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<Paper
or Plastic?>
defining the field
place(less)ness
the
field site
multi-sited
fieldwork?
being/becoming
place(less)ness
[field site][multi-site][becoming][up]
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“Many modern landscapes are characterized by what Edward Ralph (1976) called placelessness which referred to both a form of, and an attitude towards, the cultural landscape. Placelessness is in many ways the ultimate form of modernity, mass produced and international in style. As Kenneth Frampton (1985:26) put it, ‘the bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is clearly a technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness’ which would result in ‘the weakening of distinct and diverse experiences’ (Relph, 1986:6) and their replacement by commonplace and mediocre experiences. (Relph, 1986:78).” Bale, 1994:100-101
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In contrast to the quote to the left, the Internet is a space in which the initial starting point is a placeless, indistinct – indeed, vacuous – flat screen. The process of ‘bulldozing an irregular topography’ is reversed in the construction of this virtual landscape, as is evidenced in the visual designs of web sites and the language used to refer to it. It seems that the extreme absence of physical presence in online interactions (eMail, web-chats, newsgroups, virtual shopping malls, etc.) creates an uneasiness that is heavily compensated for through a complex set of metaphors of physicality and place-ness. |
the field site
[place(less)ness][multi-site][becoming][up]
Two of the most important questions that an ethnographer of
cyberspace must answer before beginning to conduct field research are how the
terms ‘field site’ and ‘community’ are being defined and how they will be used
in the ethnographic research and composition.
What constitutes the field, and how is ethnographic data collected?
multi-sited
fieldwork?
[place(less)ness][field site][becoming][up]
It seems almost silly to ask whether the study of an online community is multi-sited or not. The answer, however, is not as straight forward as it may seem. Ethnography will necessarily span many web addresses (‘URL’s)
In his discussion about multi-locale ethnography, George Marcus (1998) notes that the three characteristics
being/becoming
[place(less)ness][field site][multi-site][up]
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George Marcus (1998:53) quotes the following statment made by Marx and Engles: All
fixed, fast-frozen relations are all swept away, |
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Like a physically-located community, the ephemeral character of the World Wide Web – the fact that information you view on a given day may not still be there on the next – make the Internet curiously parallel to a physical community. Moreover, the fact that you can never surf the same web site twice brings into consciousness the fact that communities, in the words of Victor Turner, are in a constant state of ‘becoming’, a fact that has often been forgotten in conventional ethnographic fieldwork. |
Consider how a sense of ‘community’ is constructed in the following passage
found in the guidelines for the IRC #israel
channel chat group:
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IRC is not a democracy. keep that in mind. We are trying to make
#israel as democratic as possible,and trying to give everybody their rights,
and we do our best. However, the whole structure Remember, a lot like in the army, veteran people have more rights than new ones. It doens't mean that a veteran can violate the rules, but s/he will have more access to do things new ones do not. And last
but not the least |
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creating communities |
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creating texts
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bibliography |
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