the other
side one strand of a more utopian vision of the future was the excitement over virtual
communities. This excitement over virtual communities was part of the general
excitement about the Internet. For instance, a 1997 article in Foreign Affairs (Weber
1997) suggested that maybe the business cycle was coming to an end or at least being
transformed by the Internet. The New York Times picked up this discussion in
several of its articles, and while the paper may not have endorsed the idea of the
business cycles end, it certainly took the idea seriously. During this time there were
many articles about how production distribution and consumption were a click away
for everyone. And this was not just an issue of large-scale production but this
moment also saw the reintroduction of small scale and craft production, as well as
the beginnings of the global Do-It-Yourself (DIY) movement.
At that point in time most online communities were online interest groups or
clusters of online discussion groups, such as those on America Online (AOL), the
Whole Earth Lectronic Link (WELL), or the Usenet in general. These online
communities generated a lot of excitement about the potential for new forms of
interaction and new resources (Jones 1997, 1998; Kollock and Smith 2002). In the

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scholarly literature of the 1980s part of the pessimism was about the loss of the place
where the public could meet and discuss issues, the decline of the democratic public
sphere. However, these new online communities raised the hope that the Internet
might be the place, where the public meets again and is able to discuss issues (Ess
2001; Papacharissi 2002; Bohman 2004). Hardt and Negri take these issues even
further and point out that in the global productive system of informational
capitalism the exchange of information and control of meanings will be of greater
and greater political importance (Hardt and Negri 2000). In this new form of
Empire the virtual collaboration of the multitude is the hope for political
emancipation.2
The fear of the collapse of social life in the physical world coupled with the hope
of a rise of a new social life in the virtual world helped lead to a tendency for the
discourse to draw a pretty sharp binary between online and offline. There were
physical communities and virtual communities. In the popular and scholarly
literature there was a flurry of interest in virtual communities and virtual
ethnography. At that moment, virtual communities were mostly seen as separate
from physical communities and much scholarly and popular literature set up a binary
between virtual and physical communities (Rheingold 1993; Turkle 1995; Donath
1999; Jones 1999; Hine 2000).
Certainly the technology at the time supported this hard separation of the
physical and the virtual. People were able to access the Internet with desktop
computers and their portal into cyberspace was fairly fixed. William Gibsons
metaphor of the meat remaining in the physical world while the consciousness was
drawn into cyberspace felt like a correct description of the separation of the physical
and virtual worlds. And while laptops were becoming very popular in the 1990s
mobile communication was very limited. It was not easy to find a hot spot and
connect to the Internet away from ones home and office. And much of this time
people outside of large organisations were using dial-up modems to connect to the
Internet. Certainly, a hybrid reality was possible at this time. Many teachers working
on projects virtually at the Math Forum would meet up at the Math Forum office or
at conferences face-to-face in order to combine online work with face to face work.
Many companies combined such virtual and physical work too; however, this did not
yet feel like the hybrid social world. With the development of quick connection to the
Internet 3G and 4G cellular technology, as well as a variety of broadband access
options, the binary physical/virtual is an idea that will shift in the twenty-first
century. But in the 1990s the binary was often a way for people to compartmentalise
what was happening and a way to position their lives within this significant shift.
In education there was similar concern and excitement about online communities.
Probably the most famous dystopic vision was David Nobles (2002) Digital Diploma
Mills. Originally published online, Nobles book imagines a complete commodified
university, where instruction is delivered as a product through a machine and
professors are reduced to producers of canned curriculum, grading and other
administrative tasks. While concerns over this vision have died down since the late
1990s, the have recently come back, with several elite institutions in the United States
making headlines by offering free online courses (Lewin 2012). This movement in the
context of the economic collapse after 2008 has left many wondering if families will
still pay for university educations and what other less elite universities will be left
doing.

