During the 1990s, the first ethnographic studies of the Internet demonstrated that computer-mediated interactions were socially significant and were fully loaded with meaning for the participants (Hine, 2000). The first ethnographies of the Internet developed and used online methods to gain access to the issues researchers were studying, that is, how social interaction and cultural signifying practices were possible through computer-mediated communication (Baym, 1998; Paccagnella, 1997; Reid, 1994). This was a first step in legitimising the social and cultural study of the Internet, given that previous conceptions had considered that computer-mediated communication lacked social cues or believed it to be second-class communication. These ethnographic studies were based on the idea that social interaction in ‘cyberspace’ could be studied from the perspective of culture and characterised as a specific and relatively autono-mous culture from the ‘real’ or physical world.
Daniel Miller and Don Slater’s study of Internet use in Trinidad (2000) and Christine Hine’s (2000) study of the case of Louise Woodward are both well known for following actors across their multiple activities in ways that bypass the division between online and offline ethnography. Hine reflexively brought to Internet studies the shift to understanding the constructed nature of the field site in anthropology (Amit, 2000; Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Marcus, 1995),
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systematising her ‘principles for virtual ethnography’ through a multi-sited and connective notion of ethnography (Hine, 2000). Leander and McKim (2003) also pointed out that the online/offline dichotomy should not be the a-priori assumption of the ethnographer but is something that needs to be explained.
What matters then is how participants create, bound and articulate different social spaces. This implies the development of combined online/offline meth-odologies (Dirksen et al., 2010) that blend research methods, as Mann and Stewart (2000) proposed. Simultaneously, and largely as a result of the process of methodological reflection and development undertaken by these authors, Internet technologies have become a research tool that social researchers from other areas have begun to use in their empirical work, the goals of which are not necessarily related with Internet studies. The net has become a research tool for many research purposes.
Annette Markham (2004) has analytically drawn on the duality of the Internet as a method: as just a research tool for collecting, analysing and pre-senting results; or as the field for conducting research – that is, the social con-text where the subjects and the researcher meet and interact. For researchers interested in the Internet as an object of study, the object, the tool and the research context collapse in many ways. Yet this analytical division can also be useful to those interested in incorporating the Internet into their field methods.
While the use of visual technologies has given rise to a whole new reper-toire of research techniques and ‘visual methods’, the conversion of the Internet into a research tool has led to the creation of a collection of methods and research techniques based on the use of Internet technologies for data gather-ing, labelled as ‘online research methods’ (Mann and Stewart, 2000), ‘Internet research methods’ (Hewson et al., 2003), ‘virtual methods’ (Hine, 2005) or ‘dig-ital methods’ (Rogers, 2009). These online methods include the adaptation and reformulation of conventional research techniques such as participant obser-vation, interviews, focus groups and surveys, as well as innovative proposals based on the analysis of hyperlinks, such as ‘web sphere analysis’ (Foot et al., 2003) or ‘web hyperlink research’ (Woo, 2003). For instance, some authors have discussed the social dimension of hyperlinks (Beaulieu, 2005) and the need to include web analysis techniques in the ethnographic approach (Howard, 2002).
In many cases, it has been argued that the incorporation of the Internet in ethnographic fieldwork provides the conditions for studying collectives that would be practically inaccessible without the use of these technologies.
Using the Internet in fieldwork may allow us to access geographically dis-persed individuals, so we can construct geographically disdis-persed analysis units in a more radical way than that proposed by multi-situational ethnography (Marcus, 1995). For example, to research Ghanaians living in London, Burrell and Anderson (2008: 206) used the Internet, among other sources, to recruit
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informants, thus eluding both the ‘ethnic neighbourhood’ and the ‘online com-munity’ as forms of study that identify the community itself as the object of analysis. The Internet is increasingly used to recruit informants, alongside more traditional techniques. For example, Angela Orend and Patricia Gagné (2009), when studying the popularity of corporate logo tattoos, placed flyers at local tattoo parlours, coffee shops, restaurants, stores and university bars, and posted a notice about the study on numerous Internet newsgroups, listservers and chat rooms. Sometimes using Internet technologies enables the develop-ment of strategies for gaining access to extremely elusive or especially sensi-tive groups, for example, medical patients (Illingworth, 2001; Orgad, 2005), neo-nazi groups (Kimmel, 2007), or people who are into extreme sexual prac-tices (Pichardo, 2008).
