Posts Tagged ‘Virtual’

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; what are the main cares worries and joys of the average young urban South Delhi girl?

This is Anthropology 2.0 — The modern day researcher using Social network sites as research tools.