Faraway,so close! Proximity and distance in ethnography online

The ‘pros and cons’ of ethnography online

Several new histories of ethnographic studies in online environments have recently been published and I will not add another story to them here (e.g. Boellstorff et al., 2012: ch. 2; Kozinets, 2010: ch. 2). Instead I will briefly discuss the conceptual debate of online ethnographies, which leads into the discussion of online methodologies.

In the early 1990s discussions appeared on media ethnography, touching partly on research in online environments (e.g. Lindlof and Shatzer, 1998), and media anthropology (Rothenbuhler and Coman, 2005), predominantly relating to offline aspects of everyday media use. According to Rothenbuhler and Coman, media anthropology distinguishes itself from traditional anthropology by turning ‘its attention from “exotic” to mundane and from “indigenous” to manufactured culture’ (2005: 1; see also Drotner, 1994). Ethnography conducted in online environments thus differs largely from the wider field of media ethnography as many ethnographic projects conducted online have presented cultures that are predominantly exotic for the larger audiences (such as computer games, virtual worlds, etc.) thus turning towards a new kind of exoticism.

One of the first to claim expertise in the field of ethnography online was Christine Hine, who in the late 1990s launched the term virtual ethnography, a concept thereafter heavily supported in research literature (e.g. Ducheneaut et al., 2010). ¹ According to Hine ‘virtual ethnography’ is ‘ethnography in, of and through, the virtual’ (2000: 65) and she claimed that:

[v]irtual ethnography is not only virtual in the sense of being disembodied. Virtuality also carries a connotation of ‘not quite’, adequate for practical purposes even if not strictly the real thing (although this definition of virtuality is often suppressed in favour of its trendier alternative). (2000: 65)

Later discussions have suggested other terminology, such as ‘virtual anthropology’ (Boellstorff, 2008: 65), ‘digital anthropology’ (Miller and Horst, 2012: 5) or ‘netnography’ (Kozinets, 2010). In the following I will simply use the term ‘ethnography online’ to refer to ethnographic research conducted in online environments, to indicate that I do not regard ethnography in online settings as essentially different from ethnographic research conducted in other kinds of environments as their core, intentions and aims remain the same.

In the growing stock of literature on ethnography in online settings surprisingly little attention is paid to the advantages of doing ethnography online, apart from the fact that an expanding part of our everyday lives takes place in such settings and is organized in accordance with digital culture (see Deuze, 2012; Nowak, 1996). The spatial and temporal proximity of digital cultures and the constant access to the research field provided by new technology is often put forward as the one and only benefit (see Hine, 2000: 22; Sundén, 2012). I will return to this dimension later in the article, but will first present an overview of the many disadvantages of ethnography online that have been addressed in earlier research. Besides some rarely discussed issues, such as the commercial ownership of many virtual environments (e.g. Paech, 2009), most discussions deal with the same kinds of difficulties.

The field of ethnography online is no longer new, and has changed along with the changes in technological development since its early days. From initial attempts to contemporary discussions, the question of reduced social presence has been a major topic. Lindlof and Shatzer thus typically dealt with ‘the problem of participation’ (1998: 184) when claiming that:

worlds that CMC [computer-mediated communication] ethnographers investigate are simulacra of an indexical kind (there really are bodies out there behind keyboards), in which a high degree of self-referentiality in the text to ongoing and past events helps to build the sense of a continuous, living project. (1998: 173)

In the same article, as in a large number of later articles (Ducheneaut et al., 2010; Garcia et al., 2009; Paech, 2009; Sade-Beck, 2004; Wittel, 2000), they also address the problem of ‘reduced social presence’ (Lindlof and Shatzer, 1998:178) of the often non-synchronous communication of new media technologies (1998: 182ff).

A similar but slightly different aspect regards data collection and processing. It is argued that the, often very rich, information that digital technologies provide us with is not ideal for ethnographic analyses, and that in order to be meaningful it sometimes also requires analytical skills that most researchers lack (Ducheneaut et al., 2010). Hine (2008) subsequently pointed out the risk that researchers in online environments, due to their lack of such skills, only focus on the kind of information that is easily provided by technology (see also Hine, 2011).

