Ethnography in online contexts

Ethnographic methods aim, through the vehicle of participant observation, “to find social meanings as they are implicitly forged and sustained in everyday interaction” (Boellstorff, 2008, p. 75). According to Clifford Geertz, ethnographic accounts should strive for “thick description,” in which the cultural context of observed events can be described in a way that attaches meaning to their superficial characteristics, linking emic (insider-perspective) meanings to etic (outsider- perspective) ones. He writes:

As interworked systems of construable signs (what, ignoring provincial usages, I would call symbols), culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly—that is, thickly—described. (1973/1988, p. 539)

Participant observation, the primary tool of ethnographic inquiry, is not just observation of the participants in the study as they go about their daily lives—it often entails participation of the observer, insofar as it is practical and reasonable. However, virtual and Internet-based field sites pose special challenges for participant observation, and ethnography more generally. Anthropologists and

sociologists conducting research on the internet have used a variety of ambiguous umbrella terms, such as “online ethnography,” “virtual ethnography,” and “virtual anthropology” to describe projects of multiple different types. There exists a blurry distinction between four different modes of ethnographic research conducted in internet contexts:

1. Using the internet as a tool for collecting data about general social and cultural practices, not specifically related to online activities; Hine notes that the internet is a useful tool for sociologists because it provides a convenient venue to conduct interviews and it naturally produces an enduring textual record of social interactions (University of Surrey, 2013). 2. Studying how people use internet technologies.

3. Studying activities that are (necessarily) mediated through online spaces. 4. Studying semi-bounded virtual worlds as cultures in their own right.

Boellstorff objects to the term “virtual ethnography,” arguing that it suggests that there is something virtual or unreal about the culture under study (2008, p. 65). Instead, he favours the term “virtual anthropology” (the method, rather than the object of study, is virtual). However, the research that he refers to as virtual anthropology falls in the realm of the fourth item above: Boellstorff argues that virtual worlds and online communities can be studied not as activities that people do at their computers, but as cultures in their own right, like the proverbial Trobriand Islands of classical cultural anthropology—an approach that he himself and others have adopted (see e.g. Taylor, 2006; Pearce, 2009; Nardi, 2010).

My research falls largely into categories (2) and (3) above. On the surface, playing and modding Minecraft would seem not to be explicitly about the use of internet technologies—surely, the point is the game and its community, not the venue. However, the game and the community are inextricable from their online contexts. Modding is a deeply networked activity, and furthermore, the sociotechnical architecture of Internet communications media is implicated in how modding discourses are carried out (see Chapter 7). A study of Minecraft modding is a study of practices that necessarily take place online, or that exist in a context in which the move from online to offline is

seamless. The nature of the game software itself, the mod distribution channels, the collaboration and discussion venues, and the centrality of multiplayer gaming to the Minecraft experience—all of these take for granted constant, international broadband connectivity. If the platform for the

Minecraft software itself is the JAVA VIRTUAL MACHINE, then the “platform” on which the

“software” of the modder community runs is the global internet.

On the other hand, participating in a modding community is not merely a thing that people do

on the internet. The community itself (and the sub-groups therein) has its own social dynamic, its own

conventions and linguistic codes. Still, it is too loosely distributed over multiple venues and activities to understand it as a virtual world: unlike Second Life, the shared world-space that Boellstorff studied, there is no one place called Minecraft (the multiplayer mode runs on individual, user-created servers, which often run significantly different versions and highly personalized sets of mods). There is also no one place where the modders hang out and interact online. This research requires understanding that the modding scene has common cultural referents and practices, while simultaneously keeping in mind that it does not fit the Trobriand Islands metaphor the way that virtual worlds and

massively-multiplayer online role-playing games do.

For the purposes of this research, engaging in participant observation meant trying to situate myself as an honorary modder, going to the sorts of online places that modders go and doing the sorts of things that modders do. The easiest field activity to reconcile with traditional ethnographic methods was my three-day participant observation at the virtual Better Than Minecamp convention (Chapter 5), because the event entailed real-time, virtually-embodied interaction with modders, and observations of their interactions with each other. Participant observation in lower-bandwidth, text- based communications venues such as IRC and Discord channels, of which I clocked roughly 60 hours across each of 24 channels over a six-month period, was similarly straightforward: there already exists a significant body of anthropological and sociological work based on internal

participant observation in largely text-based virtual spaces (e.g. Smith & Kollock, 1999; Webb, 2001).

Trying to take part in two of the other things-that-modders-do—exchanging asynchronous messages on web forums, and programming mods—is trickier.

