The lurking researcher

Lately, most of my "field work" (lurking) has taken place in a confusing field:

Screenshot from February 28, 2016

Within some circles, this is hardly a strange place to conduct field work. There have been some very compelling articles written lately by people who spent a lot of time in these trenches, including Bergstrom's "'Don't feed the troll': Shutting down debate about community expectations on Reddit.com" (2011) and a lot of Massanari's amazing work. I would suggest "#Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit's algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures," which was informed by Massanari's long-term participant observation and ethnographic study (2015, p. 1).


I've always spent a considerable amount of what I consider formative time on the Internet so it's only recently that I've become aware of how often people distinguish between the online and the "real." In many ways, this is similar to Robert Park's attitudes towards the library. In "Digital gender: Perspective, phenomena, practice" (2015), Arvidsson and Foka presents this issue nicely:

Steeped by strong social imperatives and a profound neglect towards the very materiality of human life (Hodder, 2012; Latour, 2003), past Internet research tends to imagine “cyberspace” as a distinct realm. This has caused life “online” to become understood as somehow separate from the “ordinary” aspects of the human experience, ignoring in absurdum how our technologies affect even the most mundane parts of life (Heidegger, 1977; Yoo, 2010) and how digital materials give shape to human emotions (Goel, 2014).

 They continue:

In order for future scholarship to seriously tackle the societal challenges brought forth by the WWW, the Internet must, in other words, be understood as part and parcel of the “real”: a generative information infrastructure (Hanseth and Lyytinen, 2010) with profound consequences for real bodies, ultimately affecting both what we are and who we can become (Haraway, 2013; Hodder, 2012; Wajcman, 2000).

I included both of these lengthy quotations because they perfectly sum up where Internet research is coming from and where it should ideally go in order to become more meaningful.


One aspect of online field work that interests me is how to deal with your position as researcher. The first time I had to conduct research outside of the library was during my last year of my undergraduate degree. Although it wasn't exactly field work, I had to make observations and conduct a series of interviews over several visits to a community museum in Montreal. There, my role as researcher was clear. Online, however, it becomes more difficult to differentiate between the researcher or researcher-observer or researcher-participant or Reddit-lurker.


My current topic doesn't require me to be an active participant in these communities. It is merely helpful to get a sense of the communities. The research I've been doing, however, is opening my eyes to the possibilities of studying groups of people or communities online and the changing tools required to do such studies. Just as in the physical world they: share and organize information; do or don't have agency; do or don't have access; appear and disappear; and leave traces. 


References

Arvidsson, V. & Foka, A. (2015). Digital gender: Perspective, phenomena, practice. First Monday 20(4).