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In the 1980s Larry Cuban (1986) offered not so much a dystopic vision of the
Internet but rather a critique of the role of media technologies in education. Cuban
pointed out that since the 1920s advocates suggested that the latest media technology
for example, film strips, documentary film, television, were going to change
education. After this flurry of excitement Cuban points out that each settled into
a relatively minor role in education. Cuban then suggested that the same would be
true for the Internet. While one can understand how Cuban might have felt this way
in 1986, what was hard to imagine then was, as to how the whole world would be
dramatically changed by new information technologies. And what is further true
about Cubans point is that many schools have gotten further and further out
of touch with social life in developed nations, because of their failure to take up some
of the new technologies and transform their practices through the new avenues of
interaction.
Since the 1990s there have been many more utopian visions of the Internet and its
potential impact on education in the scholarly literature. This is especially true in
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) areas where online networks
are very often part of the way work is organised professionally in engineering,
science, and math (Renninger and Shumar 2000; Barab, Kling, and Grey 2004; Falk
and Drayton 2009). Associations like Computer Supported Collaborative Learning
(CSCL) and the International Congress of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) have
included within them extensive networks of scholars who work on issues of new
media and their use in education. Further national funding agencies in a number of
countries have specific focus on cyber-education and cyber-learning. Much of this
research is on the forefront of thinking about how new media create new
opportunities for interaction and how those interactions can be harnessed for
education. Certainly these groups of scholars were much invested in online
communities and online communities of practice and their potential for improving
learning. While there has been significant work on online communities in education,
there has been less ethnographic work in education with online groups.
In the 1990s paralleling the literature on community, many researchers were
talking about virtual ethnography as a form of ethnographic practice that was very
separate from traditional ethnography and had to deal with the ironies of trying to
do ethnography in virtual spaces (Mason 1996; Lindlof and Shatzer 1998; Jones
1999; Wittel 2000; Kozinets 2010). This irony was particularly strongly felt around
the concept of space. As many early virtual communities were spatially distributed,
researchers asked the question how can one do ethnography when there is no
place to position oneself as an ethnographer in the field?
An interesting and important book in this period was Hines (2000) book Virtual
Ethnography. While the book was published in 2000 most of the thinking reflects the
discourse about the Internet that was common in the late 1990s, although there are
also ways the book reflects a changing perspective.
Hine does an excellent job reviewing the literature around the crisis of
representation that had been an important part of the anthropological ethnographic
tradition in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the United States. The crisis in
ethnography was not one but perhaps three different things. First, the crisis was a
crisis of space. It was about coping with a world that had been changing dramatically
due to increasing globalisation. The globalisation of people and things started to
challenge more traditional ethnographic notions of place. Traditional notions of

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place themselves had been built upon fictions that from the beginning of the
twentieth century were increasingly under symbolic pressure. Ideas about pristine
locales and an ethnographic present that represented a native world that changed
slowly were always false, but with imperialism and the wars of colonialism it became
harder and harder to justify these fictions.
This leads to the second crisis, which was a crisis of interpretation that had at
least two parts. The first part went all the way back to the 1950s, when Ph.D.
students going into the field began to see themselves as agents of normalisation
under colonialism, and questioned the anthropological project as the interpretations
of a dominant group laid upon a subordinate group. Later in the 1970s and 1980s,
led by feminists, ethnographers questioned whether there could be one culture with
one truth to be told by an ethnographer. As the world became smaller, it became
harder for ethnographers to sustain the view that they had correctly captured the
truth about a culture and that there could even be one truth about that culture.
And still even further, is there one culture or is it really several cultural fragments
caught up in a global sweep? Is it not more the case that within every culture there
are different interest groups with different stories to tell and that each of these stories
might be in conflict with others (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer
1986; Clifford 1988).
There were several ways that anthropologists struggled with these crises.
Regarding the changing conditions in the world and the interconnectedness of
places, one of the most popular and most developed responses was George Marcus
multi-sited ethnography. Hine uses Castells notion of information flows and
Marcus ideas about multisited ethnography to talk about the spatial dislocation of
ethnography and the struggle to cope with flow and a space of flows (Marcus 1995;
Hine 2000). Marcus (Marcus 1986), who at that point was coming out of a Marxist
tradition, suggested that global changes were being pressured by a crisis of capitalism
and the information revolution. In this way he shared a view with others on the left as
to what was happening at the time (Harvey 1990). In this early essay, Marcus
suggested that Paul Willis Learning to Labour, an ethnography about working class
high school boys in the late 1970s, represented an important shift in the ethnographic
tradition. Marcus argued that in Willis text the ethnographic locale is situated in a
larger political/economic context in order to understand, how the practices of the
lads (such as resistance) are not just local phenomena, but rather the result of
pressures from a much larger system that are felt locally. In fact one could argue that
situating a locale within a larger political/economic context could go all the way back
to Geertz and his study of two Indonesian towns (Geertz 1963). In an early work that
first suggests the idea of multisited ethnography, George Marcus uses the work of
Paul Willis as a much more manageable mode than multisited ethnography to
situate the local in a global context (Marcus 1986).3 Both models still implied travel
and distance, and were embedded in a twentieth century view of time and place.
However, for Internet ethnographers, multisited took on a whole new meaning
because the Internet linked together many different physical places and also made it
possible for one person to be in more than one place at more than one time.
Marcus concern with location and representation was not the only concern for
ethnographic authority of the time. As Faubion (2009) has suggested, the critique of
anthropologys position within a global capitalist system, and the other two
interpretive dilemmas listed above, led to a questioning of what he called the ethics

