Ethnography in a virtual world

Abstract

This article situates the discussion of virtual ethnography within the larger political/economic changes of twenty-first century consumer capitalism and suggests that increasingly our entire social world is a virtual world and that there were very particular utopian and dystopian framings of virtual community growing out of that history. The article also situates the discussion of virtual ethnography within the anthropological ‘crisis of representation’ discussion to suggest there are many parallels between the two discussions. These discussions suggest that while ethnographers have recognised that all societies are virtual except, maybe the smallest, new information technologies, and particularly, the Internet create a persistent virtual space that transforms earlier notions of the imagined society. Finally, the article suggests that educational ethnographers are in a position to discuss the new pedagogical issues that arise when attempting to do ethnography in our contemporary virtual world.

Keywords:

• educational ethnography
• globalisation
• global economy
• representation
• virtuality
• virtual/physical
• hybrid social spaces

Notes

1. Harvey comes out of a Marxists tradition and in the Marxist tradition capitalism is contradictory for a number of reasons. Perhaps, most importantly, because of the ‘labor theory of value’ where value is produced through human labor. As owners of the means of production skim off the ‘surplus value’ by paying workers a living wage rather than paying them for the full value of their work, there is little money left to buy the goods and services that are produced. Galbraith, a much more mainstream economist captured this contradiction by pointing out that in capitalism money tends to ‘flow up’ meaning that it gets concentrated in the hands of rich companies and individuals and again you have economic stagnation due to the inability of people to buy goods and services. Schumpeter is yet another example of a non-Marxist economist who captures the inherent contradictory nature of capitalism with his notion of ‘creative destruction’ and the ways that technological innovation makes old forms of capital accumulation obsolete.

2. One only has to think of recent events in the Middle East to understand how prescient these ideas were.

3. Of course, Marcus's multi-sited ethnography will become the much more famous concept and it gets developed by Marcus himself and many other ethnographers from within and outside of anthropology. We will discuss Marcus's more recent ideas about multi-sited and collaboration later in the paper.