II. Literature Review

Merey Seitova

ANT 475 – Digital Ethnographies

First Paper: Project Proposal Instructions

I. Research Topic

Digital Ethnographies appeared to be an interesting research field once we had been introduced to it. Unfortunately, I am not interested in conducting research in virtual worlds like Second life or There.com, however, I do not mean to discredit the research conducted by Celia Pearce or Tom Boellstorff. I was impressed by the research performed in the virtual worlds because these were completely unfamiliar fields of research. Nevertheless, I felt more comfortable with conducting research in social networks such as Facebook, Instagram or VKontakte. One of the reasons why I chose Facebook is that I am an active Facebook user and as it was said by Tom Boellstorff the personal interest plays one of the significant roles in managing research in digital worlds. Facebook was created in 2004 and on 27^th of August 2015 it counted one billion users. (Facebook.com, 2015). The mission of Facebook presented by its founders states “Founded in 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them”. (Facebook, 2015). From what was stated the impression is that Facebook has become a major online internet communication platform. People share their life experience through Facebook and put a part of themselves in what they post, what they “like”, what pages they follow. In this sense I can relate Facebook to the findings by Celia Pearce when she discovered how attached participants of Uru had become to the game and to their avatars. (Pearce, 2009:219).

The book “Ethnography and Virtual Worlds” explained that the ethnographic research is more of the explorative approach. (Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce and Taylor, 2012:52). In many cases it is not necessary to have a clear research question but rather have a general direction of interest. (Boellstorff et al., 2012:52-53). The aspects I would like to study through Facebook are communication, language, culture, and, perhaps, media. Therefore, I would like to research how people change their behavior in language and culture that they use while communication via Facebook. However, this is an initial direction of my research and changes might occur during the ethnographic research.

II. Literature Review

Naturally, the books that we have covered during the course will be helpful for my research. “Ethnography and Virtual Worlds” by T. Boellstorff, B. Nardi, C. Pearce, and T.L. Taylor is a very detailed and comprehensive handbook for the starting ethnographers because it introduces the opportunities that ethnographic research can provide. Moreover, the handbook revealed the general myths that people have about ethnography. The authors greatly discussed the participant observation method of research and broadly explained it using their own experience. (Boellstorff et al., 2012:29-48).

Another book which we have not read but we will further in the course is the “Tales from Facebook” by Daniel Miller. This book is directly connected to the research topic I plan to study. This book was one of the inspirations that encouraged me to focus on Facebook additionally to the original ideas I had about this paper. Miller included the stories by different Facebook users who share their own experience and describe their impressions and perceptions of online communication. Additionally to that, the book included the Anthropology of Facebook, in which the author exactly talked about relation between Facebook and individuals separately. Also, Miller talks about the relation between Facebook and the community; in this section most interestingly Politics are discussed as well. (Miller, 2011). Another advantageous point of this book is the bibliographic resources that the author used which will then be helpful for my research.

I also found the electronic book about research done on Social Networks among which Facebook was studied too. The book was written by Susan B. Barnes and introduces the new method how Social Networks can be used in teaching the students considering the progress of social interactions in internet. Barnes analyzed such social internet platforms like Facebook, Courseware and Second Life. This can be related to the book we have read “Coming of Age in Second Life” by Tom Boellstorff and the guest lecture we had by Jean-Paul DuQuette about Second Life. Jean DuQuette actually taught English language to a group of students via Second Life. It is interesting that Barnes defined Second Life as social network, whereas Boellstorff defined it as virtual world. According to Boellstorff et al., virtual worlds are defined by that (1) “they are places and have a sense of worldness”, (2) “they are multi-users and are shared social environments”, (3) they are persistent because they continue to prevail even when users are offline, (4) users are represented by avatar. (Boellstorff et al., 2012:7). Facebook does not fall under such definition of virtual worlds since it is not exactly the place and lacks the sense of worldness. Nevertheless, Facebook contain some worlds within the platform. It is curious how different authors approach the matters of Social Networks and Virtual Worlds differently. This book will enrich my ethnographic research by providing more extensive information about the social interactions in social networks.

Apart from the books from the library, I usually like to use the electronic resources and databases. I searched for the articles with “Facebook” as the keyword and discovered a number of interesting electronic articles. One of them is the article titled “Why do people use Facebook?” by Ashwini Nadkarni and Stefan G. Hofmann published in 2011 and reached to using Elsevier database. The article is very thought provoking as it addresses the issues I was interested in about this research. The article starts with the review of the demographic characteristics of users of Facebook. After that the article turns to the rather psychological review including discussion of the personal characteristics of users. Moreover, the paper describes how the Facebook usage is motivated by two factors. One factor is the need of belonging which means the need of social interaction and acceptance. Second factor is the “need for self-presentation” meaning that Facebook provides its users with the opportunity to present themselves in a certain manner that they prefer. (Nadkarni and Hofmann, 2011:245). Although this article presented research of rather psychiatric and psychological approach it is beneficial to develop and improve my broader perception of Facebook users.

