Ethnography in cyberspace
FEBRUARY 22ND, 2016 — POST 049
Last week The New Republic posted a longform piece entitled The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens. Written by Elspeth Reeve, the piece tracks a few wildly popular teenage Tumblr users as a way to grab hold of a cyber-supported culture that can appear as mysterious as it is entertaining. Essentially, Reeve, an interested outsider, seeks to enmesh herself within the world of “the teens” (I still can’t work out if this is used ironically) to study the ostensibly inscrutable social mechanisms that enable this corner of the internet to blossom, both culturally and financially. In a very real sense, Reeve is performing ethnography. Whilst the ethnicity here is neither genetic nor even physically proximal, Tumblr teens, as Reeve discovers, form a distinct tribe. What I found latently present in Reeve’s piece was a cataloging of a cyberethicity: a group of people that share cultural traditions, claim identity, and seek refuge in a pocket of the internet. The consequence of this is a reinvigoration of the process of ethnography which was replaced by social scientific practices of the post-colonial period.
My use of the word “ethnography” is intended to be possibly controversial. The term originally described the method of study that, for the most part, was used to study remote tribes of Africa, and South-East Asian and Pacific islands such as Papua New Guinea. Invariably, there was a colonial overtone to ethnography: the white man would immerse himself in a tribe and attempt to describe them from the inside. Ethnographic photography and film will illuminate that the process quite often became indiscernible from the study of an animal species. The implied superiority of the student over the subject was ripe for dismantling at the end of the colonial period when ethnography as a practice fell out of favour.
Reeve displays no illusions of superiority over the cyberethnicity she’s studying. However, the piece occasionally has the air of fetishisation. Reeve arguably unduly elevates a joke about pubes to “the best social commentary on American culture’s obsession with women’s pubic hair”. She fangirls out with Danielle Strle over Pizza as if Pizza is some mythic cultural unicorn and not a girl running a tumblog. Reeve even cites Danielle Strle who describes Tumblr communication as “absurdist dada”. This retains the subjectivity of the piece and, like ethnography, ensures phenomena and data are described in terms of the student’s perspective of them. But this isn’t necessarily an ethically questionable position, at least as it pertains to what I’m calling cyberethnicities. Furthermore, it would appear Reeve is aware of the value in preserving the subjectivity in the process.
In the closing paragraph, Reeve elegantly reframes the above study as not only of “the teens” but also of her own, arguably more widely represented, cyberethnicity.
I think there are three phases of understanding the teens. At first you loathe the teens, because you know nothing about them and think they’re idiots, beneath you. Then you love the teens because you figure out they are smarter than you, and you make peace with the death of your cultural relevance, because you know you’ll be in good hands. Finally, you recognize the shape of the adults they’ll become, corrupted by money and vanity and hubris just like everyone else. And you’ll see yourself in them because they’re relatable: That moment you realize the teens are just like you.
The closing sentences can be reframed in terms of the value of ethnography in cyberspace. Once the problem of subjectivity is reconciled, the ethnographic process’ value is reestablished as existing in the encounter of distinct cyberethnicities, that the encounter of difference can yield understanding. Given the sheer number of divergent cyberethnicities from Red Pillers and Dark Enlightenment, to Shippers and Minecraft kids, cyberethnography might prove an invaluable approach to charting the ever-increasing diversity of groups online.
Ethnography conducted in cyberspace ought to reveal as much about the students as it does the subjects.
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