Ethnobase is a web resource for ethnographic approaches to studying Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The site is based at the London School of Economics, Department of Sociology, and aims to network the growing ranks of ICT ethnographers, increasing communication and awareness of our work.

Hypermedia offers ethnographers a powerful new medium for authoring. Its potentialities suggest various levels of convergence with the concerns of critical theory and post-paradigm ethnography. Nevertheless, the project of authoring academic ethnographic hypertexts is fraught with difficulty, not least due to the difficulties of formulating a new rhetorics which can offer the same persuasive power as the conventional printed narrative. Hypertext opens up particular kinds of authoring innovations, such as the linking together of data, analysis and interpretation in the same medium, and the juxtapositioning of materials in written, visual and aural forms. A new multi-semiotic ethnography is becoming possible through digital technologies, which will have to develop new ways of ordering academic argumentation and analysis.

Combine phenomenal increases in buying power, a growing population, and rising Internet penetration, and find a valuable demographic market. The African-American community is becoming a strong online presence, and creating its own unique identity.

Ethnography is a long established method for research and analysis that involves the immersion of the researcher into the activities and practises are being researched. Streams of this discipline emerged with the birth of the Internet aptly named “online ethnography” or “virtual ethnography”, to describe this research in the content of net or cyber-cultures.

Cybersex in online chat rooms is defined here as having two forms: 1) computer mediated interactive masturbation in real time and, 2) computer mediated telling of interactive sexual stories (in real time) with the intent of arousal. Both of these forms of cybersex are found on America Online. Ethnographic methods are used in researching and writing this paper.

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L'ethnographie appliquée aux relations sociales et aux réseaux sur Internet, par sa pratique concrète d'immersion dans le milieu social, essaie de décrire l'histoire et le ressort des communautés virtuelles, analysant des espaces construits par les individus sociaux en même temps que leurs discours et leurs pratiques.

La rivoluzione delle comunicazioni prodotta dall’esplodere delle reti telematiche di cui Internet, la Rete, è la materializzazione più visibile, ha effetti molteplici che coinvolgono potenzialmente tutte le sfere dell’attività e dell’organizzazione umana. E’ diffusa la sensazione che la posta in gioco delle trasformazioni in atto sia piuttosto alta, stiamo vivendo, molto probabilmente, un momento di passaggio epocale che sembra somigliare ad altri periodi cruciali della storia umana. Mark Poster la paragona all’emergere della cultura urbana e mercantile nel feudalesimo.

Naval Postgraduate School Monterey, CA
At any given moment there are thousands of surveys and polls being conducted on the web, yet surprisingly little scholarly research is reported about this new technique. After a summary review of the comparative literature on e-mail and "snail mail" and a more extensive review of research involving web-based methods, this article contrasts e-mail and web-based survey techniques used in an ongoing study of the web presence provider industry. Practical issues of web-surveying methods are highlighted, such as programming pitfalls, sample-building, and incentives.

The project of developing an anticipatory anthropology of the future reveals unique ethical opportunities. For example, the increased importance of performance means there is a substantial potential for a substantive "resocialing". of work in organizations, just as the decline of Modernism opens space for collective, situated ethics as opposed to individualized categorical imperatives.

L'ethnographie appliquée aux relations sociales et aux réseaux sur Internet, par sa pratique concrète d'immersion dans le milieu social, essaie de décrire l'histoire et le ressort des communautés virtuelles, analysant des espaces construits par les individus sociaux en même temps que leurs discours et leurs pratiques.

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L’avvento dell’era digitale, effetto dello sviluppo delle tecnologie informatiche, comporta una crescita costante del numero di persone che utilizzano internet quale strumento oltre che per apprendere informazioni, anche incontrare amicizie, intrecciare amori, scambiare emozioni. In pratica internet sta diventando sempre più uno strumento attraverso il quale si stabilisce, con particolari caratteri, una vita di relazione. Anche le tematiche religiose hanno trovato il loro posto in questo uso della Rete, al punto che è possibile affermare che la religione, dopo il sesso e l’informatica sia, dal punto di vista dei singoli utenti (con esclusione, quindi, degli scambi tra istituti e organizzazioni), il terzo più diffuso tema attorno cui si concentrano gli interessi degli internauti (Hadden&Cowan 2000).

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.

This paper explores methodological issues raised by an ethnographic approach to the Internet. The paper is motivated by an ongoing concern with the Internet as a technology and as a communication medium. The aim is to develop ways to study not just to how people use the Internet, but also the practices which make those uses of the Internet meaningful in local contexts. The first section of the paper maps out an emerging approach which is illustrated in the second section by data drawn from the Louise Woodward case. The final section reflects on the implications for methodological adequacy of an ethnographic approach increasingly divorced from reliance on a single bounded field site.

Among the most important transformations in the discipline of anthropology over the last hundred years are changes in our conception of what constitutes anthropological knowledge. In the wake of the adoption early in the Twentieth Century of ethnographic fieldwork as something of a methodological standard in social and cultural anthropology came an implicit recognition of the cultural relativity of knowledge, that what counts as “known” varies from cultural to culture. Over the century, this recognition co-existed more or less uneasily with the Malinowskian and both earlier and later forms of commitment to a “science” program in the discipline.

The study of social worlds built by people on computer networks challenges the classical dimensions of sociological research. CMC scholars are prompted to exploit the possibilities offered by new, powerful, and flexible analytic tools for inexpensively collecting, organizing, and exploring digital data. Such tools could be used within a Weberian perspective, to aid in systematic examination of logs and messages taken from the actual life of a virtual community.