This week was spent mainly analyzing and constructing my micro virtual ethnography on YouTube’s Davidsfarm. On Monday I flew from London to the States where I am working over the next two weeks. While on the plane I didn’t have access to the internet (someday it will be possible), I spent most of the time outlining the structure of my virtual ethnography in Word. Last week I had been tagging relevant Davidsfarm videos to my Delicious account and copying selected comments on the videos into Tumblr – both of which fed into my lifestream. When I finally had internet access this week, I had my lifestream open in one tab of my browser and the WordPress pages where I was constructing my virtual ethnography in another. I found the lifestream a very effective organizing tool. It enabled me to find the relevant videos for me to embed into my ethnography as well as pull out the comments from Tumblr. I was still collecting more information about Davidsfarm while I was constructing the ethnography so these were fed into my lifestream this week.
The challenge for me was to take advantage of the affordances offered by the internet in the representation of an ethnography. A major criticism of qualitative analysis in the past is that the analysis process is not transparent so not subject to scrutiny. With the introduction of software for qualitative analysis, such as ATLAS.ti, MAXqda and NVivo, the process is transparent but despite this software being around for 20+ years it is still not part of the toolkit of many social scientists (although this is changing) and it is certainly not something that can be easily picked up. However, a virtual ethnography if constructed well, offers the possibility for anyone to explore the logic of the representation and have access to the same data the ethnographer works with. And there is the possibility to interact with both the ethnographer and the elements of the ethnography – as well as contributing further elements (or data) – and interpretations. Although there is a linear argument in the ethnography I constructed, I encouraged readers to dip into the ethnography, mirroring the experience of visitors to Davidsfarm who initially come across any one of the types of videos he produces by chance and who then elects (or not) to explore further Davidsfarm and become an active fan, commenting on videos and interacting with other fans and with Dave himself.
After finishing my ethnography, I enjoyed very much exploring and commenting on fellow students’ ethnographies. I was amazed by their richness and the number of issues that they raised about virtual communities. There seems to be a range of types of communities – from loose associations or what Tony calls ‘digitally mediated networks’ to communities where people are very open about personal issues and give and receive support – such as Sarah P’s quilting community. Another issue that comes out clearly is power and control – examples are the communities that Sibylle and Bill explored. This seems to be related to the motivations and personality of the founder members. And for me in my ethnography in Davidsfarm, there was a real difficulty in discerning what was real, what was constructed and what was imagined. And I was puzzling about whether something constructed or imagined becomes real and what is ‘real’ anyway. I look forward to reading more of the ethnographies.
