This post is more practical than nostalgic. Yes, sometimes I like to look back and think about how ‘things were better’ with our various online anthro communities, but that’s not the goal here. It’s clear that the online communities our discipline had are not what they once were, whether on Facebook, Twitter, etc. And those communities did–and still do–matter. Twitter just keeps coming apart at the seams and people seem to be leaving in droves. As they should. For a long time now that site has been like posting into a black hole, and it’s only getting worse (more ads, etc). My old pal Colleen Morgan posted this today:

Sowing seeds in ruins indeed. In the spirit of Colleen’s post, I have retreated to one of the few spaces that we do still have: this old website. It’s not what it once was, but it’s still here and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. So it’s a good place to leave some trail markers, so to speak. Again, my goal here is practical: Let’s use this space to share what we’re all thinking and were we’re going for some rest, repair, and reconciliation. I think many of us have already lost a lot of those little connections we once had on these platforms. Let’s see what we can save and maybe leave some breadcrumbs for where we’re all going. What are you thinking and where are you going next? Mastodon? Bluesky? Post? Staying offline and just going surfing, hiking, or walking more? Something else? Let me know in the comments below.

*Image link here.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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Hi there!

I am reaching out to whoever it is that receives these emails or runs Anthrodendum to ask for a possible favour. I was wondering whether or not you would find it worthwhile to write about doing ethnography from home – and by that, I do not mean ‘studying a place you call home’, but literally from our desks.

I, like the 9 other young women in the anthropology honours class at my university, find ourselves at a complete loss for how to restructure our already underway research projects in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic. Having been issued a national lockdown for at least a few weeks, we’ve been told to shift our research to an entirely online form. It is unlikely that it will be safe to continue to conduct traditional participant observation even by mid-fall in the urban-centers of our country’s Coronavirus outbreak. While we have been given literature to pour over regarding ‘virtual ethnographies’ and doing anthropology online, I, and my fellow students, would definitely benefit from some pretty basic pointers.

I appreciate your time in advance!

Kind Regards,

Stephanie Cookson
University of Pretoria, South Africa
Bachelor of Social Science Honours

Dick Powis

This is a great question, particularly as you are definitely not alone right now. Nearly every anthropologist I know – student or otherwise – is in the same boat. And like you (and many of them), I have no experience in digital/virtual ethnography, so I’ll try to talk about how my research experience might translate into a digital/virtual world.

The first thing I would determine is the research site. In this context, that could be an actual website, or it might be a bigger community of people that operate across multiple websites, or perhaps it’s a community that occupies a small part of a website. What is it about the site or community that interests you or demands attention? Then, I would approach it the same way I approach my own ethnographic research: move in, live there, get to know people, lurk, make it a part of your daily activities, learn the language (or jargon). Become a community member, get involved, become a fixture. Journal about it!And then from there, you can reach out and interview individuals. See how they feel about the topic of conversation or ask them why they talk about things the way they do or hold certain attitudes.

Anyway, that’s a basic framework of my approach. I know you probably have plenty of literature to read, but I’d like to push Collins and Durington’s “Networked Anthropology” to the top of your stack if you’re not familiar with it. Thanks, good luck, and I think we’d all like to hear from you in a few months and see how everything turned out!

Maia Green

How can social scientists do research when the social assumes unprecedented forms? 

Dispersed communities of concern are emerging in response to the pandemic and using online collaboration platforms designed to allow groups of people to interact and see each other in real time. Established communities of practice — in business, the media, religion and  academia — are making massive efforts to carry out their ordinary activities online. These kinds of communities are probably quite different to the kinds of virtual communities anthropologists have studied, for example Tom Boellstorff’s engaging ethnography of how people make and manage virtual selves in the online environment of  Second Life. New virtual communities brought into being as a response to the pandemic are different. First because of scale and reach, and second in pace of expansion. Established communities which are moving online are different from wholly online communities because the practices they perform are distributed through the internet, but were developed independently of it. 

The differences between these kinds of online communities could suggest different strategies for fieldwork. As you are asking about projects you have already started researching, one option is to do what other established communities are doing and move your practice online. This would entail locating the online spaces where your chosen community now spends its time and exploring with them the  possibilities for some kind of participation (subject of course to having obtained relevant ethical permissions and requesting consent). You could then carry out your fieldwork through the usual steps- networking with key informants and organising interviews through Skype or other apps.  

