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Ethnography and Hermeneutics in Cybercultural Research
Accessing IRC Virtual Communities
Address: Computing Department, Maths and Computing Faculty, The Open University.
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes. MK7 6AA. United Kingdom. Phone: (+44)-19-0865-3096.
Abstract
This article suggests a qualitative methodological framework and a holistic-historicistic
epistemological perspective that balances the sociopsychological and cultural
dimensions of IRC Virtual Communities. CMC cultural research should not be focused
on intercultural collision phenomena alone, but also on cultural construction from
inside the Net. An ethnographic strategy discovering cybercultures together with
Gadamer's hermeneutics for the interpretation of systems of meanings are the
proposed tools for understanding “virtual” life and cultural production within the Net.
Introduction
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is an interdisciplinary field of study which
conceives new information technologies not only as data channels and banks, but also
as spaces for meeting and interaction (Dutton, 1998). Therefore, we are met with the
opening of virtual spaces in which people can construct new social and cultural
realities without even being physically there (Abdelnour, 1998). This situation
accentuates the symbolic and cultural dimension along which humans differ from the
rest of the organisms in the world (Mead, 1927). It is important not to forget
Rheingold's definition (2000) presented in his book The Virtual Community:
Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. According to Rheingold “virtual communities
are social aggregates that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those
public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of
personal relationships in cyberspace (p. xx).” It is obvious that this concept provides a
cultural and sociopsychological vision. These webs of Rheinghold are very much like
those webs of meaning of Geertz (1973) when he refers to culture. Marvin (1996)
proposes virtual communities as cultural groups that construct their own culture
through the use of a set of expressive and interpretative resources (in which language
plays the main role).
In these virtual settlements (Jones, 1997), groups of users establish networks of
relationships through the use and development of a specific language, which
preserves the identity of the community's members. This notion of an identity shared
by the virtual community is vital, for it helps to support the cohesion and the sense of
the group's life. As a result, this leads to a cyberculture that is inherent to the group
and is also constructed collectively in “webs of meaning” that the group has spun
(Geertz, 1973). In these webs, humans live and construct their cultural, social and
psychological realities.
Approaching these virtual symbolic spaces, where users build their own way of life by
means of a language, requires a methodology and an epistemology that best fit the
notion of a multiple-face, a non-physical person who is able to create as many
personalities as “worlds” he or she accesses. Therefore, if for psychology's classic
epistemology the unit of study is overt behavior, for the social psychology applied in
this work the unit of study is the symbol, its meanings and experiences; of course, all
this being extracted from the community's textual social discourse.
Epistemological Foundations
We are standing in front of a person who activates a collection of social resources of
meanings made available by the situation, and who is in turn activated within the
framework of those meanings (Jensen, 1991). This may be observed when a first-time
user enters a virtual settlement. this person will have to absorb the community's
language and culture (both already existing) in order to perform interactions adapted
to the settlement's symbolic reality. From this conception of the human being, it is
evident that both language and action are intertwined in a discursive sense, as
expressed by Harré (1993). A person living in virtual settlements is then conceived as a
responsible creating agent with a history of its own. As in the real life, signification in
cybercommunities is a collective achievement, and each one of the members inside
that collective recreates, reproduces and changes it (Fernández, 1994). This vision of
the knowing process turns inquiry not into a simple discovery or a critical method of
analysis, but into a complicituous partner within the meaningful systems in which we
live, whether virtual or real. Cyber research, as any other sociocultural inquiry, is part
of the reality-producing enterprise (Anderson, 1992; Caputo, 1992).
Discovering Structures and Cultures in virtual Communities
In order to access the social and cultural reality of virtual communities, Jones (1997)
makes a distinction between the cyberspace inside which the community “lives”
(called virtual settlement), and the community itself. And it is precisely through the
analysis of these virtual settlements, their language and objective components, that
we can classify and analyze the properties of a cybercommunity.
