Ethnography for the twenty-first century

1. The changing research context: technology

Participant observation once implied a lone researcher working in a self- contained community, armed only with a notebook and pen, and perhaps a sketch pad and a simple camera. The mechanics of research were revitalized by the introduction of audiotape recorders, movie cameras, and later video recorders. Note-taking has been transformed by the advent of laptop computers and soft­ware programs for the analysis of narrative data.

But as our technological sophistication increases, ethnographers have begun to realize that the technology helps us capture and fix ‘reality’ in ways that are somewhat at variance with our lived experience as fieldworkers. The great value of participant observation research has been that we have immersed ourselves in the ebb and flow, in the ambiguities of life as it is lived by real people in real circumstances. The more we fix this or that snapshot of that life and the more we have the capacity to disseminate this or that image globally and instantaneously, the more we risk violating our sense of what makes real life so particular and so endlessly fascinating.

Perhaps it will become necessary for us to turn our observational powers on the very process of observation, to understand ourselves as users of technology. Technological change is never merely additive, that is, never simply an aid to doing what has always been done. It is, rather, ecological in the sense that a change in one aspect of behavior has ramifications throughout the entire system of which that behavior is a part. So the more sophisticated our technology, the more we change the way we do business. We need to begin to understand not only what happens when ‘we’ encounter ‘them’, but when ‘we’ do so with a particular kind of power­ful technology. (See Nardi and O’Day, 1999, for an elaboration of these points.)

2. The changing research context: globalization

Globalization is the process by which capital, goods, services, labor, ideas, and other cultural forms move freely across international borders. In our own time, communities that once existed in some degree of isolation have been drawn into interdependent relationships that extend around the globe.

Globalization has been facilitated by the growth of information technology. News from all corners of the world is instantaneously available. While once we could assume that the behaviors and ideas we observed or asked about in a par­ticular community were somehow indigenous to that community, now we must ask literally where in the world they might have come from.

Communities are no longer necessarily place-bound, and the traditional influ­ences of geography, topography, climate, and so forth are much less fixed than in days past. Many Trinidadians, for example, are now transnational, including members of the once defiantly insular Indian community. Even in fairly recent times people would migrate to England or Canada or the United States for edu­cation or job opportunities; but once they went, they usually stayed. Nowadays they can and do go back and forth, often maintaining homes both on the island and ‘away’. Being an ‘Indian’ once had a definite meaning within the context of the small island. What does it mean now when one is shuttling between the West Indies and some other place? In New York or London or Toronto, is that person an ‘Indian’, a ‘Trinidadian’, a ‘West Indian’, or some combination of factors? A generation ago that question would have made no sense to the people I began studying in the early 1970s. But now the ‘community’ exists all over the place and its identity is by no means as neatly fixed as people thirty years ago would have thought.

Doing participant observation in a ‘transnational‘ community presents obvious challenges. We could, of course, contrive to follow people around the globe, but that hardly seems practical in most cases. More often than not, we will continue to be place-bound researchers, but we will have to keep reminding ourselves that the ‘place’ we are participating in and observing may no longer be the total social or cultural reality for all the people who are in some way or another affiliated with that community.

We can discern several aspects of the modern world that may help us take ethnographic methods such as observation beyond their origins in small-scale tra­ditional communities:

• Analysts now speak of the emergence of a world system, a world in which nations are economically and politically interdependent. The world system and the relations among the units within that system are shaped in large measure by the global capitalist economy, which is committed to the maximization of profits rather than to the satisfaction of domestic needs. Some settings and events that might be studied by the methods discussed in this volume so as to contribute to our understanding of the world system are:
  • the nature of labor migration (see, e.g., Zuniga and Hernandez-Leon, 2001, who describe the ways in which Latino laborers coming to the United States have been shifting out of agriculture and into the industrial sector);
  • the emergence of ‘outsourcing’ and its impact on the traditional societies that are thus brought into the world of the dominant powers (see, e.g., Saltzinger, 2003, a study of Mexican factory workers).
• The transformation of what was once the Soviet sphere of influence has led to many social as well as economic and political changes. One scholar who has begun to document them is Janine Wedel (2002).
• The world has always been culturally diverse, of course. But now that globalization is bringing different cultures into more frequent contact with each other, the dynamic of cultural diversity, multiculturalism, and culture contact is shifting dramatically. (See, e.g., Maybury-Lewis, 2002, a study of indigenous peoples and ethnicity in the contemporary world.)
• In the modern world, people are less defined by traditions of ‘high culture’. They are more likely to be influenced (and to be drawn together as a global ‘community’) by popular culture. The study of popular culture has been a staple of ‘cultural studies’ for some time, and it is now well established in the mainstream disciplines as well. (See, e.g., Bird, 2003; Fiske, 1989; Fiske and Hartley, 2003; see also Ong and Collier, 2005, for an extended treatment of the implications of globalization on social research in general, and ethnographic research in particular.).