Another article from electronic database I encountered is the article called “The effect of social networking websites on positive self-views: An experimental investigation” by Brittany Gentile, Jean M. Twenge, Elise C. Freeman, W. Keith Campbell. The researchers conducted two experiments to examine how social networks shape personal and identity characteristics of people. The article first discusses how social networks are self-focused because users post their own pictures and posts, and share ideas that reflect their own perceptions. (Gentile et al., 2012:1929-1930). Then the article describes the personality traits that might be developed or influenced by social networks. The experiments included the observation of participants’ browsing their platforms and questionnaires. The researchers then analyzed and compare the experiments findings. The results demonstrated that the MySpace users presented narcissistic traits whereas the Facebook users presented higher levels of self-esteem and self-presentation but not narcissism. (Gentile at al., 2012:1930-1932). The article can significantly contribute to my planned research because of exploration of self-presentation and self-perception of individual users.

“Networked multilingualism: Some language practices on Facebook and their implications” by Jannis Androutsopoulos is another electronic article I found. It is a very exciting article as it addresses the question of language usage in Facebook which was my primary interest. The article connects the concept of multilingualism and the “computer-mediated communication on a social network site” such as Facebook. (Androutsopoulos, 2015:186). Even though the focus of paper is on the multilinguistic communication, it also includes aspects about language usage in Internet. The article concentrated on three perspectives of “network multilingualism”: how the digital written communication is restricted, the opportunities provided by the global web, and coordination of the connections systems among people. These restrictions contribute to all resources of language usage. The author used the ethnographic approach which is very critical for me to see how such approach was used in language and Facebook research. Specifically, Androutsopoulos observed the online activities of the participants, collected and analyzed the screen data, and directly communicated with the users. (Androutsopoulos, 2015:185, 200-201).

III. Methodology

A. Observation

I have never conducted any research in the digital field; hence, I will try to rely on the previous research I have read and books we have covered during the course. My research will include going out to the research field which in my case is Facebook. This should not cause many problems as I visit my Facebook page more than once per day. I have access to Facebook through my mobile phone and my computer as well. The internet connection in the University and University dormitories is free; hence the financial obstacles will be avoided. I plan to observe how people communicate in the comments because most of posts, comments and publications are open for access and observation. I will also monitor how people communicate via comments and what they write in response to each other. The conflicts that occur in Facebook comments are also interesting to observe and analyze. The ways how people handle the conflicts and responsive negative comments will be a part of my observation.

B. Interviews

I will conduct interviews with participants via Facebook message service. I will develop the questionnaire that will focus on gathering information about how people communicate via Facebook. I will ask questions about with whom people choose to communicate through Facebook. Facebook is a global platform for access to information and communication. Therefore, people from all over the world employ Facebook communication tools to reach each other. For instance, I talk to my host family who live in Kansas, USA, and my professors who used to work in Nazarbayev University. Besides reaching my friends in USA, I talk to my friends from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Germany, and South Korea. Hence, on my own example we can see that Facebook unites and connects people from various countries from different continents.

I will also ask question about the reasons why people communicate via Facebook. I assume that the reasons could be as stated before that they want to connect to people who are far distanced from them. Another reason could be that people have social or personal issues or are socially isolated that motivate them to use Facebook messaging. The research mentioned above in the Literature Review is much concerned about the personality issues of Facebook users. That will help me to determine what exact features of personal and social issues I would like to examine in Facebook.

Other questions of the interviews will target the ways how people communicate in Facebook. I am interested in self-evaluation of people about their communication in social networks. How people evaluate the changes in how they speak to other people in social networks compared to face-to-face communication? How do they feel themselves changing? What kind of changes occurs: grammar, attitude, word choice?

The questionnaire will include the concrete question about the above mentioned issues. Apart from that, I will include possible follow-up questions. In case of emergence of an interesting topic I will ask questions to continue discussion about the topic. However, since the interviews will be via internet I will have to adjust the written and spoken interview questionnaire to online interviewing.

The blogs and platforms dedicated to language and communication in social networks including Facebook will be practical and useful as well. I have not searched for those yet; however, I plan to look for such blogs and platforms.

C. Participants

Participants for the interviews will be chosen based on their agreement to participate in research. Since my research is limited by the term period I will not be able to interview many people. I will try first to begin with two or three interviewees because analysis of data collected through interviews requires a lot of time. And I suggest that I will devote most of research time to observation of language and communication behavior of Facebook users.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 863