Linked to this is the acknowledged problem of coverage: online communities are often small, diverse, and quickly changing or liquid, as well as providing users with possibilities to easily teleport or travel between places, complicating the possibilities of the researcher becoming immersed in a community for a sufficient amount of time (Ducheneaut et al., 2010; see also Paech, 2009; Sade-Beck, 2004). Connected to this is the aspect of generalizability, a sub-aspect of the above (e.g. Ducheneaut et al., 2010).

Another dimension that is often highlighted is the question of authenticity and trust (Hine, 2000: 44, 2008). In its early versions this discussion typically dealt with the fact that we cannot know who the people behind the keyboards really are, or what their online behaviour and values mean to their life offline (Schroeder, 2011; Turkle, 1984; Wittel, 2000), but today it also encompasses wider aspects of representation, related to the question of ethnography as storytelling (Garcia et al., 2009; Hine, 2000: 44; Malinowski, 1932 [1922]; Paech, 2009: 205ff). Authenticity is also reflected upon as a question of the researcher’s introduction to the studied community (Garcia et al., 2009).

Related to authenticity, and a key aspect of the anonymity of both researcher and research subjects (Garcia et al., 2009), is the ethical dimension of ‘internet research’ (Boellstorff et al., 2012; Ess, 2009, among many others). Early on, Lindlof and Shatzer (1998) discussed how to handle participation in an ethically informed way, regarding aspects such as lurking, adjusting to the environment, etc. Garcia et al. (2009) have, among many others, put forward the delicate organization of public and private spheres online, and our responsibility to protect the privacy and anonymity of the cultures we study online (see also Hine, 2008; Sade-Beck, 2004).

It is clear from the above that the most significant theme in earlier research is the difference between embodied (face-to-face – FTF) and online communication (CMC) and participation; that is, how the ethnographic research process is carried out in online environments. Much less effort has been put into discussing how the research process is carried out in relation to its offline context, that is, considering the researcher behind his or her technical device (although approaches such as connective ethnographies touch on this; see Dirksen et al., 2010; Hine, 2000, 2007; Leander and McKim, 2003). And even if I agree with Ducheneaut et al. (2010) that ‘[a] virtual ethnographer is then, simply, an ethnographer that treats cyberspace as the ethnographic reality’, and that this reality is interesting enough to study in itself, it is important to also acknowledge the ethnographer as a person of flesh and blood, who exists in a social and cultural environment. Boellstorff et al., however, address this, stating:

Physical world ethnographers often (though not always) travel to remote locations; they are typically removed from everyday tasks and responsibilities that would otherwise compete for their time. By contrast, in studying virtual worlds, we can sit right down at a computer anywhere and engage in research. It is tempting to slot data collection between other obligations and activities. However, that is not how ethnography is done. (2012: 76)

In the next section of the article I will dig deeper into this, so sparsely discussed, dimension of online ethnography, including aspects outside its mere communicative and interactive dimensions. I will discuss ethnographic work in online environments as it takes place in two simultaneously present contexts: the examined culture online and the everyday life of the researcher.

Proximity, closeness and distance

Digital technologies have restructured space (Christensen et al., 2011; Qvortrup, 2002). For researchers of online cultures this means that the studied environment is never far away, and Jenny Sundén thus claims: ‘The fact that the game world is never further away than an Internet connection and a computer with the appropriate game software (such as my own) creates a particular closeness to the field’ (2012: 167; see also Hine, 2008). In the following section I will discuss closeness, proximity and distance in ethnography online with the neglected dimension of the embodiment of the researcher in ethnographic research as vantage point. As the terms ‘proximity’ and ‘closeness’ are linked to each other it is necessary to sort out how I use them here. ‘Closeness’ is related to intimacy and understanding and represents, on the one hand, an ideal within ethnographic research, emphasizing an insight perspective, but is also part of the methodological aims of ethnographic research: to take part in everyday life, share the ‘little’ moments, etc. ‘Proximity’, on the other hand is more related to physical and temporal nearness, indicating immediacy in time and space, although the two terms are not completely separable.

Much has been written about the importance of closeness between researcher and the studied culture in ethnographic work in general, as well as more specifically in relation to ethnography online. Both hands-on introductions and more theoretical discussions deal with this, for example Hammersley and Atkinson’s much-cited Ethnography: Principles in Practice (2007), where ethnographic work is put forward as an approach that is concerned with and takes place in everyday settings, focusing on a few cases, which facilitates an ‘in-depth study’ (2007: 3), or Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), where it is argued that one of the main characteristics of ethnographic work is that it is ‘microscopic’ as it ‘approaches such broader interpretations and more abstract analyses from the direction of exceedingly extended acquaintances with extremely small matters’ (1973: 21).

