Doing fieldwork on the internet is a whole new world opening up to me. (Although i admit that the opportunity has been there for a long time). Never has it been easier to seek out a field than in an online context. It is just a few clicks with your mouse, and swosh, you are there.

Of course, it is not without constraints. One thing that i did not think through before joining Second life is the fact that you can only ‘arrive’ at your field once! For the first time that is. Perhaps i should have done a little more research before doing so. After all, usually you know quite a deal about the subject of your study before jumping into it.

But done is done. I was lucky to meet someone who could help me out early on. It is just this: I am left wondering, ‘who is this someone that i met?’ In the world of online anonymity you never know for sure. And as this particular person pointed out to me, some people enjoy inventing new and completely different personas from their real-life-selves. Identity is everything in Second Life – especially if it is not “your own”.

So at this point i might start by formulating research questions that has to do with identity. How do people create their online personas? What is important to them when doing so? Is the development their online personas or avatars go through having an effect on their real world lives, or is it merely an escape? Maybe a bit of both. I am still lost as to having any sort of questions ready, whatsoever. Though maybe that might be a good thing.

I’m sure we will get a lot of the answers to these questions and the ones that will follow soon by reading Coming of Age in Second Life, which i am about to do, of course. But in the coming weeks i might try to find out if i can identify at least some very broad sub-groups of the people who inhabit Second Life.

Until then, please stay tuned. I will work vigilantly at making this site an at least interesting resource for those who are as amazed by the prospects of doing fieldwork online as i am.  

Personally, i think that it might be too soon to add someone if you’ve only spent something like an hour in their company, but then again, this shows that people have different attitudes towards social networking. Here’s some of what Annette Shaff, the author of the lifehacker article, has to say about the topic:

Again, we’d advise caution with Facebook, just because it’s such a tome of personal connections and information that you may not want public—and make no mistake, friending a company or coworkers means that information is public, at least at the office—but LinkedIn is always a good bet, as is Twitter, mostly because both are designed to be more public than private.

These were more or less my own first thoughts on the subject. Facebook is more private than LinkedIn and should therefore be for the people you know well – or did at some point. But as anthropologists we know that we should not jump to conclusions so fast. Instead we’ve stumbled upon a good research topic.

How are people relating to each other on the different social networks? And what makes users of a social network use it differently from each other? Obviously, someone who has 800 friends on Facebook is using it differently than someone who has 150. As digital anthropologists we can advantageously treat the different social networks as different fields (in the sense meant by Pierre Bourdieu) and make comparative studies of them.

What kind of social and cultural capital does it take to be a ‘success’ on Facebook? Or on Google plus? I am on both and can say that, yes, the people who define the discourse of the two sites are quite different. So going forward with defining ‘the anthropology of the web’ is not as difficult as some may think. As in the real world, there are borders separating various fields and there are both private and public spheres. But it gets confusing when you have to take into account that the fields in question are changing – fast.

Interestingly, thinking again about the mentioned Lifehacker article, Facebook very recently unveiled a new tool which lets you demote ‘friends’ to just being ‘acquaintances’ (without them knowing, of course). With improving privacy settings Facebook have found an effective way to keep its position as the number one social network. Because with these new settings it might not be too soon to add someone on Facebook at the same time as you add them on LinkedIn. But to what use is LinkedIn then? Not much perhaps. Its a clever tactic to make the competition unnecessary in the same way that Google plus is making Twitter less useful by implementing some of its features. The new acquaintance tool is, by the way, arguably also a take on Google’s ‘circles’. This feature was originally introduced in the wake of Google plus seeing the light of day last year.

I do think that there will continue to be a place for many of the different social networks on the scene. Each has its place. But it will be a long, long time before Facebook looses its place at the end of the long-table. And in the meantime, we will be there, following the battle of the social media discourses.

Daniel Miller is quite a figure of authority when it comes to the anthropological study of the web. Before he started focusing more on digital technology he was (still is, of course) an expert on material culture and mass consumption. Like me, he is originally trained in Archaeology before turning to Anthropology so i am particularly looking forward to reading his book and sharing what i get out of it with all of you.

Tom Boelstorff I do not know much about, but his wikipedia bio say’s that he has been doing research about HIV/AIDS, which I think sounds interesting. There’ll likely be no connection between his HIV/AIDS research and the research he has done on the virtual world Second life though.

Amazon recommends readers of ‘Tales from Facebook’ also to take a look at the following books:

Making is Connecting by David Gauntlett 

Personal Connections in the Digital Age by Nancy Baym

Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online by Robert Kozinets

As well as a wealth of other more or less ‘anthropological’ books about the internet. I will try to get the hold of more of those soon and make a reading list of literature relevant to this site.

Welcome to anthropology plus. The following is a brief introductory FAQ . (Which will be updated when new questions arise).

Why are we named anthropology plus?

Honestly, because all of the other names that were suggested during the naming brainstorm were already taken by other bloggers.   With millions of active (and formerly active) bloggers it is more than difficult to come up with a good brand name that no-one has thought of before you. This was also the case for us, and even though we are fans of sociology plus, a website that ‘provides an informal study of the socio-cultural anthropology of the Google+ society’, we decided to go through with using the similar brand anthropology plus anyway. 

Originally, we wanted to to name the site digital anthropology because this is what many scholars seem to agree as being a fitting name for the rather new sub-field of cultural anthropology studying the socio-cultural implications of social media and digital technology. That name, however, was taken along with others in the same line of thought.

To us, our name – anthropology plus – stands for progress – specifically related to the sociability of the web. It is partially inspired by the online magazine humanity plus which ‘covers technological, scientific and cultural trends that are changing – and will change – human beings in fundamental ways’. Our mission is sort of similar to this. However, all we do is write (hopefully interesting) anthropological articles about the implications of social media and digital technology.

What are our articles about?

Well. As already stated, we write about the socio-cultural implications of social media and digital technology. A specific interest of ours is to further theoretical and analytic approaches to the social scientific study of digital technology. One of our main goals is to write articles about specific methodologies when doing ethnographic fieldwork online in order to further the development of an anthropology of the internet. Obviously, we are only a very small fish in the sea , but we hope to do ours to further this goal. Other than that we write about viral online phenomena in general. Like the Kony2012 video. And lots of other things. We haven’t really decided to narrow down our field of study quite yet, so as of now everything that has to do with the internet may be written about on anthropology plus.