Paccagnella, Luciano. (1997). “Getting the Seat of Your Pants Dirty: Strategies for Ethnographic Research on Virtual Communities”. Journal of Computer

While I was reading an article by Luciano Paccagnella I thought I was reading cyber archeology. It’s amazing how we progressed. Reading his article is almost like reading Morgan. OK, I exaggerate, I actually like Morgan, but, but, but many so-called networks that he talks about do not exist anymore. For instance, Usnet groups are really Bronze Age. This article actually reminded me that Usnet groups existed. I forgot all about them. Poor Usnet groups, they can’t even be called dinosaurs because dinosaurs are kind of glamorous while Usnet groups are, well, sooo… backward!

In his chapter “Naturalistic analysis” he talks about ethical problems while studying virtual groups. He cites two problems “specifically related to participant observation in CMC: going native and role conflict, the first referring to involving oneself in the group to the extent that objectivity is lost, while the second means a dilemma between the goals of the group and those of the evaluation” (p. 5).

It’s a problem I’ve noticed in our class project. A few students are doing research on groups they are already ”native members” of. Objectivity is obviously already lost before any research has been done.

Paccagnella cites ethical guidelines on doing research on the Internet established by in the ProjectH Research Group in 1993-94:
1. Viewing and analysis of public on CMC are public. “Such study is more akin to the study of tombstone epitaphs, graffiti, or letters to the editor. Personal? - yes. Private- no.” (p. 6).
2. Messages posted on messages boards are not equivalent to private letters. “They are instead public acts deliberately intended for public consumption” (p.6).

In closing Paccagnella notes the beginning of multimedia systems on the Internet. He states,

Research on virtual communities cannot ignore these new environments, which can potentially take the task of the researcher extraordinarily close to that of traditional field anthropologists.
Screenshots taken from graphical worlds like Alphaworld [4] show a land inhabited by different people and modeled by different artifacts: buildings, streets, gardens, means of transportation and other tools may be analyzed in their shapes and aesthetics. They can be captured and compared by specific software, perhaps like that discussed above for textual CMC.
Research on virtual communities will then be even more similar to research on traditional communities in "real life."

I was never tempted to have a “second life” to kill my time or to talk to people who hide behind avatars, but as some of well-known retailers opened their stores there, I think Paccagnella is correct in his prediction.