To fully take advantage of the time-consuming and self-transforming approaches of ethnographic methods (e.g. Drotner, 2000: 172), research conducted within this tradition must result in a close description, with the studied subjects’ own understanding of the world taken as the vantage point for the analysis. In the earliest days of ethnography, this was also explicitly political, as the anthropologists’ ambitions to understand the cultures of foreign ‘tribes’ worked in opposition to the colonial powers’ official representations of them as uncultivated and savage (e.g. Malinowski, 1922: 9–10). This political goal (partially) remains today, although the importance of intimacy and nearness in ethnographic work is often addressed simply as an epistemological perspective emphasizing an inside view, rather than being explicitly political.

In Digital Anthropology, Miller and Horst recommend a dialectical approach to studying the digital (2012: 4ff), returning to Hegel’s theory of the ‘relationship between the simultaneous growth of the universal and of the particular as dependent upon each other rather than in opposition to each other’ (2012: 5). In practice, ‘the principle of the dialectic is that it is an intrinsic condition of the digital to expand both [abstraction and differentiation], and the impact is also intrinsically contradictory, producing both positive and negative effects’ (2012: 11). I sympathize with this approach, especially its latter part, and more specifically how the Frankfurt School developed Hegel’s ideas, emphasizing the double-edged dimension of culture (e.g. Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002).

A dialectical perspective thus means to take as a vantage point the double-edged dimensions of our existence, be it societal macro structures or the micro dimensions of everyday life. Here it specifically means that, attached to the much emphasized dimension of closeness (and proximity) in ethnographic methods there is also distance. Returning to the founding fathers of ethnography though, distance turns out to be as fundamental to an ethnographic approach as closeness (and proximity).

In his canonical book Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Bronislaw Malinowski (1932 [1922]) addresses this question in the introductory outline of the book:

Indeed, in my first piece of ethnographic research on the South coast, it was not until I was alone in the district that I began to make some headway; and, at any rate, I found out where lay the secret of effective fieldwork. What is then this ethnographer’s magic, by which he is able to evoke the real spirit of the natives, the true picture of tribal life? As usual, success can only be obtained by a patient and systematic application of a number of rules of common sense and well-known scientific principles, and not by the discovery of any marvellous short-cut leading to the desired result without effort and trouble. The principles of method can be grouped under three main headings; first of all, naturally, the student must possess real scientific aims, and know the values and criteria of modern ethnography. Secondly, he ought to put himself in good conditions of work, that is, in the main, to live without other white men, right among the natives. Finally, he has to apply to a number of special methods of collecting, manipulating and fixing his evidence. A few words must be said about these three foundation stones of field work, beginning with the second as the most elementary. (Malinowski, 1932 [1922]: 6, italics added)

From today’s position there are many points of critique that can be put forward regarding this quote, of which some are more important than others in relation to the discussion conducted here. First, the naïve notion that a ‘true’ and ‘real’ picture of tribal life can be obtained by ethnographic methods is noticeable. Others have put forward their critique from many different directions and I will not go further into that discussion here, simply referring to the philosophical debate that has been held during the many decades that have passed between the publication of Argonauts and today. Second, and of more importance to the arguments put forward here, is the fact that the reader, eager to learn the ‘ethnographer’s magic’ is simply addressed as a he. Because of the times when the Argonauts was written, it is not meaningful to be contemptuous or make jokes about this either. Many scholars have debated the gendering of ethnographic work and the emergence of a ‘feminist ethnographic’ perspective, defining ‘feminist ethnography’ as an ethnography that acknowledges women and their specific cultural dimensions and ways of life (Lather, 2001; Visweswaran, 1997). Nevertheless, in relation to the point I am making here, the gendering of the addressed ethnographer in Malinowski’s text is crucial, as gender structures, as well as other power-related structures, are present in all cultural spheres. I will return to this dimension later in the text. More to the point for my argument here is the second, and according to Malinowski the most important, aspect of ethnographic research in the quote above: that good conditions of ethnographic work means to live ‘without other white men’, that is, right among the ‘natives’. This aspect of ethnographic work is particularly important to address in discussions of ethnography conducted in online environments, as these can be easily reached without leaving one’s own everyday life, which therefore enables closeness without distance (see Hine, 2000; Sundén, 2012).