A second strategy could be to focus on an already existing online community, either one which is engaged in the area you are researching or, perhaps, consider a new topic. Social media are great places to find members of different social worlds and begin to explore them. Once you have made some contacts, you can explore with them the possibilities for more structured interaction, again subject to consent and ethical review.  

Option three is to do something totally new in an emergent social field and explore some of the ways in which the pandemic is creating new forms of behaviour and sociality. You can do  this based on what you learn about how people are responding to the pandemic online, through news, social media and what you hear from friends and colleagues. If you are permitted to leave your home to get essential foods or take exercise you could observe people’s interactions. If staying inside you can reflect on your own changing practices. How are you structuring your days? How do you make boundaries between work and leisure? How are you socialising remotely with others outside the home?  

Responses to coronavirus in all countries raise important questions around inequality, health systems, care, and social solidarity. All aspects of life are affected by it in some way. Research conducted during this uncertain  time can shed light on the multiple creative ways that people in various situations respond to the ongoing changes brought about by the pandemic. 

Ryan Anderson

Most of my research focuses on traditional ethnographic sites: places and communities and the issues they need to deal with. I look at the politics of conservation and tourism development in Baja California Sur, Mexico, and conflicts/challenges of sea level rise adaptation along the California coast. Some of this work has led to an increasing interest in the intersections between these places/communities and media/online communities. I’m really interested in how ideas about places, as expressed through media (and online forums), shape those places. This piece on media depictions (link) is a step in that direction, and the next step is to examine the online component of this media. To give another example, some of my work on sea level rise, has led me to the whole issue of climate change denial/skepticism… which in turn has led to an interest in how mis- and disinformation spreads online. In both cases I am not just interested in studying the online component, but rather how it fits within larger processes and systems.

That’s one basic approach to doing digital or virtual ethnography that I have found helpful: keep it holistic and examine how something fits within a broader social picture. In your case, you may only be able to look at the online component for now, but even so you can develop some ideas and ask questions about where and how certain things may intersect with offline social behavior. Take notes, gather ideas… and study those offline intersections when it’s possible to do so. In all ethnographic work you have to do your best given the situation you are in.

A second tip is to look for ‘places’ where people come together, where they congregate. Think creatively about what this can look like. For example, in my work it’s useful to look at how people think about and talk about places in the comments sections on travel sites. Keep in mind though that there are ethical issues that you want to think through for anything you’re looking at online. But these kinds of spaces can provide fascinating insight into how people think about and interact with ideas, places, and events.

So overall, keep things holistic, look for connections, and find places where people come together. Be as creative as you can, and don’t forget to attend to ethical issues. Good luck!

Matt Thompson

I am not an academic anthropologist, I work for a city public library, but my professional practice is informed by my training in anthropology and ethnography. At the library our doors are closed to the public, but we are still at work urgently seeking ways to bring our services to the community. A lot of that, by necessity, will be online via mobile devices.

Recently, I attended a webinar hosted by StoryCorps, best known for their short, engaging, personal recordings of everyday people; stories of love and families and obstacles overcome, real make ’em laugh, make ’em cry kinda stuff (link). The webinar was to be about their digital oral history project. I was interested because my library has an already existing, albeit unloved, digital oral history project that’s just sitting there not doing anything. I think, maybe StoryCorps can give me some new ideas or inspire me to revive this moribund project? By the conclusion of the webinar, StoryCorps had not solved all my problems. There was no switch I could flick to make our oral history project vibrant and successful. But they have a very interesting model that you might be able to adapt to ethnography under quarantine.

Program participants download a StoryCorps app to their phones, allow permission to the mic, and create an account. Family members are then encouraged to interview each other using the app to record, there are plenty of tips on their website for recording a successful interview. The recorded interview can stay as a local file on the participant’s phone or it can be uploaded to the StoryCorps archive. Note: these are .wav files and can be quite large, especially if the interview is long. There is a code you can give participants that shares their recording on a community page, which can then be curated and enriched with text and photos.

