digital ethnography

Disrupting the Ethnographic Imaginarium: Challenges of Immersion in the Silk Road Cryptomarket Community

ABSTRACT

This paper is a contemplation of a digital ethnography with the community surrounding Silk Road, the first widely used cryptomarket for drugs on the Dark Web. To position the study within the broader field of illegal anthropology, it provides links between the existing literature on the study of cryptomarkets with relevant anthropological scholarship. A theory of piracy is interrogated for its explanatory capacity of the digital pirates of the Dark Web. The start of the study unexpectedly coincided with the FBI seizure of Silk Road in October 2013. The field site disappearance provoked a practice-based and conceptual rewiring. The paper unpacks how the ‘hydra effect’ introduced to conceptualise resilient innovation within cryptomarkets can also apply to the multiplicity of identities linked to research practice. This effect also raises how the knowledge production within digital ethnographic practice may be reconfigured through notions of opportunism, replication, obsolescence, regeneration, iteration, adaptation and proliferation.

Somewhere Between Here and There: Negotiating Researcher Visibility in a Digital Ethnography of the Influencer Industry

ABSTRACT

Despite our preparation for fieldwork, a majority of what ethnographers actually do in the field is based on ‘gut-feeling’, ‘sensing’, and ‘whim’. This paper is a piece of reflexive ethnography detailing a series of minor but important methodological decisions pertaining to researcher visibility throughout fieldwork in a digital community of social media Influencers. It details one anthropologist’s private negotiations during the foray into the Influencer industry by situating the self along various spectrums of conspicuousness. These confessional anecdotes of ‘behind the scenes’ labour can be taken as suggestions on how to negotiate one’s positionalities during ethnographic encounters between and betwixt physical and digital fieldsites. I detail these through six experiences from the field – as the esteemed guest, the exotic inbetweener, the willing apprentice, the trophy acquaintance, the concealed consultant, and the passing confidante – in which I negotiate being ‘seen’, being on ‘show’, and ‘seeing’ from somewhere between here and there.

Three Lies of Digital Ethnography

ABSTRACT

The relative novelty of digital ethnography as a research methodology, along with the challenges that it moves to classical understandings of fieldwork, participation and representation, results in a repertoire of professional illusions through which digital ethnographers justify their work when confronted with the disciplinary culture of anthropology. This essay is based on the author’s reflexive experience of researching digital media use in China, and updates Gary Alan Fine’s 1993 article “Ten Lies of Ethnography” by identifying three lies of digital ethnography. Illustrating each of these lies through an archetypal figure – the ‘networked field-weaver’, the ‘eager participant-lurker’ and the ‘expert fabricator’ – this article argues for the need to confront methodological illusions and embrace the tensions behind them as useful heuristics for conducting ethnographic research on, through and about digital media.