Hine, Fay, Wittel

Hine, Christine. (1998). “Virtual Ethnography”.

In “Virtual Ethnography” Christine Hine describes the Internet not just as a communication medium but as the Louise Woodward case shows also culture and as cultural artefact. As she states her paper should not be read as an announcement of already achieved project, but rather a “starting point which aims to map” virtual ethnography. She disagrees with “Marcus (1995) [who] identifies a trend for ethnographies to encompass multiple sites in a bid to follow complex objects through a series of cultural contexts” (p. 4) and although she chooses “to encompass multiple sites in considering the Internet as a culture and cultural artifact” she describes her approach “as a virtual ethnography rather than a multi-sited one” (p.5) for the following reasons:

1. “Virtual” is the metaphoric term which means that occurring action exists online, not depended on “time, location and presence” (p. 5) This occurrence makes it “a-sited rather than multi-sited ethnography”(p. 5).
2. Her second point is as obscure as the first one. She talks about “virtual to play on the anxieties which this kind of ethnography can produce” (p.5). Whatever that means.
To sum up, I find her article an attempt not a starting point to make sense of the Internet, its culture, and virtual ethnography.



Fay, Michaela. (2007). “Mobile Subjects, Mobile Methods: Doing Virtual Ethnography in a Feminist Online Network.”

The second article is so useless that I don’t think I can bring myself up to write anything witty. It is a boring and predictable feminist writing about nothing. Michaela Fay says, “the aim of the article is to demonstrate how online connectivity, alongside a differentiated understanding of mobility and academic feminism, shapes belonging in the context of a transnational feminist network” (p. 1). Then she boasts, “women are playing an increasingly important role as ‘agents of change’ (p. 1) as they have been “closing the ‘technology gap’ between the sexes, using the internet and communication technologies” (p.1).

Michaela Fay and the feminists are about 20 years late with this statement. Women were always the first to use new technologies from cellular phones, to video-cameras, to on-demand streaming, to the Internet – prostitutes and stripers. Prostitutes are extremely mobile AND in terms of using and utilizing new technology, ahead of everybody else. It is for this reason that Fay’s article did not bring any insights into the topic of women and technology, but let me tell you Ms. Fay: your 2000 conference sponsored by German taxpayers money was on the periphery of a real technological happening. Wake up.


Wittel, Andreas. (2000). “Ethnography on the move: From field to net to Internet”.

Main idea of Wittel’s article is that the purpose of ethnography, or cultural anthropology as Clifford Geertz described, "they have a culture out there and your job is to come back and tell us what it is" (p. 1) is outdated. Outdated as “societies have modernised and differentiated and so have cultures” (p. 2). Therefore, the concept of “the field” cannot be geographically defined to one place as people became mobile. Wittel proposes after Marcus and Fisher that “ethnographies should be conceptualised multi-locally or as multi-sited “ (p. 2). He also insists that “ethnography …is on the move [from geographically defined ‘fields’] towards socio-political locations, networks, and multi-sited approaches” (p. 8).

My angle is that Geertz’s idea of “cultures out there” but not in his office or in Manhattan was already outdated in his times as he adopted anthropology of British Empire but without understating that British anthropologists inspired by Darwin and his evolutionism tried to find out answers to modern day problems in understanding of the workings of ‘savage’ cultures.
To Wittel’s idea that “ethnography is on the move” I propose this question: did culture move from radio to television?