Not a system without constraints, but take the brand name off of everything and we might find some ideas that could be put to work. A lot of people have phones, many of which can function as digital audio and video recorders. You cannot be in their physical space, but that space is shared with select others. They can interview, record, and photograph their family members and roommates. Essentially, participants use their phones to create digital ethnographic objects and then they share them with you. This has potential as an alternative to virtual or remote ethnography, particularly if pursed with diligence and compassion.

To make this model successful would require testing some thorny technical and ethical considerations, but they are not insurmountable. I would begin by partnering with a community organization and experimenting with the model inside just that group, focus on organizational history for example. Then once the researchers better understood the limits of the data collection method, no doubt incorporating feedback, steps could be taken to address the issues and the project could expand. But I think the basic idea of getting study participants to use their phones to collaborate with the researcher has a lot of potential.

Caio Coelho

Dealing with anthropological fieldwork is always something difficult to teach, it is an apprenticeship that heavily relies in the experience of the ethnographer and the group researched. The basics for fieldwork, in my view, is an exchange of affections, of information, of intelligence, of cultures. But it isn’t exactly implied anywhere that it has to be done physically.

We live in a society where speech became detached from the body when the telephone was invented, some 150 years ago. We live in a society where images can appear to move themselves for some 120 years now. We live in a society where it is possible to see wars, while they are happening from some other corner of the world for the past 60 years. And more recently, we can use computers to practically do anything: from virtually walking the streets of New Delhi on Google Maps, participating in academic events held on Twitter (Hi #ASEH2020tweets, it was great!), to communicate with someone in almost anyplace in the world via videochat through a device that is smaller than a hand. I’m not saying that technology is democratic in this 21st Century, there are problem of access to them, as there are problems of access with almost anything under Capitalist regimes. But I’m saying that there are possibilities.

One of the main dimensions of fieldwork, according to Jeanne Favret-Saada (1990), is to be able to affect and be affected by others [see Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1990. “Être Affecté”. In: Gradhiva: Revue d’Histoire et d’Archives de l’Anthropologie, 8. pp. 3-9]. She vividly describes dewitchment in her fieldwork in the Western French Bocage, in which she only was able to enter the “native” network of conversations around magic when they started to see her as a person who had been bewitched. The question that I pose to you Stephanie and colleagues is: can we only be affected through the body? Through the corporeal experience? Or is affection a phenomenon that relates more to our minds? If it is so, our mind is able to visit places, through our imagination and technology, to get us in touch with others. Including myself in this example, I make part of Anthro{dendum} and am in touch with the conversations we do here, even though I never met anyone of the collective in person (I’m from Brazil). I can participate and observe, as the digital nature of what we do on the blog helps to trespass the geographical contingencies of where we live. I’m not saying every fieldwork is possible to be done at distance, but I’m saying that there are possibilities. I would like to take a moment to let you see another example of this in action, there is a street photographer that has agoraphobia. Her project confronts her own fears, and she found a way to explore the world using one technology to access what she had difficulty to access physically. Hope this helps.

Matt Thompson

Matt Thompson is Community Services Librarian for the public library in Suffolk, Virginia. He has a doctorate in anthropology from the University of North Carolina and has been blogging with Anthrodendum née Savage Minds since 2010.

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A Digital Bermuda Triangle: The Perils of Doing Ethnography on Darknet Drug Markets
by Alexia Maddox

Media reports sensationalize the dark web as a seedy digital location where drugs, guns, hitmen and child pornography circulate through eBay-style marketplaces that are only accessible to your hacker types. Here, elusive fringe behaviors proliferate in plain sight, with identities hidden through encryption technologies and secretive user cultures. In 2013, I began collaborating on a digital ethnography of the most popular darknet drug market, Silk Road. The social impacts of this kind of choice-driven, highly visible yet anonymous, peer-to-peer drug market were unknown. The research was led by Dr. Monica Barratt, a social scientist at the Drug Policy Modelling Program, part of Australia’s National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. Together, we considered the Silk Road community to be a great place to start studying the impacts of choice-driven drug availability upon people’s drug use trajectories. What we found was so much more than that.