The research strategy that conducts this kind of study is of an ethnographic nature. As
Paccagnella (1997) notes: “a longitudinal strategy of research which systematically
compares specific aspects of virtual communities over different periods of time” is
necessary for the understanding of on-line culture. Ethnography in virtual communities
research has been a strategy directly or indirectly used for studying several aspects of
a virtual group's life: sociolinguistics (Paolillo, 1999), group communication studies
(Reid, 1991), networked interactivity (Rafaeli & Sudweeks, 1997), aesthetics and
expression (Danet, 1998; Marvin, 1996), identity as a psychosocial phenomenon
(Bruckman, 1992), language and culture (Paccagnella, 1996), social aggregates (Smith,
1992), and archaeological-anthropological perspectives (Jones, 1997; Liu, 1999). Most
of them use a positivistic explanatory method with its corresponding quantitative data
analysis. From Paccagnella's point of view, the discussion of qualitative/quantitative as
excluding categories should be transcended, since full understanding of virtual
communities has to be gained from in-depth interpretations; this does not mean,
however, that quantitative instruments and statistics have to be discarded a priori from
the research strategy. Quantitative tools are necessary to the extent that cybergroup
activity tends to be very chaotic and with large numbers of users.
This article's proposal revolves around an ontological conception of the virtual
community (specifically those living in Internet Relay Chat environments) as a dynamic
meaningful system in which language, actions, culture and norms fuse into a discursive
process and product. Given the fact that our starting point is an ethnographic strategy,
it is quite clear that the main goal of research is to get to know the culture constructed,
which involves, supports and fosters collective life within the virtual settlement. The
attitude of analysis is that of Gadamer (1975) and Heidegger (1962), based on the
ideas of the hermeneutic school. The analyzed discourse being the merging of the
hermeneutic text and context, it would be rather pointless to pretend that the
qualitative data analysis stage be separated from the gathering process, since the
hermeneutical attitude guides not only data interpretation but also data collection. The
community's interaction is taken as a text to be analyzed and, above all, understood.
There is an important consideration regarding the history of the virtual community and
its users, which leads to a better understanding of how language, symbolic webs of
meaning and values evolve to integrate the virtual community's culture. To speak about
understanding in a hermeneutic sense means to discover the structure and dynamics
of the intersubjective space of these cybergroups. Then, we may look at culture as a
collective product, and intersubjectivity (Berger & Luckman, 1967) as the space where
this culture is constantly being created and recreated. One of the main aspects
pointed out by Gadamer (1975) and his posture on the knowing process is the crossing
of “worlds of sense,” which certainly considers the historicity of the object of study
along with the world of the researcher, who is a participant observer. That notion of
existence over time offers a holistic vision of the virtual community's agents and their
roles within the group.
The main objective of cybercultural research is then to obtain a thick ethnography
(Geertz, 1973). This means that those objective and extremely descriptive
ethnographic records - somehow “dry” from my point of view - will be replaced by
reports in which hermeneutical explanation and understanding (Ricoeur, 1981) are the
main sources evidencing a reality in constant transformation, and these will lead to a
conscience of the sense, guiding and supporting those real sociocultural worlds in
virtual spaces. This sense is understood as the north of the hermeneutic inquiry. In
contrast to both formal structures and causal laws, the hermeneutics approach seeks
to elucidate and make our practical understanding of human actions explicit by
providing an interpretation of these actions (Packer, 1985). In the case of virtual
communities, besides common conversation, most actions are performed through
written discourse.
Since this article has an ethogenic influence (not to be confused with ethnogenic,) the
analysis is aimed at discovering not only ethnographic, traditional information about
the community's culture, but its members' accounts of “actions” and communications
inside the social aggregate. This information is obtained through open in-depth
interviews about topics related to the group's life and culture. Harré (1979) makes a
clever and illuminating distinction in relation to account analysis:
We must distinguish the speech we use when we are talking descriptively about
the prescriptions of our own culture, contributing to our own ethnography, so to
speak, from the speech we use to justify some action of ours to others within the
culture, the kind of speech that has come to be called accounting.
The language of virtual communities is the main substance of study in this
methodological proposal. As noted earlier, action and words fuse in only one
continuum, thus becoming a complex discourse, which is drawn from an
intersubjective space defining an everyday way of life, just like what we experience in
our physical world (Beger & Luckmann, 1967).
Stages of Ethnography
Stage 1
This stage corresponds mainly to access to and familiarization with the community's
language. In the same way, contact with key users within the group is established to let
them know about the purpose of the research. The practice that predominates in this
first approach is passive observation; the goal here is to learn basic skills and gain
social and cultural knowledge for coherent, fluid interactions in the future with the
virtual community under study.
It is important to point out that the record of the interactions and communications is
saved automatically on hard disk. This detailed record makes the task of analysis
easier, since the researcher need not transcribe the data.