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of connectivity and the claims of anthropology to ethnographic knowledge. Further
the work of Marcus, Fischer, Rabinow, Clifford and others, all in different ways, were
questioning the status of ethnographic knowledge and positioning it as what Faubion
(2009) called an epistemological problem. While this literature questioned the status
of ethnographic knowledge, it was also clearly a questioning of the place of
anthropology and ethnography within an increasingly globalised world and how to
make sense of the ethnographic encounter in these new and changing conditions.
Faubion is right to see the ethics of connectivity as both an ethical problem and
an epistemological problem. For decades anthropology relied on a kind of
phenomenological conceit: I know because I was there. And now this being there
was triply questioned: who were you there with, did you understand what they were
saying, and where were you? One very important point that Faubion raises in his
essay was that these critiques were not leveled in an effort to destroy anthropology
and ethnography, but rather in the spirit of nurturing doubt (Miller 1995). Miller
suggests, in the same way Faubion does, that this critique of ethnography
also
referred to as a reflexive turn
was a way to improve the quality of ethnographic
interpretation, not destroy it. While many saw this moment as a nihilistic moment in
anthropological ethnography, it was intended more as a genuine effort to make sense
of the criticisms of ethnography as had been practiced up to that point.
An important part of this reflexive turn that we have attempted to emphasise in
this paper is that the crisis in ethnography came about due, at least in part, to the
historical and social conditions within which ethnographers were working. Much
like their informants, ethnographers could not escape being situated
and their
intellectual productions were situated too. As colonial empires collapsed and as
capitalism globalised, the circumstances of peoples in the world and the way people
were connected changed. And this required a rethinking of ethnography just as it led
to the first positing of a binary between the virtual and the physical.
Perhaps because anthropology as a discipline attempts to understand the social
world by participating in that world and sharing the contradictions and confusions
that social actors experience in their daily lives, this has contributed to anthropologys deconstructionist approach. A part of making sense of the other is about
deconstructing ones own categories, including the categories of analysis. Anthropologists are often relentless in this task and certainly this approach figures largely in
the crisis of representation.
In 1997, Gupta and Fergeson published a volume titled Anthropological
Locations, suggesting that there has been significant critique of anthropological
categories up to that moment, but the one category that remained standing was the
notion of the field. They further suggest that in the contemporary world the notion
of the field
as some intact and contiguous space that is separate from the
anthropologists home
is quite contradictory. While this notion of the field became
and continues to be problematic, they point out that the whole ethnographic
enterprise is based upon this notion of two separate spaces, the space of field notes
and the space of the finished ethnography.
Van Maneen, in his Tales of the Field, describes this separation as it is often
imagined within the discipline. Early in the book Van Maneen is careful to separate
fieldwork and culture, explicating that he sees ethnography (spatial separate from
fieldwork) as conjoining fieldwork and culture. It is a translation process. He states:

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Ethnography is the result of fieldwork, but it is the written report that must represent the
culture, not the fieldwork itself. Ethnography as a written product, then, has a degree of
independence (how culture is portrayed) from the fieldwork on which it is based (how
culture is known). Writing an ethnography is office work or deskwork, not fieldwork
(Marcus 1980). (Van Maanen 1988, 4)