In this post, I’ll cover what it is like to work in online spaces that disappear overnight, and discuss the levels of visibility people adopt in these disrupted and disruptive spaces. The question of ‘how to’ do ethnographic research in a contentious and dynamic environment such as Silk Road led me to formulate the notions of ‘site instability’ and of ‘contentious visibility’. Moving away from sensationalizing fringe activities on digital media, I found a nuanced and internet-oriented notion of healthcare emerging among Silk Road users, which I describe here as systemic ‘selfcare’.

As a researcher, I am drawn to digital spaces where people are using and creating innovations in networked technologies to engineer – both socially and computationally – a more permissive reality. I see these digital frontiers as collective and constructed resistance spaces that act as cultural laboratories through which alternative futures are experienced. Not all of these socio-technical experiments gain traction and uptake, yet they lay down the technologies, ideas and experiences from which we learn.

Whenever I present this research project, a common response that I receive is one of intellectual curiosity, yet mixed with personal rejection and distancing. Working with a community with strong liberal values, a requirement of anonymity and an underlying libertarian ethos all surrounding a drug market operating in the darknet can be polarizing and confronting, and there were times where it was for me as well. However, I began my research with a process of social sensitization and non-judgement by understanding that there are different ways to approach structural problems, social marginalization and culturally stigmatized prohibitions in our societies.

By nature, this community’s ways of establishing ‘the self’ in the environment was going to be combative, and their perspectives towards personal and public health and wellbeing were going to challenge centralized regulatory practices and perspectives. This empathetic connection and space for social difference that I drew on to assist my research practice were the strengths of an ethnographic approach. Its weakness, however, is in dealing with anonymous online populations and field sites that disappear. Both of these aspects were at play in the research, and yet the mobility and real-time connection with community that ethnography emphasizes ended up being the greatest assets to completing this work, as we will see.

Our research into the social implication of cryptomarkets took place between 2013 and 2015, and focused on people who had purchased drugs on Silk Road, a cryptomarket founded by Dread Pirate Roberts in 2011. Cryptomarkets are e-commerce websites that operate in the ‘dark web’, commonly referred to as darknet markets (DNMs). The dark web, as an anonymous online space, has allowed drug sales to become highly visible and enacted through peer-to-peer market structures that allow vendors and purchasers to gain and lose reputation and business deals through recommendation and rating systems. Associated forums gather together people who wish to discuss drug-related issues and harm-reduction strategies with people across the world, and reviewing the quality of the drugs they’ve purchased through trip reports and vendor insights. From October 2013 to June 2014, I conducted my ethnographic fieldwork by engaging online with the digital community surrounding Silk Road that was active in these forums.

The dark web can be thought of as a ‘digital Bermuda Triangle’. It is a dynamic space with websites that regularly change their Internet Protocol (IP) address (the unique identifier of each device connected to the internet) and often appear or disappear overnight. When Monica and I launched our study, Silk Road had successfully avoided ongoing law-enforcement efforts to shut it down through vigilant anonymization practices and encryption technologies. This successful resistance to state regulation lent the website a sense of stability that made it seem impenetrable. Yet, just as we launched the data collection component of the research (i.e., me entering into active recruitment and research engagement in the Silk Road forums), the FBI suddenly shut the site down.

Other than the sinking feeling of having put all my research eggs in one digital basket, I was there to observe the outpouring of grief and loss that the community felt in having their shared and constructed space abruptly taken offline. They knew that other drug markets would quickly take its place, but they mourned the loss of a collective culture that offered them a safe space in a highly contentious and risky environment. This mobility of people and practices across online environments taught me a key lesson as a digital ethnographer. This lesson was to not get attached to any one ‘site’ as the location of community, and to be prepared for some form of ‘site instability’ during the course of fieldwork. Therefore, each site should be thought of as a vessel traversing the digital Bermuda Triangle, potentially disappearing at any moment, and resilient strategies are needed for researching site-specific populations that are accustomed to dealing with this sort of turbulent and unstable online environment.

As I attempted to raise the visibility of our research project and conduct interviews among the community, I encountered several ethical conundrums. A central concern of the study, for both myself and Silk Road participants, was how personal visibility was to be negotiated in order to avoid vulnerability in this highly contentious social context – an issue I identify as ‘contentious visibility’. When posting about our research project in the Silk Road forums and associated online spaces, the striking dichotomy in communication styles explicitly revealed the local climate of contention and exposed an ethos through which community members gained traction (and satisfaction) from their capacity to attack one another, while masking themselves through posturing and belligerence.

