Weight Wheelies – Authenticity without F2F communication

Hine 2000 discusses the problem of authenticity in cyberspace ethnography, suggesting that online roles and sicussions may not be authentic and identities may be assumed in this environment.

Although this may well be a problem in other forums, this doesn’t appear to be an issue here. There have been posts about what bike do you have and people have listed bikes,put photo’s online of their bike.

People have also posted questions on what was your first bike and some have written and some have photo’s and some have photo’s from Google but have actually said it is not their actual own bike.

With regard to the weight issue, people have sent in a stream of photo’s of their bike components on scales – I think the authenticity here is not in question.

However, there are people who have been deleted as they have a duplicate account. I cannot see the benefit in having two accounts, but I also cannot see why this would be problematic for the site administrators and that they would choose to delete their accounts

Hine, C (2000) The virtual objects of ethnography, chapter 3 of Virtual ethnography. London: Sage. pp41-66