Stage 2
Once the researcher has learned basic notions for interacting with the community, he
or she is ready to begin with participant observation. Participant observation allows for
entry into those limited zones of meaning (Berger & Luckman, 1967) otherwise
impossible to reach.
Stage 3
The participant observation stage will identify some relevant and key informers within
the virtual group. Through focused ethnographic interviews, these informers can
provide in-depth knowledge and interesting accounts about their personal experiences
and the community's cultural framing. These interviews have an ethogenic influence,
because their goal not only revolves around ethnographic information, but is also
directed at personal accounts highlighting interesting differences between local
cultural prescriptions and what is really accomplished and perceived from that
cyberculture. Account information facilitates access to those contents which are not
yet totally shared, but that will soon be incorporated into the cultural framing of the
virtual community. This kind of qualitative data gathering and analysis opens a window
onto the sociopsychological dynamics of public and private life within the group.
Stage 4
In this last stage, a concluding analysis is made so as to arrange the resulting emerging
categories found during the research process. Strauss and Corbin (1994) suggest a
model for the construction of qualitative data through axial categories. This model is
interesting for those who are not familiar with qualitative methods, even though it
cannot be easily applied in all cases. In the field of virtual communities, the main axial
category from which an ethnographic approach usually starts is the text-based
discourse as social action.
The passing from one stage to another depends on the group's size and the number of
topics to be researched within the community. It may range from one to twelve
months. An important aspect to recall is that a cybergroup's symbolic reality tends to
change easily over time.
Understanding Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Communities: A Venezuelan
Case
IRC is a multi-user synchronous communication Internet platform. IRC text-based
environments are ideal for the establishment of virtual groups because of the
conditions for easy connection they offer and the devices facilitating access and
maintenance of the channels in which communities live. The IRC design provides the
necessary conditions pointed out by Jones (1997) for virtual settlements as indicators
of a community's life: (1) a minimum level of interactivity; (2) a variety of
communicators; (3) a common public space; and (4) a minimum level of sustained
membership. Liu (1999, p.3) develops Jones' idea that not all CMC implies a
community's existence:
Recognizing that a CMC environment has the potential to nurture the development
of a virtual community is fundamentally different from taking any group CMC as
evidence of community without justification. Any attempt at characterizing a virtual
environment and analyzing its online activities without first comparing its
properties against empirical signposts of community is methodologically flawed.
Although this work does not deal directly with distinguishing virtual communities in
IRC from those in other technical settings, it has strong implication for such
studies.
I share Liu's idea but with some important differences. Liu's approach (1999) seeks
empirical-operational fixed parameters to identify the legitimate existence of a virtual
community. It would be like a preexisting device that, once applied to any CMC in IRC
environments, will cast out the positive or negative proof of a virtual community's
existence. This article's line of research is also looking for that collective and shared
notion of membership and culture, but goes even further as it tries to understand the
dynamic process of the symbolic production and reproduction that gives sense to the
cybergroup's everyday life. In this case the hermeneutical construct of sense would be
the main axis around which the virtual community develops its life (Ricoeur, 1981).
After sixteen months of ethnographic research, a resulting structure of categories that
explains and helps understanding Venezuela's IRC community was obtained (see
Figure 1). This model was presented with a high level of abstraction so that readers
could take it as a possible research outline for other IRC virtual communities. Since this
article does not pretend to develop an in-depth theoretical elaboration, I will only make
a brief description of these final categories, which are obviously linked to my
conceptual framework.
IRC Venezuela's cultural and social model.
We must establish a distinction between two basic spaces of reality: the physical world
and the virtual world. From the physical world, we obtain the first basic elements of
affinity for IRC Venezuela, which are a possession of Venezuela's cultural influences in
the field of everyday life, just like urban language, lifestyle in general, music, sports,
trivia, politics, etc. These are referential symbolic systems from outside the virtual
settlement that help in constructing the cybergroup's own culture within the Net. The
cyberculture has also an intersubjective space, in which symbolic systems inside the
virtual settlement are produced, reproduced and changed. These shared meanings
and values constitute the identity of the group's members. The topics of conversation
and discussion tend to vary and drift along with the flow at two levels: (1) accounts
about what is happening in the country (real world); and (2) accounts about internal
events and general discussions of the cybergroup, namely someone's birthday, flirting,
fights, virtual parties, debates on what is wrong or right in human relationships, life and
death, sex, aliens, etc. These symbolic systems have an affective dimension that will
determine the ups and downs of the community's interactive flow.
