This panel examines how anthropological theory and methods can critically engage with people’s daily lives as they increasingly encompass diverse online platforms. Early ethnographic research about the internet emphasized that existing cultural categories and practices loomed large both in understandings of cyberspace and in imaginings of its transformative potential. These studies of online forms of sociality, modes of interaction, and representations highlight a range of practices, technologies, and assumptions that were deployed in cyberspace. Building on such research, this panel focuses on the means by which research participants, as well as researchers, have strategically constructed disjunctures and connections between their online and offline experiences. At a moment when digital commitments are expanding far beyond email and websites, this panel critically considers how online ethnographic work resituates the anthropological project.

The panel includes four presenters and two discussants who have conducted ethnographic research online among diverse populations. Four of these contributors approached online communities as an explicit component of research; three were originally interested in other questions but realized digital connections and disconnections were of fundamental importance. This range of research design enables us to examine how online lives might be fundamentally impacting anthropological research, whether it explicitly concerns the internet or not. The focus on strategic connections and disconnections also allows us to reflect on anthropologists’ commitments to engage multiple publics. For instance, what are the ethical demands of referencing writing posted online, when research participants’ aspirations and reflexive practices explicitly counter anthropological commitments to assuring confidentiality? Should such writing be represented as the pseudonymous words of an informant, or as the credited writing of another expert?

The panelists highlight the diversity and the politics of online commitments. For Americans who travel to China to seek experimental medical care, online health discussion forums have enabled new forms of sociality and tactics of mobilization that both transcend and reinforce lines of social cleavage. In France, romantic partners of software activists have created their own online platforms, in which their personal accounts redefine activist identities and terms of engagement by foregrounding gender and sexuality. For Japanese Americans who return-migrate to Japan, online communities have produced and strengthened networks in Japan, creating new formations of diaspora and ethnicity. In Japan, divorce support groups are coded explicitly as “online” communities, even if many meetings occur in person. In all of these situations, being online matters deeply to the people involved. We discuss how anthropological approaches can account for such strategic commitments to the virtual, the possibilities offered by ethnographic fieldwork to trace such online mediations, and the implications of pursuing them.

Other participants will be Priscilla Song (chair), Ayako Takamori, Allison Alexy (co-organizer), Ilana Gershon, and Nicole Constable.

Our panel is scheduled for Wednesday, December 2, 2009, starting at 8 p.m. in the Room 413 at the Downtown Philadelphia Marriott. We are planning a special journal issue on this topic and would love some provocative questions from the audience!

These exciting details notwithstanding, the Welcome notice is timely: in ten days, I am traveling to Zurich for the conference “Shaping Europe in a Globalized World? Protest Movements and the Rise of a Transnational Civil Society, ” organized by the Department of German, Zurich University. I am giving a talk on the panel about computer-based protest. My paper, based on my ethnographic fieldwork and media research in 2004-05, will analyze the campaign against software patents in the European Union.

One part of the workshop was a week-long group project. My group was thematized by organizers Geof Bowker and Helen Nissenbaum as “open source / cyberculture.” Our project was inspired by “the freedom to study” which is one of foundational principles of free software, “page source” option on many web browers, and the “view source” key on the One Laptop Per Child computers. We asked, what kinds of “sources” would be necessary to foster software literacy in a diverse population? Our response was in the form of a web-based application intended to promote understanding of software as a socio-cultural, organizational and technical artifact. Specifically, we wanted to highlight the (often overlooked) diversity of activities that drive a software project forward in various key moments. We were also concerned with increasing means for raising awareness about diversity (or lack of it) among free software and open source contributors. The slides of our final presentation are available for download.

P.S. I will post a link to my dissertation through an open access arrangement as soon as the NYU and UMI make it available.