The Internet offers social researchers many opportunities for primary data collection beyond recruiting participants or administering questionnaires, in that it is a source of textual and visual data for multiple research topics. For example, an increasing number of studies exploit the Internet as a repository about body, health or illness experiences, such as the study of the relatively hidden practice of self-injury (Adler and Adler, 2007) or the analysis of online stories of childbirth experiences to assess women’s degrees of involvement in decision making (Bylund, 2005 in Seale et al., 2010). In these cases the Internet is not the focus of the research but part of the field for conducting research.
Internet forums and communities allow researchers to approach participants gradually and to progressively construct a rapport, participating in a forum one step at a time, setting up a blog or creating a user profile account. Nicola Illingworth indicates how the Internet became her field site for the analysis of assisted reproduction techniques when it was impossible to gain access to participants directly from the hospital. Far from being a hindrance, using the Internet as the source for her empirical data had certain advantages. The ano-nymity of the interaction established over the Internet facilitated the partici-pation of a large number of informants, many of whom recognised that they would not have agreed to a face-to-face meeting, especially if it had been in the hospital ward (Illingworth, 2001). José Ignacio Pichardo also believes that anonymity was a fundamental aspect in his research while studying the sexual practices of bondage and sadomasochism (Pichardo, 2008). A questionnaire administered on the Internet allowed him to obtain data from anonymous participants who would have been unwilling to participate in a face-to-face interview.
The Internet has therefore become one more means through which social scientists construct empirical knowledge. However, technologically medi-ated interaction profoundly changes the nature of the information col-lected through participant observation research or face-to-face interviews.
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As Garcia et al. (2009: 62–3) noted, in face-to-face participant observation, ethnographers routinely experience and analyse participants’ verbal utter-ances in conjunction with their facial expressions, tone of voice and body language, along with other sensory impressions of the environment. Instead, online ethnographers should take care to integrate visual aspects of the tex-tual interactions into their observations and treat many visual data displayed by the Internet interface such as the use of emoticons, pictures, colors, page layout and graphic design of web sites as a key aspect of the online social interaction and context, as well as the technological script of the site. This will produce a great amount of visual and textual data that must be archived, classified and analysed. This may require developing a new set of skills and data-collection methods similar to those already used by visual anthropolo-gists and socioloanthropolo-gists.
Since the beginning of the 1980s, social scientists have explored the possi-bilities brought forth by computers, specialised software and computer applica-tions for data storage and retrieval. The pioneering use of software for textual analysis (Podolefsky, 1987) has quickly led to the development of specific qual-itative data-analysis programs (CAQDAS). The development of specialised programs has given rise to what some authors have termed ‘computer-based methods’ (Fischer, 2006), which, as well as qualitative data-analysis systems, include simulation and applications for analysing structural relationships (Lyon and Magliveras, 2006). Moreover, many of us who use digital cameras realise that digital technology is changing not only the way we take images, but also the way we see, store, analyse and show them (Parmeggiani, 2009).
The ability to create interactive and multimedia representations (Biella, 1996) on CD-ROMs has been explored since the middle of the 1990s by various researchers, especially in the field of visual anthropology. This approach was later transferred to the Internet, at which point various forms of hyperme-dia representation were experimented with (Banks, 2001; Pink, 2004, 2007).
In most cases, these ideas have focused on the use of digital technologies for analysis and knowledge representation.
Nowadays, the Internet is a powerful tool for sharing textual, visual, audio and audiovisual information, both in the social scientist’s imagination and as part of contemporary global popular culture. In recent years, visual digital tech-nologies have undergone an intense process of expansion in parallel to that of the Internet. Their proliferation has resulted in the use of webcams, CCTV cameras, digital cameras, multimedia mobile phones and tablets. All these technologies produce sounds, images and video, which circulate on the Internet and can be simultaneously viewed on the screens of portable multimedia play-ers. Visual elements are increasingly used in telecommunications technologies and are ever-present in the daily lives of people and institutions. Contemporary
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visual practices are therefore marked by complex interactions between digital technologies and networked infrastructures.