Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday

by Christine Hine

The internet has become embedded into our daily lives, no longer an esoteric phenomenon, but instead an unremarkable way of carrying out our interactions with one another. Online and offline are interwoven in everyday experience. Using the internet has become accepted as a way of being present in the world, rather than a means of accessing some discrete virtual domain. Ethnographers of these contemporary Internet-infused societies consequently find themselves facing serious methodological where should they go, what should they do there and how can they acquire robust knowledge about what people do in, through and with the internet?

This book presents an overview of the challenges faced by ethnographers who wish to understand activities that involve the internet. Suitable for both new and experienced ethnographers, it explores both methodological principles and practical strategies for coming to terms with the definition of field sites, the connections between online and offline and the changing nature of embodied experience. Examples are drawn from a wide range of settings, including ethnographies of scientific institutions, television, social media and locally based gift-giving networks.

Genres: Ethnography, Anthropology, Research, Research Methods

230 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 9, 2014

Reviews

[Alexander Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Books that focus largely on the authors' publications as a way to approach an emergent methodology always perplex me. This one is no different. Also, I must admit that I have my limitations with believing ethnography in the first place. Ethnography is hard to do well, and it is even harder to know when you're reading a good ethnographic account. It takes a lot of faith, something of which most sciences proclaim happily to have little supply.

Yet, that said, ethnography is useful and important online, and I find myself needing it in order to question some prior assumptions of more quantitative and mixed methods studies online. I find myself needing either ethnographic accounts or digital archaeological accounts of what I am seeing. This book is a fairly decent introduction to how ethnographic could be done and for what reasons. Also it offers some limitations that the reader are bound to find themselves perplexed by.

I feel as though I'm going to need a much stronger grasp of what I'm looking at and a comparison to other interpretive methodological approaches to the Internet before I can say how useful this is. This book was primarily half a giant explanation of how ethnography relates to the Internet, and half discussion on how it should be approached actively. It is not very broad or detailed in its explanations, but it is a methodological sketch by a great academic on the subject, I suppose. In that sense, I have a little faith.

Over the next couple months, I plan on coming back to this one and saying how it compares. But until then...

[Nan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The definitive update on ciberetnography. I love her conception of the omnipresent internet. I recommend it for the public in general, especially social researchers.

[Ari Stillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a helpful book I read while writing the methodology section of my PhD. Hine covers all the bases in thinking through how to think about conducting a digital ethnography and the numerous considerations, a priori and emergent, in doing so. While her earlier work focused on making the case for taking the internet seriously as a space for researching culture, this book is a logical progression. The subtitle refers to the being embedded in our devices, embodied as enact ourselves through it rather than a digital dualism, and everyday in that it has become part of the background infrastructure of our lives. While some find it self-indulgent, Hine helpfully demonstrates different possibilities for conducting internet ethnography through her own research comprising the latter half of the book. I suspect the 2020 second edition of the book, which was out of my budget, has updated some of her insights given the accelerated rate of change of the internet and its governance as it relates to research.

[José Miguel Tomasena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Este libro es una muy buena actualización de Virtual ethnography, el clásico libro de Hine publicado en el 2000 sobre las posibilidades y los límites de extender los principios del método etnográfico a internet.
Lo que sucede es que el internet de los primeros años dosmil es totalmente diferente al internet actual, con redes sociales, dispositivos móviles, big data, internet de las cosas, etc.
La red es hoy embebible, encarnada y parte de nuestra vida cotidiana. Bajo estos principios, Hine expone los retos téoricos y metodológicos para realizar etnografías que consigan explicar el sentido (o los sentidos) de la experiencia de vivir, socializar y hacer nuestra vida con la red.
Abundan ejemplos de sus propias investigaciones, así como de otros casos.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent primer about conducting ethnographic research involving the internet, especially with the shifting notion of what constitutes a research site or field in the age of the internet. Appreciate author's clear exposition of various approaches and case examples that she specifies are open and evolving, to be selected and used alongside reasonable and rigorous theoretical/disciplinary framework, and are not strict prescriptions on exactly how and what to do. Very helpful overview situating ethnography within the context of its roots in anthropology and its evolution with mobility, media studies and science & technology studies.

[Ainslee]

Great book for those of you who are doing online ethnographic research like I am. Although the internet is evolving (even more so since this recent book was written) it is a great resource of what and what not to do, and some of the hurdles to expect when first conducting this kind of research.

This book should be a must on the reading list of any anthropology undergraduate courses.