Escobar and HIne

Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture by Arturo Escobar looked like an interesting article until I came to the point where Escobar with his mouth wide open calls on Foucault (p. 213). I refuse to take seriously anyone who quotes or refers to Foucault as an authority. Anyone who borrows from Foucault, the French “intellectual” who attended sadomasochist parlours in California and supported Baader-Meinhof terrorists is a person who betrays philosophy as a noble and arduous discipline. To my critics who will say that I use ad hominem argument to attack one of the greatest thinkers of our modern era (Foucault) I kindly remind that ad hominem may apply to a mathematician, for example, one can beat his wife and still be good with numbers, but if a philosopher’s moral behaviour is questionable then his ideas are questionable too. To my other critics who will say that Escoabr has something interesting to say, I will respond, Adolf Hitler said many interesting things, and I am not joking. Good bye Arturo Escobar and Cyberia.

In Virtual Ethnography Christine Hine makes a number of important points in defence on virtual ethnography:
Explaining traditional ethnography: “Cultures are studies in their natural state, rather than as disturbed by survey techniques or experimental scenarios” (p. 42).
“The problem with an ethnographic approach to the Internet encompass both how it is to be constituted as an ethnographic object and how that object is to be authentically known” (p. 43).
‘The ethnography will always have to meet a different standard of authenticity to that prevailing in interactions in the filed: the ethnography is ultimately produced and evaluated in an academic setting” (p.50).
She interprets the Internet activity as “text.” In that context: “texts shoul be seen as ethnographic material which tells us about the understating which authors have of the reality which they inhabit” (p. 51).
She argues against holistic approach in favour of multi-dimensional p. 59 and quotes Marcus who suggests “a range of strategies for ethnographers to construct fields in the absence of bounded sites, including the following of people, things, metaphors, narrative, biographers and conflicts” (p. 61).