Travelling to, but not from

One of the key dimensions of ethnography online is the fact that the researcher does not have to (physically) leave his or her home environment. Rothenbuhler and Coman (2005) put this forward as one of the basic characteristics of the larger field of media ethnography:

A key difference with the classic anthropological ethnographies is that media ethnography does not, usually, take place fully outside the researcher’s culture. When researchers turn their attention to their own cultures, even some of the more distinct corners of them, some of the – shall we say – sacred characteristics of the classical ethnographic experiences are missing. One does not travel far to be there, the journey and the life is not strenuous, one does not need to learn a new language or wholly unfamiliar customs, values and modes of behaviour; the researcher is not fully isolated from home, in all its senses. (Rothenbuhler and Coman, 2005: 3)

The time-space compressing aspects of electronic, as well as digital, media make this development of ethnographic work seem natural (Harvey, 1990; Meyrowitz, 1985; Qvortrup, 2002, etc.). We no longer need to travel far to take part in distant cultures, and media technologies today easily bridge the physical distance between the researcher and a wide array of foreign cultures, using online spaces as their primary location. According to Malinowski, distance in ethnographic work is mainly a matter of the researchers’ distance from their home cultures, arguing that the loneliness embedded in this forces them to approach the studied cultures more eagerly than they would otherwise do. Malinowski also suggests that this forced socializing and interaction between researcher and the culture at hand, is the ‘ethnographer’s magic’, marking the border between mediocre and ground-breaking ethnographic research. Several decades later John Van Maanen addressed the same question, claiming: ‘Whether or not the field worker ever really does “get away” in a conceptual sense is becoming increasingly problematic, but physical displacement is a requirement (2011 [1988]: 3). His argument goes along the same line as Malinowski’s, suggesting that researchers’ methodological tools are sharpened by distance, as their social needs will force them further and further towards the deep knowledge that an ethnographic approach is about:

In the field, one must cut his or her life down (sometimes to the bone). In many respects ethnographic fieldworkers remove themselves from their usual routines, havens, pleasures, familiar haunts, and social contexts such that the fieldwork site provides a social world. The assumption here is that to get at this world, one has to need it. (Van Maanen, 2011 [1988]: 152)

Given that this is regarded as such a fundamental aspect of ethnography in face-to-face settings, surprisingly little has been said about this in the literature on online ethnography, although Andreas Wittel (2000) has stated that:

The displacement between ethnographer and her field result in a lack of a common and mutual perception of the physical context. It does not provide any information of the physical and aesthetic (dress codes) characteristics of the users.

The argument put forward by Wittel is only valid if it is the people behind the keyboards that are of interest, and is thus not valid for a study of ‘cyberspace as the ethnographic reality’ (Ducheneaut et al., 2010). Sundén (2012: 172) acknowledges that ‘[n]ew media ethnography rarely puts the researcher in isolated and lonely situations (even if spending long hours at the computer sometimes feels that way)’. Christine Hine, in her much-cited volume Virtual Ethnography, also claims, ‘the object of a virtual ethnography is a topic, and not a location’ (2000: 67; see also Cowlishaw, 2007, cited in Driscoll and Gregg, 2010). Hine questions the importance of distance, arguing that the idea of physical travelling in ethnographic research has gained symbolic status within the field, signifying the relation between reader, writer and subject under study that are manifested in certain sub-genres of ethnographic writings, such as arrival stories and notions of translation – more or less paradigmatic models, narratives and manifestations of values within the research field (Hine, 2000: 45, 2008: 259). Rather than unreflectively going along with these paradigmatic truths about ethnographic research, Hine (2000) proposes that the journey of ethnography online is experiential rather than physical. She also emphasizes that, whether or not the researcher travels far away, the insights and experiences that he or she has gained when meeting the culture under study can be worth listening to and learning from: ‘The contrast between ethnographer and reader that forms a large part of the authority claim of the ethnographic text depends not just on travel, but also on experience’ (Hine, 2000: 46).

