Week six summary

My first post was on potentially interesting online communities. Soon, it became clear that those which permissions have to be sought will not fall into the time frame of this piece of work.

I found the article on the Lemmings vs Kant which had a critique on Facebook Graph Search.  It explained the issues surrounding the commodifying of personal data, and the view that Facebook take of its users.  It was necessary to  understand the criticism on Facebook, a social media platform used by so many, and to consider if Facebook is a good representation of an online community.

I also posted a link to the controversy of Banksy’s street art which is auctioned in the USA, which touches on authorship and public space.  When I did not hear back from the various support groups which I have written to, I gravitated towards the street art community.

The core materials reveal that online ethnography is quite different from the traditional ethnography that I was familiar with.

Hine (2000) on Virtual Objects of Ethnography presented  a reasonable approach to researching the online communities: its emphasis on connective ethnography; how to make the invisible visible without the physical presence of the ethnographer; and the reflexivity methodology providing as much information as looking at the cultural processes rather than the physical space.

Bell (2001) raised interesting issues on what we naturally think of as communities, and how online communities choose to recreate a similar concept, despite the fact that the medium used allows for a creative transformation of communities.  The characteristics of contemporary communities as a result of the disembodying, detraditionalised, globalised and uncertainties could give a new way of finding belonging.  He reintroduces the idea of Bund, an elective grouping, bonded by affective and emotional solidarity, sharing a strong sense of belonging. He describes how the benefits of membership are often described in terms of the member’s quality of life, rather than in the quality of relationship between subjects, and that the internet could be a place of emancipation as well as one of suppression.

I started with trying to find my way to an online community but stopped to comprehend what makes the online community and the views on ethnography which would frame the process of these two weeks’ study.

Reference:

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

Bell, David (2001) Community and cyberculture, chapter 5 of An introduction to cybercultures. Abingdon: Routledge. pp92-112 [e-book] [PDF]