Ethnography in a virtual world

Abstract

This article situates the discussion of virtual ethnography within the larger political/economic changes of twenty-first century consumer capitalism and suggests that increasingly our entire social world is a virtual world and that there were very particular utopian and dystopian framings of virtual community growing out of that history. The article also situates the discussion of virtual ethnography within the anthropological ‘crisis of representation’ discussion to suggest there are many parallels between the two discussions. These discussions suggest that while ethnographers have recognised that all societies are virtual except, maybe the smallest, new information technologies, and particularly, the Internet create a persistent virtual space that transforms earlier notions of the imagined society. Finally, the article suggests that educational ethnographers are in a position to discuss the new pedagogical issues that arise when attempting to do ethnography in our contemporary virtual world.