19

Always at Crossroads

Studying Online/Offline Intersections as a Postcolonial Feminist Researcher

Radhika Gajjala

In her article “The Challenge of Changing Audiences,” Sonia Livingstone notes the shift in media communication from “mass” (one to many) to “communication among peers (both ‘one to one’ and ‘many to many’).” She asks if this means “that the concept of the audience is obsolete” (Livingstone, 2004, p. 75). Indeed, in turning to study the Internet and computer-mediated communication, one might ask this question: Is the phrase “audience research” relevant anymore? For instance we hear terms such as “lurker,” “participant,” and “prosumer” (producer plus consumer), which seem to suggest a different relationship between the viewer and the media environment than the term “audience” would describe. When studying online-mediated environments we are forced to re-examine our relationship to the texts and screens we encounter.

What follows in this chapter draws on my experiences as I encountered this internet-mediated environment as a user, prosumer, teacher, builder, and researcher of online content through frameworks derived from postcolonial and feminist theories. As I narrate my encounters and dilemmas, my journey and explorations are situated, hence they are written from the vantage point of my particular location. The threads opened up here are intended to invite the reader to engage in an open-ended conversation with my thoughts and concerns.

My work occupies unique intersections of media and critical/cultural studies, as I continue to develop critical ethnographic methodologies – under the heading of “cyberethnography” and “epistemologies of doing” – for research and pedagogy at online/offline and global/local intersections and nodes. Communication and the understanding of organizations, as well as the role of culture and politics and of economic and everyday life are central to my research, as I conduct ongoing participant and performative ethnographies in emerging areas where digital communicative environments impact and shape globalization and where development work produces unexpected encounters between so-called new and old technologies.

Thus I examine how individuals act within communities while their subjectivities are shaped and they are produced as actors or subjects within interdependent global/local hierarchies. Not only do I ask who gets mapped out and why, but I also seek to understand how this happens, processually and structurally. I want to explore, for instance, how voices are produced, either in development contexts or in online contexts, and under what conditions “subaltern” speech gets heard. However, rather than stop at a euphoric celebration of this emergence of voice from a thus far marginalized group, I also try to investigate what implications these emerging voices might have for existing and emerging structures of power. I want to track how voice emerges in any of the contexts I examine, in order to understand where oppression shifts when particular marginalized groups gain representation within structures of globalization.

My continuing research examines social networking systems and craft movements online – specifically, the marketing of handspun and naturally dyed yarn within the context of what has come to be known as the “knitting renaissance.” I examine these online e-commerce frameworks for eco-friendly products and the consumer cultures evoked in these contexts in order to learn more about how the market is shifting and positioning consumer agency while it tries to educate consumers to adopt more eco-friendly ways of living and consuming. I suspect that these online movements (some under the header of “only hand-made”) mobilize existing digital technologies so as to form networks and collaborations that have potential for producing shifts and collaborations just as cyberfeminists have hoped. Whether they fulfill their potential or are appropriated by power structures remains to be seen.

When I first attempted to do academic research on the Internet through the discipline of media studies, using critical communication and cultural studies frameworks, I realized that the disciplinary formulation of the notion of “audience” would not work for my research. I then delved into much of the literature that existed at the time and saw that several cultural studies scholars have negotiated the concept of “audience” even prior to the emergence of the Internet as a commonly accessible medium.

Thus I found several such scholars' work to be of use in thinking about the relationship between viewers/readers/consumers and media texts. Stuart Hall's important conceptualization of theory as struggle and of the notion of articulation (Hall, 1980) helped me justify the conceptualization of my research as a process – always partial, always incomplete – but with important findings to contribute to academic scholarship nonetheless. James Carey's (1989) paradigm-shifting work on communication as ritual allowed in turn for a fresh approach to the study of media cultures and practices. Other scholarly research inspired me to rearticulate the idea of media research as an academic and political enterprise so I could proceed with my work: for example Larry Grossberg's (2006) emphasis on radical contextualization, Herbert Schiller's (1976) critiques of cultural imperialism; John Fiske's (1987) writings on resistance and audience meaning-making; and Steve Jones' (1995) early work on computer-mediated communication. These were some of the materials that assisted me in finding an anchor within the discipline.

