Description: Christine Hine recommends that ethnographers focus on the embedded, embodied and everyday Internet. Pic by dannymol on Flickr, CC BY 3.0
By Renha
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In Ethnography for the Internet embedded, embodied and everyday (2015) Christine Hine reflects (pp. 32-33):
Three particular aspects of the contemporary Internet experience have repeatedly struck me as especially challenging to the development of ethnographic strategies. For development of an ethnographic strategy for the Internet, it has seemed particularly significant that it is embedded in various contextualizing frameworks, institutions, and devices, that the experience of using it is embodied and hence highly personal and that it is everyday , often treated as an unremarkable and mundane infrastructure rather than something that people talk about in itself unless something significant goes wrong. These three “Es”—for shorthand purposes, the E3 Internet— provided a backdrop for thinking about why it is difficult to apply ethnographic principles to the contemporary Internet, and how we might do so successfully.
Hines brings to my attention that a virtual ethnographer has the choice of adopting an embedded, embodied and everyday (E3) perspective or a cyberspatial perspective, wherein the online space is viewed as more self-contained. For the purpose of my upcoming mini-virtual ethnography, a cyberspatial approach seems most apt, in part due to the scale – I also need to narrow my research question so that it fits within this perspective.
Hines, C. (2015). Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday. Bloomsbury Publishing [e-book]. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ed/detail.action?docID=1873332.