Cyber-ethnography was seen as a new kind of methodology that might uncover how the internet would radically change society.
#Notion offline Offline#
This led to the idea that online identities can be segmented from offline ones. Like other early internet researchers, early cyber-ethnographers such as Sandy Stone and Sherry Turkle observed that participants in online role-playing communities enact social performances that can diverge dramatically from their offline personas. Although the assertion that ethnographic fieldwork can be meaningfully applied to computer-mediated interactions has been contested, it is increasingly becoming accepted. It also understands that online communities can create a shared culture through digitally mediated interactions. Cyber-ethnography therefore addresses limitations in the traditional notion of a field site as a localized space. Ethnographies of online cultures and communities extend ethnographic study to settings where interactions are technologically mediated, not face-to-face. Traditional ethnography study observes the interactions between individuals who are co-located. This article is not about a particular neologism, but the general application of ethnographic methods to online fieldwork as practiced by anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars. Netnography is another form of online ethnography or cyber-ethnography with more specific sets of guidelines and rules, and a common multidisciplinary base of literature and scholars. Instead individual researchers are left to specify their own adaptations. There is no canonical approach to cyber-ethnography that prescribes how ethnography is adapted to the online setting. As modifications of the term ethnography, cyber-ethnography, online ethnography and virtual ethnography (as well as many other methodological neologisms) designate particular variations regarding the conduct of online fieldwork that adapts ethnographic methodology. Online ethnography (also known as virtual ethnography or digital ethnography) is an online research method that adapts ethnographic methods to the study of the communities and cultures created through computer-mediated social interaction.