Virtual EthnographySAGE, 2000 M06 22 - 179 pages Cutting though the exaggerated and fanciful beliefs about the new possibilities of "net life", Hine produces a distinctive understanding of the significance of the Internet and addresses such questions as: what challenges do the new technologies of communication pose for research methods? Does the Internet force us to rethink traditional categories of "culture" and "society?" In this compelling and thoughtful book, Hine shows that the Internet is both a site for cultural formations and a cultural artifact which is shaped by people's understandings and expectations. |
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accounts activities allows analysis appears approach appropriate audience authenticity authors become campaign challenge Chapter claims communication concern connections considered construction context cultural depends described designers detailed developers discussion distinct effects electronic engagement ethnographic experience explore field focus idea identity important individual interaction interest Internet interpretive involved kind lives look Louise Woodward meaning meaningful messages newsgroup object observations offline opinion organization orientation participants particular performance play possible postings potential practices present problems produced questions readers relations relationships relevant reports response seems seen sense settings shaped situated social sources space spatial specific statements strategies suggests television temporal topic trial understanding users virtual visitors web pages
Popular passages
Page 1 - Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.
Page 17 - Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.
Page 1 - The Human Race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, 'Keep tomorrow dark', and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire I have no doubt) 'Cheat the Prophet'.
Page 39 - CMC . . . not only structures social relations, it is the space within which the relations occur and the tool that individuals use to enter that space. It is more than the context within which social relations occur (although it is that, too) for it is commented on and imaginatively constructed by symbolic processes initiated and maintained by individuals and groups.
Page 48 - Personal narrative mediates this contradiction between the engagement called for in fieldwork and the self-effacement called for in formal ethnographic description, or at least mitigates some of its anguish, by inserting into the ethnographic text the authority of the personal experience out of which the ethnography is made.
Page 41 - In its most characteristic form [ethnography] involves the ethnographer participating, overtly or covertly, in people's daily lives for an extended period of time. They are watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions — in fact, collecting whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of the research.
Page 59 - ... revealing distortion. In retrospect, it appears that only a concerted disciplinary effort could maintain the tenuous fiction of a selfcontained cultural whole. Rapidly increasing global interdependence has made it more and more clear chat neither "we" nor "they" are as neatly bounded and homogeneous as once seemed to be the case.
Page 64 - Legionnaires— is, thus, essentially a device for displacing the dulling sense of familiarity with which the mysteriousness of our own ability to relate perceptively to one another is concealed from us.
Page 84 - On the other hand, the new communication system radically transforms space and time, the fundamental dimensions of human life. Localities become disembodied from their cultural, historical, geographic meaning, and reintegrated into functional networks, or into image collages, inducing a space of flows that substitutes for the space of places. Time is erased in the new communication system when past, present, and future can be programmed to interact with each other in the same message. The space of...
Page 59 - we" nor "they" are as self-contained and homogeneous as we/they once appeared. All of us inhabit an interdependent late 20th century world, which is at once marked by borrowing and lending across porous cultural boundaries, and saturated with inequality, power, and...
References to this book
Bibliographic information
| Title | Virtual Ethnography |
| Author | Christine Hine |
| Edition | illustrated, reprint |
| Publisher | SAGE, 2000 |
| ISBN | 0761958967, 9780761958963 |
| Length | 179 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |