From Virtual Ethnography to the Embedded, Embodied, Everyday Internet

TLDR

My first online ethnographic experience occurred over twenty years ago in a real‑time text‑based virtual reality setting called a MUD, during a conventional ethnographic study of software production for biologists. A key informant invited me to participate in the MUD on a day I was absent from the field site, allowing me to experience the virtual environment. Although the clunky technology and confusing tricks made initial fieldnotes difficult, the experience revealed the potential for ethnographic immersion in a non‑physical interaction space.

Abstract

My first online ethnographic experience happened over twenty years ago in a real-time text-based virtual reality setting called a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon). At the time I was working on a conventional ethnographic study of two fieldsites that were involved in the production and use of software systems for biologists. One of my key informants at the software production site invited me to try out this new (to me at least) form of interaction that he thought I might find interesting, arranging to meet in the MUD on one of the days when I was not physically present in the fieldsite. The technology was clunky and the experience bewildering, and my informant delighted in confusing me by playing tricks with multiple logins. I could not even work out how many people I had met, never mind fathom how I might make enough sense out of what had gone on to produce anything coherent in the way of fieldnotes. As I continued to reflect on what had gone on, however, I came to see that this initial puzzling experience offered a glimpse of the possibility of ethnographic immersion in a space of interaction that did not have a physical grounding.