Posts Tagged ‘Boellstorff’
Your virtual you
Posted by Johanna in Anthropology, Global on september 15th, 2009
There is a debate in Swedish news media regarding diseased peoples facebook profiles, do we honour them by letting the profile remain as a virtual bversion of the deas person, or is it simply disrespectful? In the infomation age – death is no longer definite. I have previously ecountered virtual cities in the anthropological article by Khosravi and Graham (in Reordering Public and Private in Iranian Cyberspace, 2002) .The example in the article is a city destroyed by war is virtually existing online. This online virtual sphere is becoming more and more emergent to research, I stress the concept Anthropology 2.0 because I believe that there is so much to be investigated in what we call ‘cyberspace’. Further reading on cyberspace research I recommend is of course one of ,my favourite books ‘Coming of age in Second Life’ by Tom Boellstorff, 2008 and ‘The Internet – an ethnographical approach’ by Miller and Slater, 2000. Please let me know if you have any more tips for further reading.
Anthropology 2.0
Posted by Johanna in Anthropology, Global, India, Popular culture on september 10th, 2009
Conducting my research in Delhi in November and December 2008 I did a classical anthropological fieldwork in an upper class market in South Delhi. I choose a popular cafe as my field and all my initial meetings with informants took place there. On the initial meetings, hanin out with girls at the cafe I began too see a pattern. They kept asking me if I was to be found on the social networking site Facebook. My group of informants where to a large extent engaged in this social network site, actually I did not encounter any South Delhi girl who where not found on Facebook…
I created a Facebook profile. I concluded my research days logging in to the Facebook chat where I always found someone of my informants. The social network profile became a tool of great utility for me, facilitating me in keeping contact with informants on a regular basis. Time of the day when we did not find actual time to meet me in real life we could spend time online chatting on Facebook. I thought about call these meetings to have taken place in virtual time, since the take place virtually not phisically, but I see the philosophical contradiction in time being virtual since time is actual…
The distinction virtual life and real life is problematic since virtual life is real life, but I choose to separate these two types of meetings based on the different of these events. Tom Boellstorff is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, who recently conducted researched online for the book Coming Of Age in Second Life. Bearing Boellstorff in mind I was not afraid to use modern world tools in my traditional anthropological research.
Facebook as a tool helped me to gain the data necessary needed to be able to describe and contextualize, and the best part is, my research is passively active even though we are not meeting in real life since we live on different continents. We are constantly connected thought ICT. This is the main advantage of conducting research in the information age.
This is Anthropology 2.0 – The modern day researcher using Social network sites as research tools. Anthropology 2.0
Ethnography in virtual worlds
Posted by Johanna in Anthropology on mars 24th, 2009
I believe that there can be interesting ethnographies done in virtual worlds. Maybe this can even constitute a sub-field in the future. I believe with Boellstorff; “The virtual is the anthropological” (Boellstorff 2008:237). Because when reading an ethnographic book, I am virtually there.
The dynamics of identity construction are aided by ICT:s. The expansive realization and the expansive potential are central strategies that individuals absorb when their day to day lives are intertwined with ICT. The expansive potential gives way to new meetings, new contacts, new nodes connecting and the egos are fed with new material to digest and materialise into the concept of the self. In the intertwined network of networks the connectedness is prodigious.
ICT:s facilitates new possibilities for interaction in the information age. In the societies of today social units are enabled through ICT to interact anywhere, anytime. ”…the boundaries between human life and machine life are blurred..” (Castells 2004:6). ICT influences identity construction, the spread of ICT facilitates the individual’s sense of self, her location, her world view, her cultural belonging and her identity shaping process. = The virtual is anthropological