It seems perfectly reasonable that, if the object under study of an ethnographic approach is a community that lacks a shared physical location, the researcher’s need for physical travelling is dramatically reduced. If the research interest is formulated around the culture and everyday life in an online setting, and accordingly around the virtual personas of the individuals that populate the space online, rather than their physical selves behind the keyboards, presence in the locations of the online culture matters rather than where the researcher’s physical body is situated. The knowledge and understanding of what it means to be part of an online culture can obviously be gained without moving your body a millimetre.

Nevertheless, I believe that something is missing in the debate about the researchers’ travelling as addressed in the arguments above. This debate mainly deals with the researcher’s physical movements as a way to make his or her social needs force him or her to approach closer to the studied culture, and their not being able to ‘take a rest’ from the exhausting ethnographic work or to hide among their fellows between the fatiguing get-togethers with the ‘natives’, as the possibility of relaxing in a familiar setting will keep the researcher from digging for a deeper understanding of their social world. This argument primarily deals with how the researcher conducts research in relation to the studied culture, and hence how close the researcher – due to the physical distance from his or her ‘home culture’ – is forced to go. It thus mainly deals with the relation between the researcher and the ‘new culture’, more than addressing his or her relation to the ‘old one’ – that is, the researcher’s own everyday life.

All researchers are human beings of flesh and blood but, unlike others, ethnographic researchers primarily use their own bodies and minds as research tools, emphasizing the social and cultural situatedness of knowledge (see Haraway, 1988). From my own experiences of conducting ethnography in online environments I argue that it is important to stress the physical location of researchers, acknowledging the old culture’s impact on a researcher’s attempts to share a new culture and the spatial and temporal proximity and distance among them.

A couple of years ago I initiated a research project around the virtual world Second Life. I was initially inspired by the (mainstream) media hype over the virtual environment in the mid and late 2000s, a phenomenon that may have been especially marked in my home country, Sweden, which, through the Swedish Institute, had had a virtual ‘embassy’ for a number of years (2007–12) and where several public institutions launched virtual offices in the virtual world during this time. I was interested in this entire media circus: the hopes and ambitions of those who worked with the institutions, their experiences of getting online in this technological and cultural setting, but also of the experiences of the ‘private’ users of the virtual world. There had been, for quite some time, a vibrant national community in the virtual world already when the (traditional) media became aware of Second Life and several offline institutions launched virtual offices. My ambition was to gain a broad and deep understanding of this unique and interesting phenomenon from many different angles via an ethnographic approach. As the publicly run institutions quite quickly became fairly empty of people as well as of activities, it was easier to conduct most of my interviews with those involved offline. They had offices offline, and due to their status as officials they had no problems with allowing me to know their offline identities. With them I thus made proper appointments during office hours, and I also most often met them in their office buildings. The virtual buildings in Second Life were there for me to visit at any time I wanted, so getting a grip on the aesthetics and functions of the virtual environments was also quite easy.

But besides this, I also wanted to understand how the ordinary users in the virtual world reacted and felt about this institutional ‘invasion’. I had ambitions to get this understanding from an inside point of view, addressing the (national) online community as a broad phenomenon, and as an everyday life in its own right (see Boellstorff, 2008; Ducheneaut et al., 2010). There had been some initial quarrels between the institutions and the native amateurs who populated Second Life, especially regarding the ‘embassy’ in the virtual world, but also around a virtual city (see Bengtsson, 2011, 2013). To understand the clashes between the offline institutions and the online cultures, I needed to conduct ethnographically informed research, and thus started to take part in events and meetings in the virtual world. I carried out interviews with Second Life users, took part in parties, attended courses and tried to understand as much as possible about what this particular part of the virtual world was about. It was very exciting, fruitful and also very convenient as my own private life included small children. These kinds of research methods, and the location of the culture under study, actually seemed compatible with a life with pre-school children, without having to leave them for long research periods away from home. But, as Boellstorff et al. have claimed, to conduct ethnographic research we:

must be on the scene, immersed in local activity, if we are to understand it. We cannot miss key events … just because there is something we might want to do more in the physical world. We do not know when interesting things will occur inworld, and we must be present to experience them. (2012: 76)

This, indeed, is true. And it was not nearly as convenient to conduct ethnographic research online as I had imagined initially. My offline life constantly forced me to take a step back from my new online aracquaintances and friends and their activities, as my own everyday life, my life offline with family, friends and loads of social obligations were impossible to ignore, as I physically remained in the middle of it.