However, my journey as a feminist researcher who was beginning to make connections with subaltern studies frameworks was a fairly lonely one within the discipline of communication, rhetoric, and media studies. Feminist scholars who engaged with issues in science, technology, and epistemology while questioning the universality of “knowledge” – scholars such as Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, Evelyn Fox Keller, Linda Alcoff, Gayathri Spivak, and many others – assisted me in framing my work as situated knowledge that emerged from a particular location. In addition, postcolonial feminist philosophers and anthropologists such as Uma Narayan, Kiran Narayan, Chandra Mohanty, Kamala Visweswaran, or Mary John (to name only a few) were also encountering the same problems and challenges that I was facing in my research, even though they did not carry out their work in media environments such as the Internet.

Further, just as I thought I was alone struggling through (inter)disciplinary shifts and crossroads, I found that there were also colleagues in graduate school and beginning faculty members who were developing methods and theoretical frames for the study of the Internet. For instance, members of the “Spoon Collective” (http://www.driftline.org/spoon_collective.html) played a significant part in my early Internet investigations, enabling spaces of practice, experimentation, and conceptualizations. In addition, as I was getting done with my dissertation, I discovered colleagues such as Lisa Nakamura, David Silver, Gil Rodman, Anne Balsamo, Jillana Enteen, Jonathan Sterne, Annette Markham, Nancy Baym, Mia Consalvo, Terri Senft (Janedoe), Lori Kendall, Kate O'Riordan, Carolyn Bassett, and so many others¹ who are now part of a fairly large and growing group of scholars called “Internet Researchers” and/or “Cyberculture Scholars.”² These were colleagues I had gotten to know interpersonally via Usenet Bulletin Boards, email lists, Internet Relay Chat systems on Unix, and MOOs (Multi-User Domains Object Oriented). In instances when we finally did meet face to face, we would mostly remember each other on the basis of our email account names or pseudonyms (mine being “Cyberdiva” and “cyborgwati”).

In the present chapter my task is to map my explorations of methodology for the study of Internet-mediated contexts. The first section of the chapter narrates my first encounters with computers, audience research, and Western academic frameworks (both quantitative and qualitative). The next section describes my main methodological framework and how it emerged through my experiences as a researcher of a South Asian women's email list. The subsequent section outlines how I developed this framework still further, in pedagogical settings where students were required to “do technology” as they researched Internet-mediated environments.

Studying Computer-Mediated Cultures: Point of Entry

In this section I reflect on my experience of studying computer-mediated cultures, and I map a path that starts with audience reception and moves to offline/online and global/local intersections and mediations.

In my early years of graduate school as a Master of Arts (MA) student, I was introduced to the phrase “audience research.” At that time I learned that audience research was mainly connected to numerical findings – of television and radio shows, of advertisements, and so on. A magical piece of software on the DOS machine, called “SPSS” (Service Provisioning System Software), would spit out various statistical analyses that I was reluctant to do “manually.” All I needed to do was to figure out the variables, the questions to ask, and the meanings of the data that the computer threw out at me. I loved it. Think up variables, punch them in various combinations, and watch the computer spit out the results. I did not have to worry about statistical process – manually – which, even though I am a statistician's daughter, I was terrified of. Punching things into the computer to see what it produced was fascinating to me. This fascination with the computer followed in the wake of my absorption with the mechanical typewriter in preceding years. I found nothing more comforting than the rhythm of typewriter keyboarding exercises as my fingers typed out the routine “asdfg,” “qwert,” and so on. As the rhythm went click-clickety-click, my thoughts – my very “being” – began to be materialized on white paper.

In the mid-'80s, when small businesses that previously offered typewriter tutorials began to provide computer training, I was compelled to sign up. As a “housewife,” freelance writer/amateur poet, and mother of a toddler who was equally fascinated with his mother's typewriting, I sought to improve myself by going to computer tutorials. I learned early programs such as Word, BASIC, COBOL, and a smattering of Fortran.

I had read books about artificial intelligence and ELIZA (http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/ELIZA/), and I wished the computer would write poetry for me as well. As I learned more about computers, the punch cards that I had often stumbled across in my brother's strewed belongings when he came home in India for vacation from his Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) campus began acquiring historical significance to me. Later these punch cards acquired even more meaning, as I realized their similarity to the cards on the Jacquard loom once I began examining offline and online technologies in global/local contexts. Little did I know that, in my search for magic³ and in my laziness, I was to stumble upon complex, nuanced intersections of science, technology, text, image, subjectivity, and gendered spaces of technocultures.