For the forums, the researcher can’t be everywhere at once, reading tens or even hundreds of thousands of posts across an entire site; there needs to be some way to determine which threads are worth investigating. Nor are the things happening right now (the most recent posts, the most recently- updated threads) necessarily the most important and interesting things. In partitioning conversations by topic into more-or-less self-contained threads, and in keeping a permanent record of all past utterances in each conversation to serve as an ongoing referent to future posts, web forums undermine the importance of the immediate that persists in real-time communication. Just as importantly, web forums construct invisible audiences of readers who don’t write back, non- participants who decipher and absorb aspects of the discourse and culture they encounter on the message board, perhaps allowing it to inform their actions in other contexts (e.g. an IRC-based conversational meta-commentary on a forum post which all of the IRC participants read, but which only one of them contributed to directly). Since the early days of Internet newsgroups, these ever- present but largely inscrutable invisible audiences have been labeled lurkers.

It would be inaccurate to claim that the body of lurkers is not in some way a part of the culture and context of an online community—especially since one venue’s lurkers may be another venue’s core personae. Lurking is a kind of participation. I suggest, therefore, that ethnographers on web forums may be well-served by spending some time conducting lurker-observation—not

exclusively, of course, but as a supplement to other data collection activities. When lurking, the researcher’s choice of threads to analyze should be based on what avenues they would naturally explore if they were approaching the forum with the same goals as the typical lurker. To elaborate: one reason for lurking on a modding-related forum is to absorb information about how to make

mods of one’s own. A novice modder can find the answer to many questions by reading threads in which others have already made similar queries. By putting myself in the position of a novice modder looking for answers (as I was actually trying my hand at programming my own Minecraft mods), I was able to participate in a social process that provided me with a glimpse of how modding know-how is disseminated online. Researchers might also spend time lurk-browsing forums in order to identify core participants who may make for helpful informants, but the texts encountered along the way should be treated as data and subjected to critical analysis, not discarded as incidental or artificially-selected. As for more active forms of participation, I made very few forum posts myself, primarily for the purpose of recruiting participants, but most of my informants, whom I discovered through other channels, were themselves not active posters on the message boards.

It is not as if researchers aren’t already engaging in lurker-observation. Hine suggests that such “unobtrusive methods” follow an established tradition in social sciences, and have a place in the study of online communities (2015, p. 159), though not as a wholesale replacement for

ethnographic immersion (2015, p. 161). She does note, however, that “it may be quite normal to lurk without posting” in some online discussion groups, and “it is important to remember that the group itself need not necessarily be treated as a bounded field site in its own right”—that is, the researcher can actively engage with participants through other channels that they naturally use in order to achieve “mutual visibility” (2015, p. 57). In incorporating lurker-observation into my method, I am not necessarily doing anything different from other researchers; what I am suggesting, however, is that we can think of (supplemental) non-reactive methods as being justified, not with reference to the traditional notions of maintaining detached observation of “objective” data, but by noting that in taking on the lurker’s role, we are encountering parts of the community in the same way that a substantial number of its invisible participants do.

As to the other issue, observing and participating in making mods, I have already hinted at its relatively simple solution. In order to understand the social processes involved in sharing

those practices were linked to software architectures, I learned how to make mods, and I made mods. I built several of them between 2013 and 2017, which gave me an excellent perspective on how the community’s practices evolved over that period. All were fairly simple, minimal, and a bit rough around the edges, but the immersion served its purpose in allowing me to initiate myself into the cultural and linguistic codes of the community I was studying. I made journal entries reflecting on the processes of learning and programming.

By 2016 I was hacking together quick-and-dirty utility mods to fix small annoyances that my colleagues and I had encountered on our research centre’s recreational Minecraft server. One of our difficulties was that the heavily-modded server process tended to slow down over time as it ate up more and more of its host machine’s memory (some mod or mods kept writing new information to memory, without removing old information to clear up space). This would cause game play to become increasingly laggy, until someone rebooted the virtual server. However, only those with administrator access could do so. I wrote a small mod that would allow any player to reboot the server by means of an in-game button, so that administrators would no longer have to be pestered to take care of the task when they had a moment. In order to enhance my understanding of the

modding community’s various ideas of “best practices,” and of the entire process of building, publishing, licensing, and supporting a mod, I later cleaned up the code, ported it to the four most- popular Minecraft versions at the time, and posted it on the CurseForge mod distribution site. As of 2019, the mod is available at https://minecraft.curseforge.com/projects/command-block-server- reset-enabler,20 _{and source code is included with the download. Since it was posted in August 2017,}

the mod has been downloaded 241 times (counting all four files)—and I am relatively certain that no more than 50 of those downloads are from me testing the links. To put it concisely, since I could not simultaneously, directly observe and participate in modding with other modders, I constructed a

20 _{Archived version (without downloads): https://web.archive.org/web/20190401182648/https://}

picture of modder practice by observing modder discourses online and doing the “participation” part on my own.