There is of course more than one reason why I found it so troublesome to conduct my ethnographic study, and thus soon had to cut down on my initial ethnographic ambitions. Given the structure of my own everyday life some would (probably) say that it was stupid to even believe that this would work at all. And maybe they are right. The vivid discussion in the 1990s about a ‘feminist ethnography’ mainly dealt with ethnographic work on female cultures, raising various perspectives on that (Lather, 2001; Visweswaran, 1997), but never dealt with a feminist perspective on women as ethnographic researchers, in a (still) patriarchal society. I will not go deeper into a discussion about the conditions for female researchers here, and my case certainly had its specific conditions (as they always have), I just want to point to the fact that when researchers stay in their own everyday life while conducting ethnographic research, the structural frames of our own private lives coexist with the frames of the culture we strive to understand. I do believe, however, that there are general insights that can be learnt from this, insights that address the epistemological relation between proximity and distance in ethnography online. In the following section I will try to understand my own experiences (and shortcomings) as an ethnographer of online cultures from the angle of everyday life theory.

Everyday life as a rhythm

According to the French Marxist Henri Lefebvre, everyday life is organized along axes of time and space. In the third part of his ‘everyday life trilogy’, Rhythmanalysis (2004 [1992]), he points to the importance of acknowledging time, supplementing but not replacing his former emphasis on space (Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]), for a better understanding of everyday life. He argues that ‘[e]verywhere where there is interaction of a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm’ (2004 [1992]: 15). To understand everyday life, and thus its rhythm, he continues, the analyst must:

call on all his senses. He draws on his breathing, the circulation of his blood, the beatings of his heart, and the delivery of his speech as landmarks. Without privileging any one of these sensations, raised by him in the perception of rhythms, to the detriment of any other. He thinks with his body, not in the abstract, but in lived temporality. (2004 [1992]: 21)

One cannot but notice that the researcher is addressed as a ‘he’ here as well. Besides this, there are many similarities between an ethnographic approach and the method of rhythmanalysis as it is described above, emphasizing closeness, participation and analysis as a multidimensional, embodied, process. Hence, it is also impossible to neglect the dilemma that the notion of the everyday as a rhythm raises in relation to ethnography online, where travelling to a foreign culture and an unfamiliar everyday rhythm is not automatically followed by a travelling from another everyday rhythm, but leaves the ethnographer needing to adjust to two different rhythms at the same time.

As noted by both Hine (2000) and Sundén (2012), one of the greatest benefits of ethnographic work in online environments is the temporal proximity between the researcher’s everyday life and the culture studied online, as online communities are instantly reachable from wherever you are in the world, when time online is regarded equivalent to time offline (regarding time as durée, that is experienced in our human minds, instead of temps, that is the time of the watch, Bergson 1988 [1886]).

But if time is regarded as external to human beings, several temporal structures can exist simultaneously in online environments just as they can in the offline world (Ducheneaut et al., 2010). Accordingly, and to attract as many visitors from other countries as possible, some of the institutions I studied in Second Life adjusted to several time zones concurrently, keeping office hours according to their national time, but they were also staffed for a couple of hours late at night for the convenience of visitors from other countries (Bengtsson, 2011).

Naturally, for a flesh-and-blood researcher with an ongoing everyday life in the background, these parallel structures, or rhythms, cause specific problems; one has to adjust to two different rhythms of everyday life at the same time. This is vital also because virtual worlds in general, and perhaps Second Life in particular, have temporal structures that are fast and variable, demanding frequent and longer visits for the experience to be meaningful. Tom Boellstorff has quoted a user of Second Life who claims, ‘the fundamental rule of Second Life is that everything changes constantly’ (Boellstoerff, 2008: 83). My experiences are similar, and I would also like to add to this my impressions of the often spontaneous and impulsive organization of time that I met in the community in Second Life. According to this temporal logic, unplanned group invitations to parties and other events, suddenly dropped in late on Friday and Saturday evenings or nights, often saying something like: Paaaaartyyyy!!!!!! See you at Rainbow Fields!!!!!!! NOW!!!!!.

Boellstorff et al. (2012: 72) point to the fact that some researchers are more productive in their tasks when hearing family and friends clattering in the room next door, something which is most obviously true. Another side of this, however, is that even the most devoted researcher can find it problematic to leave family and friends alone at the dinner table from time to time to go to the room next door to join a spontaneous get together in a virtual world as part of one’s research project. Or even to leave your partner alone with a dull crime series on the television every other Friday night, even if it is just to be behind a closed door in the next room.