This issue of location and forms of writing are central to ethnography, including
virtual ethnography. We suggest this is one of the key issues for educational
ethnography to address in the Internet age. It is easier to discuss how social space
and social time have been transformed by new technologies and that all space is now
hybrid (virtual and physical). It is even, relatively, easier to talk about spaces of
affinity, flows and mobility. But it is more difficult to move beyond the two forms of
writing, fieldnotes and finished ethnography, and their mimetic relationship to an
imagined topology. To try and move beyond this epistemology is an issue of
pedagogy and education.
By the mid-decade in the 2000s many ethnographers, including ethnographers of
the virtual (as well as other researchers), were seeing what Appadurai (1990) had an
early sense of in his article, Disjucture and Difference. Appadurai talks about the
flows of people, images, finance, and so on, but importantly notes that what is
imbedded in these is the notion that all places are fluid and hybrid: both physical and
virtual. The literature was moving to more hybrid visions of both place and
ethnographic practice (Hakken 2003; Sunden 2003; Beaulieu 2004; Carter 2005;
Boellstorff 2008). This new literature did three things: First, it critiqued the first
generation of literature on virtual ethnography, but in an ahistorical way, not
situating that first generation of thinking with the context of Internet social
development at the time; second, it posited a new focus for ethnography; third, it
posited this also for theorising the social. We now see the social as both fully virtual
and fully physical at the same time. And at the same moment people began to use a
set of terms for ethnography that dealt with new ICTs: virtual, cyber and digital were
the main terms. Increasingly, ethnographers involved with online groups, new media
and the likes, are seeing the spaces that social actors inhabit as hybrid and that all
ethnography is combined of virtual and physical elements (Wittel 2000; Forna s 2002;
Leander and McKim 2003; Sade-Beck 2004; Carter 2005; Jordan 2009; Pasek, More,
and Romer 2009).
Behind the binary of virtual/physical and the debate about a more hybrid or fluid
present, lies some of the most important changes in contemporary societies, which
are represented by the labels of modernity, late modernity and beyond modernity,
mobilities, and so on. Involved in these transformations are the most recent shifts in
the regimes of capital accumulation and the rise of what Castells (2010) has called
the network society.

The many faces of ethnography in a virtual world

Drawing on the above discussion of the transformation of our social world and the
importance of information technologies in that transformation, and drawing on
social theory
from Harvey to Anderson to Appadurai
we would suggest that any
ethnography is a virtual ethnography. Wilson and Peterson (2002) suggest that what
is missing from the new media literature is the kind of situating of these technologies

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within the historically constituted practices and interactions (2002, 453) that we
have tried to document in this paper. Similarly, every community is a virtual
community and identities are formed in all these communities. That said, it does not
mean there are not differences in this rhizomatic structure; further, those differences
should be accounted for and not ignored (Deleuze and Guattari 1987).
We do not want to suggest, however, by the above discussion that nothing has
changed and that the world after the Internet and new media technologies is just a
continuation of the world before these media. On the one hand there is continuity.
For example, the process of space time compression that Harvey has discussed is a
proof that continues into the contemporary era. But in other ways, the social is
dramatically transformed by the Internet. The Internet not only brings processes and
flows and different forms of interaction, but there is persistence as well. This concept
of persistence is that interactions become texts that get stored, and that interactions
can become asynchronous and resources can be stored. These are some of the things
that make the Internet a space, and these virtual spaces cannot intersect with
physical spaces.
Ethnographers are increasingly becoming aware that each field location is a very
different social space that involves different technologies, used perhaps idiosyncratically in its formation. For example, this is the argument that Miller and Slate make
about Trinidad in The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Trinidad is now a
mediated location, and as such is more conceptual than located in one space and
time. As authors of this paper we both come from very different field sites. One of us
has been working for years with The Math Forum (mathforum.org) which is
primarily a web-based community organised around a website with rich resources for
math education. While the use of that site has been primarily organised around
creatively combining online and offline interactions, it has little used other newer
technologies such as mobile devices and applications such as twitter. The other has
been studying multiple online social media sites pertaining to and for bisexuals, a
group of particular interest because of their marginalised status within both
mainstreams, straight as well as lesbian and gay identity politics. This research has
been examining how users engage in creating and sustaining culturally intelligible
subject positions, which are considered project identities in this context. This is also
an informal education process whereby the community educates itself about issues of
identity and social justice. Each of these field sites, like Trinidad for Miller and Slater
is more conceptual and less about a specific place we might call the field.
In anthropology, several recent examples of important work on the Internet,
which have yielded really different results, are Miller & Slaters (2001) work on
Trinidad, Hakkens (2003) Landscapes of Cyberspace, Boellstorffs (2008) work on
Second Life and Kozinets (2010) work with online marketing research. Hakken is
one of the few authors, at this moment, who embedded his thinking about the
Internet with the large global political/economic changes. Kozinets is probably the
most different from the other two in that he suggests that there is a separate field he
calls netnography and it has its own methods and practices. Miller & Slater and
Boellstorff say in their work that really there is no such thing as virtual
ethnography. Miller & Slater suggest that the entire world has become wrapped
up with the Internet, and while we can study how Trinidadians interact online and
how that makes different diasporic groupings possible, it is the same social world that
everyone inhabits (Miller and Slater 2001). There is no online and offline world,