In contrast to the Silk Road community members, I was highly visible and identifiable across online spaces and through my professional identity, working according to ‘best practices’ in trying to engage and recruit people into what may have been considered a risky endeavor for participants. Responses to the recruitment post ranged from endorsing the scope and security practices that the research was founded on to questioning both the credibility and impact of our work. Dialogue ranged from well written to opinionated and straight-out bullying, with the thread ending after a death threat. The contentious visibility that was evident in this dialogue was engendered by the playful and purposive splitting of online identities and the movement of users between multiple sites, which can make forum banning and blocking practices ineffective. These disruptive, fragmented and evasive practices are also characteristic of the distributed attachment that drives identity creation (both individual and communal) in cryptomarket spaces.

Why does this matter? Well, understanding contentious visibility in the unstable sites of cryptomarkets contributes to removing the veil from how people view, for example, their own health practices and the role of drug choice and consumption in relation to wellbeing. The healthcare and legislative systems in many countries are set to regulate drug consumption, positioning people as patients whose health conditions are subject to, and defined by, medical practitioners. During my fieldwork, it became obvious that the feisty Silk Road forum participants had a vastly different perspective on this issue.

From our research we found that there was indeed a contrast between their understanding and experiences of healthcare versus their choice-driven preferences for pathways to wellbeing, which I label ‘selfcare’. For some participants, the notion of healthcare was a constrictive regulatory system within which health practitioners produce authoritative diagnoses and hold the capacity to prescribe a suitable treatment and define the appropriate medications. This centralized system of authoritative and prescribed health support was, by its very nature, not resonating with the skepticism and sense of personal sovereignty that characterized the narratives and perspectives of many within the comminity surrounding Silk Road. Building on notions of power, self-directed health choices, and structural inhibition within the existing system of healthcare, one participant argued that responsibility regarding health and medication should be solely in the hands of the purchaser.

This ideation of self-directed care, including self-diagnosis and self-medication, is somewhat different from conceptualizations of online selfcare. Online selfcare is commonly seen as online information provision (such as that found in the Mayo Clinic website) and social support spaces. For the Silk Road community, however, online selfcare moved beyond information access and support, and included personal diagnosis and drug/medication purchasing through the cryptomarket. The debate surrounding the wisdom of this perspective is no doubt an ongoing one; however, the ‘flat’ structure of cryptomarkets, allowing them to retail illicit drugs and prescription drugs without distinction, does indeed reframe the power dynamics inherent to contemporary healthcare systems.

We have been able to draw many insights from this research and I am very grateful for the time, interest and patience that many members of this community showed me as I learnt the technical ropes and gained an understanding of the people involved and their online environment. In this post, I’ve highlighted how a disappearing field site, contentious visibility and an alternative notion of selfcare emerged from these interactions. These insights have the capacity to inform future digital ethnographic practice and to provide more nuanced insights into the online populations operating in digital fringes. As researchers entering this sort of digital Bermuda Triangle, we have the opportunity to observe ephemeral social experiments in alternative futures, but we also need to ensure that our research vessels are ‘seaworthy’, that we are open to the unexpected, and prepared with a resilient strategy for engaging contentious populations.

Cover image: Author unknown (2015), retrieved from online source.

Dr Alexia Maddox, Lecturer in Communication at the Deakin University School of Communication and Creative Arts, is a digital sociologist interested in the social impacts of technology, including social media and digital networked technologies. She studies digital frontiers and communities with stigmatized populations using technology to create and connect in emerging spaces online. Her recent book, ‘Research Methods and Global Online Communities: A case study’ (Routledge, 2015) presents an approach to mixed-methods research and is written to support postgraduate and early career researchers exploring these evolving social spaces through a myriad of techniques.

Crystal Abidin

Dr Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. She is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, and Adjunct Researcher with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. Crystal’s forthcoming book, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (Emerald Publishing, 2018) critically analyzes the contemporary histories and impacts of internet-native celebrity today. Reach her at wishcrys.com or @wishcrys.

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