3. The changing research context: virtual worlds

If they so choose, ethnographers can free themselves of ‘place’ by means of the Internet. Virtual communities are now common; they are characterized not by geo­graphic proximity or long-established ties of heritage, but by computer-mediated communication and online interactions. They are ‘communities of interest’ rather than communities of residence. While some can last a while, they are mostly ephemeral in nature – they come and go as participants’ interests change.

Ethnography can certainly be carried out online. One can ‘observe’ the goings- on in an Internet chat room in much the same way that one could observe the doings in a traditional ‘place’. One can conduct interviews over the Internet. And our ability to use archival materials have clearly been improved by methods of digital storage and retrieval. Living online is becoming a twenty-first-century commonplace, and ethnography can certainly move into cyberspace along with the technology.

Some cautions, however, are in order:

• Electronic communication is based almost exclusively on the written word, or on deliberately chosen images. The ethnographer who is used to ‘reading’ behavior through the nuances of gesture, facial expression, and tone of voice is therefore at something of a disadvantage.
• It is very easy for people online to disguise their identities – sometimes the whole purpose of participating in an online group is to assume a whole new identity.
• If you are doing the kind of research that depends on the ‘accuracy’ of ‘facts’, then it will be necessary to develop a critical sense, to evaluate virtual sources carefully, and to avoid making claims of certainty that cannot be backed up by other means.

But are ‘virtual communities’ really all that similar to traditional communities or social networks? How does electronic communication bring new communities into existence even as it enhances the way older, established communities, now geographically dispersed, can keep in touch? Such questions lead us to the possi­bilities of research not only about specific people and their lives, but also about the larger processes by which people define their lives.

Virtual ethnography also poses some ethical challenges that are similar to – but not exactly the same as – those that confront the fieldworker in traditional com­munities. It goes without saying that the accepted norms of informed consent and protection of privacy and confidentiality continue to be important, even though 94 we are dealing with people we do not see face-to-face. While the Internet is a kind of public space, the people who ‘inhabit’ it are still individuals entitled to the same rights as people in more conventional ‘places’. There are as yet no com­prehensive ethical guidelines applicable to online research, but a few principles seem to be emerging by consensus:

• Research based on a content analysis of a public website need not pose an ethical problem and it is probably acceptable to quote messages posted on public message boards, as long as the quotes are not attributed to identifiable correspondents.
• Members of an online community should be informed if an ethnographer is also online ‘observing’ their activities for research purposes.
• Members of a virtual community under observation should be assured that the researcher will not use real names, e-mail addresses, or any other identi­fying markers in any publication based on the research.
• If the online group has posted its rules for entering and participating, those norms should be honored by the researcher, just as he or she would respect the values and expectations of any other community in which he or she intended to act as a participant observer.

Some online ethnographers have also adopted the practice of sharing drafts of research reports for comment by members of the virtual community. By allowing members to help decide how their comments are to be used, the researcher thereby accomplishes the larger ethical goal of turning ‘subjects’ into truly empowered ‘collaborators’.

The anthropologist David Hakken (2003) has been conducting a long-term study of the computer revolution; he has created what he terms an ‘ethnography of computing’. He notes that most of the rapidly proliferating computer systems were designed and implemented in a ‘machine-centered’ manner. However, real computing takes place in highly social organizations (businesses, schools, gov­ernments) where the exclusive focus on the machine (and the code for operating the machine) was incompatible with the culture of the users. There is a movement toward a more ‘human-centered’ approach to the design of computing systems, but Hakken notes that even such user-friendly developments are individualistic in nature and do not sufficiently reflect the social nature of computing. He therefore proposes what he calls a ‘culture-centered’ computing model. Thinking culturally about new technology would allow for the building of effective systems and for raising the broader ethical and political issues posed by revolutionary technology. It would also emphasize the implications of such technologies on the practices of the various academic disciplines that now increasingly rely on computers to con­duct their activities. Because researchers dealing with cyberspace are working with social formations that are as much potential as existing in current real time (that is, they are perpetually ‘under construction’), an ethical posture that is ‘active’ and anticipatory is needed, in contrast to the essentially reactive ethics of prior forms of research. The dimensions of such an ethical program have not, however, been completely worked out, let alone widely adopted by researchers in the various social sciences. (See Hine, 2000; Jones 1999; Markham, 1996; and Miller and Slater, 2000, for further discussion of the challenges of virtual research.)a

Source: Angrosino Michael (2008), Doing Ethnographic and Observational Research, SAGE Publications Ltd; 1st edition.