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265

everyone lives both offline and online all the time and the point of interest is how this
is done by different groups.
Boellstorff is the ethnographer who could more easily claim a virtual
ethnography in that Second Life is a discrete entity and by its nature encourages
the distinction between a virtual world and an actual world, to use his terms
(Boellstorff 2008). And yet Boellstorff is very careful to show that each world is
interdependent and that there is virtual in all actual. Further, he suggests that
ethnography is ethnography: earlier subfields in anthropology might assert a virtual
anthropology or anthropology of online social worlds, but the ethnography involved
would not be different from ethnography in different arenas. It may involve different
tools and techniques as when medical anthropologists use different tools and
techniques, but ethnography is still a form of theoretical practice that involves an
encounter with the other (Herzfeld 2001).
If we look closely at Kozinets work, even though he is calling for netnography
he asserts things very similar to Miller & Slater and Boellstorff. His call for
netnography is really a call to develop different tools for use in online settings,
something that most ethnographers of online work have discussed (Kozinets 2010).
So on one level each of these authors is doing something similar. They are locating
their discipline (anthropology) vis-a-vis the question of virtuality, and then thinking
about the techniques that they are employing in their specific field site. One should be
careful to not conflate the needs of a particular field location, with the essence of
practice or theory.
a mistake the early ethnographers sometimes made
and we are
not accusing these authors of doing this, but one problem the field has had is that
theorising in ethnography sometimes gets done due to the constraints of a particular
locale.
In education there is a growing awareness of these issues. One of the key thinkers
in education is James Gee (2003, 2005, 2009), who has been thinking about the role
of digital media in education. Gees concept of the affinity space is not just an
Internet space, but it is an effort to think about the ways in which the Internet and
new technologies have made new kinds of affinity possible. In education there has
been considerable discussion of Communities of Practice (CoP) and the relationship
of technology to CoPs. For Gee, communities imply membership where spaces are
places of interaction. He is more interested in the ways that technology creates these
alternatives for interaction. Francis (2012) uses Gees notion of the affinity space to
suggest that new technologies in education are creating new kinds of groupings based
more around issues of affinity, and that these grouping have important implications
for education. Similarly Herna ndez, Sancho and Fendler (2011) have suggested that
learning spaces are becoming increasingly hybrid involving both online and offline
elements.
The difference in objects of study that ethnographers bring to the discussion is
very important as it starts to give us a sense of the range of social groupings,
interactions and identities and ways to conceptualise field locations. We used the
three examples above from anthropology just to exemplify the issues. In the
contemporary world, all communities are imagined and virtual, but there are very
different combinations and uses of information technology in different sites, and
these will end up creating different groupings with different relationships to new
technology. There are many other anthropologists working with online social groups.
And of course there are many other ethnographers from other fields, who are using

266 W. Shumar and N. Madison

ethnography to study online or new media contexts. There are researchers in
communication, sociology, STS studies, education, information science and others.
Ethnography is, perhaps along with the concept of culture, anthropologys most
successful export.
If field location is an important issue and will shape how ethnographers think
about the field and what virtual and physical are, another important issue is
discipline. While ethnography has been exported to many different fields, there is a
tendency for anthropologists to think about ethnography quite differently than
people in other fields. In most fields the major conceptual heading might be
something like qualitative research methods and then within that heading there
might be different methods that people adopt, interviews, surveys, focus groups and
so on. In that model, ethnography is just one method among a list of methods. And
since ethnography is just a method, it might make sense that there could be a spin-off
method that might be called virtual ethnography.
But anthropologists tend to think of ethnography as a stance. As stated above,
most anthropologists think of ethnography as a form of theoretical practice, and that
it is a theoretical informed encounter with the other. Now, when one has that
encounter, one might use a number of methods to make sense out of that encounter,
for example, surveys, interviews, focus groups, and direct observation. But these
methods are not participant observation and which itself is not a method. It is a
description of a stance towards the other. From this perspective, one might talk
about a set of methods that could be useful for collecting data in contexts that
involve new media (see Ethnography and Virtual Worlds), but the ethnographic
stance would be quite another matter.
We would suggest that all of these processes, the differences of field sites, the
differences in disciplinary background that researchers come from, and the historical
unfolding of the information society as the global flows have moved from a trickle to
something more, these factors have all influenced the discussion around virtual
ethnography and virtual community and explain some of the complexities of that
discourse.
Conclusion
Our main point in this paper is to put the discussion about virtual ethnography
(as well as the related discussion of virtual community and virtual worlds) within the
larger political/economic context of the development of advanced information
technologies, the contradictions of consumer capitalism and the rise of globalisation.
In this way we have sought to historicise the debates about virtual ethnography and
make a stronger link between what scholars have been saying about the crises of
representation within ethnography proper and what they have been saying about
virtual ethnography.
Many have made the theoretical point, going back to Andersons (1991) key work
in the 1980s, that all communities are imagined and hence virtual. Further,
following Appadurai (1990), these imaginings have taken on a new disconnected and
differentiated path given the role of new information technologies to manage various
flows in the global economy. The local is not necessarily located in the global
anymore; it is about the flows that come through the local, which is already a virtual
world as demonstrated earlier in this paper. Any ethnography of the local has to take

Ethnography and Education

267

into account the virtual. Further, these new spatialisations in the global economy
themselves have come to pass as a means of managing the contradictions of capital
accumulation in the contemporary era of consumer capitalism thereby rendering
them fairly volatile and subject to regular changes.
Further, we have shown how the transformations of this world have led to a set of
crises and developments in thinking about ethnography proper and that, by putting
virtual ethnography in a historical context, we can see that it is a part of that larger
set of crises in ethnography and not a separate problem or separate domain. Even
given the fact that all social spaces are virtual, there is indeed a range of social spaces
that run from those that involve greater connection to a physical world to those that
involve less connection to the physical world and so appear to be more completely
virtual. And those difference need to be taken into consideration and effect what
one can do when doing ethnography.
At the same time, as we have discussed above, the Internet has transformed the
social in new and unexpected ways. Whether we think about these as online and
hybrid communities or spaces of affinity, forms of interaction over time and space
and the sharing and reproducing of resources have been forever and dramatically
changed.
A critically important piece of this global set of flows that are both virtual and
physical is that most of the classic anthropological notion of the local community is
no longer the site of fieldwork. Since Geertzs early work, anthropologists have been
situating the local in the national and global context. But increasingly, the local itself
is a product of imagination and social groupings are geographically disparate,
brought together by a set of interests and flows of the different scapes enunciated by
Appadurai. In order to cope with this loss of a fixed local as we discussed above,
Marcus began the discussion of multisited ethnography. Marcuss notion of
multisited is often invoked but with little sense of the true implications of that
multisited, virtual/physical reality. In very recent works, Marcus (2009, 2010, 2012)
suggests that much of what motivates the kinds of sociality we experience in the
global system is an ideology of collaboration. What ethnographers need to do is
engage and participate in this ideology of collaborative relations, while trying to do
fieldwork in these contexts. This idea of multisitedness and collaborative research
relations is becoming increasingly more heard among ethnographers who are
working in both new media contexts, and maybe more traditional contexts.
A critically important insight of the work that we have done here is that, the
binary that the field of anthropology and the practice of ethnography were born out
of
fieldwork and office work, away and home
reifying a notion of place that on
one level was always wrong. And part of the crisis of representation within
ethnography was to deconstruct that binary of field and home as it deconstructed
culture and society (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). But if all field locations are
themselves conceptually complicated, then the process of doing fieldwork and then
writing ethnography is equally fraught. The crisis of representation in ethnography is
a crisis of pedagogy (Marcus 2009, 2010, 2012).
The models we have for training students, sending them into the field, bringing
them home is one that is still discussed even if only metaphorically. Researchers talk
about going to the field when they mean that they are logging into Massively
Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) for a few hours. We teach
students to arbitrarily stop reading theory at some point, do their fieldwork and

