As a seemingly limitless vat of information, the Internet encapsulates both a dream and a daunting nightmare for researchers. For this reason, a project's success is defined by the boundaries one should determine before jumping head first into the Net. Hine thoroughly discusses the limits and opportunities of Internet-based ethnographic research. She skillfully asserts that while the adaptive qualities of ethnography mirrors the ever-chaning nature of the Internet, researchers must frame their quests with care in order to avoid dark pitfalls.
Conducting ethnographic research in an online environment presents a unique challenge that has not been readily experienced in face-to-face ethnographic research: that of setting limits and boundaries to online research. Within face-to-face ethnographic research, the researcher can determine, for example, 'this is the community I will study', thereby constructing the boundaries of the study. Within online research, however, the boundaries are limitless and deciding where to start and stop is a significant challenge. Hine discusses how in the online environment there are communities that have been formed, which can prove to be ways of limiting the study, yet the nature of the communities being so open-ended and changing, that it is very hard to pin down the quality and context of these communities. Furthermore, grasping the connections among virtual entities is a monumental task because the contextualization is constantly in flux.
Despite the challenges posed with online research, this environment presents a new setting to conduct research. The Internet is no longer a separate entity that is somewhat abstract from our everyday life, it is now entrenched within our everyday life in our society.
No comments:
Post a Comment