So, taking a closer look at the group's chatting, it will be difficult to find a specific
pattern of content in this sociocultural knowledge; what is clearly permanent is the
presence of the social phenomenon described by Simmel (1910) as sociability. This
affective pleasure of chatting is the main factor that will give the motivational forces of
cohesion and attraction to the virtual group's life.
As it has been stated, the main substance of analysis for IRC Venezuela is language,
which is expressed through a text-based discourse. This aspect of IRC is of vital
interest since, on the basis of text characters, not only linguistic change is achieved
(chatting) but also a non-linguistic expression is accomplished through drawing figures
like the traditional smilies ( and ), flowers, banners, rockets, etc. Besides the non-
linguistic expression in IRC groups, like the text-made gestures mentioned, there is
another dimension deployed from the text-based discourse that I call action-in-text.
Here, most of the textual interactions occurring transcend completely its non-linguistic
semiotic character to an action level with a high load of social meaning. For instance, if
I decide to “kiss” another user within the virtual community, I shall write: <Jabdel>:
*Ja bde l k iss es Lad yB and give s h er a ––,'–<@ (flower). This communication is
symbolically understood as an action, not as a linguistic expression. Following this line,
we could say that the IRC language features an important pragmatic dimension (Van
Dijk, 1998). That is to say, every form of interaction would be considered as a social act
(Harré, 1979), with its corresponding place and value within the virtual community's
normative dimension. That is the reason why this epistemological perspective focuses
on meaning regardless of the symbolic support (textual chatting, non-linguistic
expression through text, action-in-text). An analysis of the IRC community's language
and accounts produce as a result an X-ray picture of the normative structure which
gives sense, cohesion and a real, permanent pattern of identity to the users of IRC
Venezuela. These structures are neither classical, logical nor context-free, but have an
important recognition of the group and its people as entities with a history, with values
and feelings. The cybergroup's normative system works just like any other real life
group. It has several language codes and rules of behavior that set the defining
conditions for acts seen as transgressions (flooding, lurking, spamming, etc.), and
sanctions (kicking, banning, downgrading, etc.), that should follow them, as well as
acts deserving recognition with the corresponding reward (public recognition, upgrade
to channel operator, etc.).
Therefore, it could be said that there are two main axial categories determining
discursive production in IRC Venezuela: (1) the community's culture understood as
shared microsocial knowledge produced inside an intersubjective dynamic space with
some external Venezuelan references that is full of sociability, giving strength to the
interaction flow; (2) a normative dimension which is the most stable structure that
really shapes the identity of the IRC Venezuela's group through the establishment of
language cultural codes, rules of behavior and moral careers (Harrè, 1993).
Why is Cybercultural Research Important?
This article attempts to contributes to the research in CMC around the world, and to
highlight new research lines being developed in Latin America. This methodological
and epistemological perspective was aimed at achieving a better understanding of the
on-line living, studying an active human being who creates a reality of his/her own, but
at the same time created by the collective (Fernández, 1994). Paccagnella (1997)
proved this perspective to be a useful tool for accessing the reality of virtual
communities. I am well aware of an ideological, critical dimension (Habermas, 1993) to
be studied in these communities. Nevertheless, the main objective of this article is to
offer a way for entering these symbolic worlds. A qualitative strategy of analysis, as
was shown here, is an optimal way to grasp the richness of psychosocial and cultural
life of on-line stable groups. It is important to note that the human relations created
inside the Net are real, in spite of the virtual spaces where they unfold.
It is quite probable that we need to find in CMC the new answers to the social nature of
the human being of the third millennium. These micro realities are just a little reflex of
what is to come. Having full knowledge of the phenomena involved in the process of
“virtual” life opens new horizons in the study of the new human cultures. At the same
time, it will set the pace in the new road towards a critical human being, in complete
connection and dialogue with humankind (Habermas, 1993). Technology generates
new spaces and possibilities; what we do with them is up to the constructive and
active character of humans: those who discovered that the Earth was round, who
introduced light in a bulb, who affirmed the relativity of universe, who stepped on the
moon.
Acknowledgments
National Council of Scientific and Technological Research, CONICIT.
Graduate Studies Division, Simon Bolivar University.
Social Communication School, Catholic University Andres Bello.
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