Another fundamental part of virtual ethnography is the spatial proximity between researcher and keyboard, often put forward as a benefit for the ethnographer of online cultures (e.g. Hine, 2000; Sundén, 2012). There are many ways to benefit from this proximity that also facilitate researchers other than the white male, middle-aged anthropologists of the early 20th century to conduct analyses over a long period with ambitions for deep understanding. But, this travelling to, but not from also causes new problems. When something happens you are present in your home environment, and have to act in the two everyday spaces you live in at the same time.

You are of course not obliged to attend all of the events and happenings that take place in the culture you are studying, as none of the other participants in that community do. But still, experiencing and adjusting to the temporal structure, and taking part in rituals and events in the culture under study, is indisputably important. And considering how Malinowski described his loneliness on the Trobriand Islands, and how his longing for social company forced him closer and closer to the studied natives, there is a fundamental difference between ethnography in face-to-face and online environments in this respect.

It could be argued that I, in my particular case, should have understood that true ethnographic work and family life are not compatible and that this was an impossible task to undertake. To a certain extent I do agree; my case was perhaps extreme. But at the same time, every researcher, as well as any other human being, has a life whichever phase they are in in that life. And things happen; children get ill, somebody close to you dies, someone else needs you. And as the rhythm of our private everyday lives may not be synched with our professional ambitions unplanned things can happen.

Conclusion

When being asked whether her life in Second Life was an everyday life comparable to the one she had offline, one of my respondents, who had spent time regularly in Second Life for more than six years, lived in a long-term online relationship and also worked (unpaid) in the virtual world, answered:

No, it’s not an everyday life. Even though we strive to establish one. But it’s not possible since our time is so limited. Other relations in RL [real life] set the limits.

This quote indicates that the outcomes of my ethnographic attempts and the difficulties that I met when conducting my research should not be regarded as failures, but as general findings of what it means to take part in a digital culture. Based on her experiences of doing ethnography online Hine also argues that being separate in (offline) space, and sometimes also in time, but still sharing a culture and community via new technology is a vital part of the experiences of the online ethnographer, and of the kind of interaction and communication that are built into life online that we need to share to fully understand the perspective of the people under study (Hine, 2000: 46). Being at several locations at once, adjusting to numerous different time zones, and socializing simultaneously with people in different cultural contexts are aspects of modern media and society that Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) brought up already in the mid 1980s, although generally intensified by digital media.

I do believe, however, that the methodological question of proximity and distance in digital cultures is worth considering more fundamentally than it has been so far. One of the most basic characteristics of online cultures is the fact that they (often) lack physical location. As foci of research this means several things; first, that we cannot, or do not have to, travel physically to reach them, but also that they are instantly reachable from any physical location offline (that provides us with sufficient internet connection). In previous debates, these dimensions have often been addressed as a special asset of ethnography in online cultures, and as something that strengthens the ethnographer’s possibilities to reach a deep understanding of the culture at hand. In earlier discussions of (traditional) ethnography, however, leaving one’s home to conduct ethnographic research has been put forward as a key dimension of the researcher as methodological tool, as our social needs force us to move closer to the culture under study, deepening our understanding of it. Malinowski’s (1932 [1922]) ideas about closeness and distance in ethnographic work hence dealt with the importance of keeping a distance from one’s own everyday culture to force the researcher to approach the culture under study.

In the above discussion, however, I have argued that regarding everyday life as a rhythm, the temporal as well as the spatial dimensions of this proximity of digital culture can be seen as contradictory to the ethnographic ideal of closeness. Staying at home in your ordinary everyday life while conducting ethnographic research means having to adjust to two different everyday rhythms at the same time, something that may impair your ability to immerse yourself in the new culture sufficiently. The epistemological challenges of ethnography are thus fundamentally restructured by the spatial proximity of digital cultures, emphasizing the importance of distance being dialectically interlinked with closeness in ethnographic research. Everyday life regarded as a rhythm, including spatial, temporal and social as well as bodily dimensions, highlights fundamental aspects of life online that certainly open doors to a new discussion about what it means to conduct ethnographic research in online environments.