268 W. Shumar and N. Madison

then return to the literature to simulate going to the field and returning home to
write the ethnography.
These may be perfectly reasonable tactics, but the question is that we need to
address the question of doing ethnography and training to do ethnography in a more
systematic way. This we would suggest is the meaning of virtual ethnography and
the task of virtual ethnography. In that all ethnography is virtual, we need new ways
to think about how ethnographic research gets conducted. And just as Boellstorff
et al. (2012) have written about methods for virtual worlds, there may be a need to
think about specific methods for different kinds of virtual communities some more
situated than others, some more online than others and some more conceptual than
others.
As we have suggested above, ethnography is really more of a stance and not a
collection of methods. One can use many different methods in ethnography. And we
will still always need to talk about technique. A survey or an interview done online is
different than the one done face-to-face or on the phone or on skype, with or without
video. As the technologies proliferate, these discussions of technique can become
increasingly more interesting and complex. But the ethnographic stance has become
complicated too. It used to be that we stood in two specific spaces, the field and
home. Now our stance is more complicated as we work in spaces of global
collaborations, which are fluid, dynamic, virtual, face-to-face and multisited. And
these collaborations are ongoing making the moment of field notes difficult to
separate from the moment of ethnographic writing. And when this process involves
multiple ethnographers it is even more complex.
New questions are raised in our virtual world about how ethnographic research
should be conducted. In a number of fields the relationship between Ph.D. students
and mentors are more collaborative and Ph.D. students are often part of larger
projects, demonstrating there are models for doing Ph.D. training within larger
and more complex projects. But these larger and more collaborative projects often
require a subject position, where the collaborator is caught up in the ideology of
collaboration (Marcus 2009, 2010). The question of how to foster a critical stance
while engaging in this ideological subject position is a difficult one. It is a new version
of the irony that ethnographers know well, having one foot in and one foot out of a
culture.
To clarify, while the irony may be well known, the particular activities to
facilitating reflective practices while working within and on collaborative relations
requires new methods and new training. Much of this new work is be mediated by
information technologies that themselves are fairly rapidly changing, necessitating
new discussions of methods quite quickly. These methods and discussions themselves
are largely happening over discussion lists, lending themselves to analysis. Ultimately,
all this work involves new ways to think about the production, sharing, and analysis
of ethnographic field notes and ethnographic writing. Some of these issues may be
specifically methodological and technical issues, such as collaborative notation
platforms. Other issues may be more conceptual, such as thinking about fieldwork as
occurring in other ways than just places. We suggest that the ethnography of
education could play a central role in the rethinking of ethnography in a virtual
world and this itself should be a collaborative task.

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Notes
1. Harvey comes out of a Marxists tradition and in the Marxist tradition capitalism is
contradictory for a number of reasons. Perhaps, most importantly, because of the labor
theory of value where value is produced through human labor. As owners of the means of
production skim off the surplus value by paying workers a living wage rather than paying
them for the full value of their work, there is little money left to buy the goods and services
that are produced. Galbraith, a much more mainstream economist captured this contradiction by pointing out that in capitalism money tends to flow up meaning that it gets
concentrated in the hands of rich companies and individuals and again you have economic
stagnation due to the inability of people to buy goods and services. Schumpeter is yet
another example of a non-Marxist economist who captures the inherent contradictory
nature of capitalism with his notion of creative destruction and the ways that
technological innovation makes old forms of capital accumulation obsolete.
2. One only has to think of recent events in the Middle East to understand how prescient these
ideas were.
3. Of course, Marcuss multi-sited ethnography will become the much more famous concept
and it gets developed by Marcus himself and many other ethnographers from within and
outside of anthropology. We will discuss Marcuss more recent ideas about multi-sited and
collaboration later in the paper.

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