I did not know it then, but the business that offered these tutorials was training the future off-shore labor forces for transnational businesses. Globalization in digital formats had arrived in my backyard in Bhopal, India, in the mid-1980s. Thinking historically, it is no surprise that the infamous Bhopal Gas Tragedy (December 1984), which resulted from manufacturing industries off-shoring outmoded technologies to third-world urban spaces, signaled the transition to a different phase in globalization. Globalization would appear more sanitized and benevolent even as more manufacturing jobs and computer hardware factories continued to be off-shored onto borderlands (maquiladoras) and other third-world regions, while the clamor of the digital made this process invisible. Thus, as audiences the world over watched the broadcast of this disaster and activist groups protested against the transfer of outmoded technologies, the focus of interest for communication scholars conveniently shifted to examining empowerment through information technology (IT).⁴

Upon completion of my MA, I worked my way into a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) program, which had quite a different focus – namely on how communication should be studied. I entered the world of rhetoric and media studies and was introduced to cultural studies paradigms. No punching was possible here. Instead, I did encounter works by Edward Said, Jonathan Fiske, Kenneth Burke, Meagan Morris, Ien Ang, Homi Bhabha, Gayathri Spivak, and Michel De Certeau among others. My idea of the media and online audiences and my approach to research took on different meanings in this context.

Cyberethnography

Starting with my dissertation project, which began in 1994, my work has continued to question whether feminist spaces for multiple forms of embodied power and for networked and connected thinking/acting (as described in studies such as those of Donna Haraway) are possible online. In probing the intersections between feminisms and the new technology, I have attempted to explore and comprehend those aspects of production and design – skills, technical and cultural literacies, and material access – that are necessary to make such connections and collaborations possible.

Scholars such as Steve Jones point out that “issues with which sociologists and anthropologists, among others, have traditionally engaged when conducting their research are part of [‘Net’] discourse, for it becomes necessary to cover the ethical ground concerning participant observation, privacy, biography” (Jones, 1995, p. 3). These issues require us to move beyond frames of representation, viewership, and reception; they compel us to engage the context as producers, designers, users, authors, and inhabitants – in addition to being audiences, consumers, and readers. Thus “cyberethnography” unfolded as a methodological approach for the study of online contexts during my attempts to study a women-only email discussion list called “SAWnet” (South Asian Women's network).

My research on SAWnet began after I had been a reader and participant in that email list for a while. This was an online space that I had originally entered in an attempt to find a community of women who might share a background similar to mine: educated South Asian women who had traveled away from their home-country or had a “cosmopolitan” background. Prior to my decision to write about SAWnet, I was already a fairly involved member (since late January 1994). I shared some fiction and poetry with members of the SAWnet email listproc. My attempts at studying this group took several forms.

My decision to research that email list was made when I had been a member of the listproc for a year or so. By then I was definitely a participant researcher. In summer 1994 I started my research by posting a survey on SAWnet with the intention of finding out how the nature of the online community had changed since the time of its formation. I also mentioned my intention (which was based on my being a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers in India in the past) of writing at least a magazine article about SAWnet. My interest in the changing nature of the group led me to try to find out if any members felt dissatisfied with how the group was interacting. I wanted to see what kinds of discourses were being marginalized. This prompted me to investigate the possibilities of dialogic interaction within an online community like SAWnet.

In researching the list, I had no access to the offline participants themselves. I was going to read their postings and textually analyze them. I also sent out a survey on the list, and I asked members to answer the survey. In other words, I was not sure how to go about researching that group of people and their use of the medium – the email list named “SAWnet.” Relying upon a combination of textual analysis of specific clusters of conversation and some (very few) replies to the survey I sent out, I wrote a paper for a graduate seminar, linking my analyses to theoretical frameworks from postcolonial theory, mainly on issues of nation and on the role women played in postcolonial nationalisms. I might have proceeded to write in this manner, monologically, describing what I read as “texts” on the list. I would then have had a dissertation that “proved” how the literature on nationalism and women could be extended to describe South Asian communities in diaspora in the United States. Had I done that, my work would have appeared to be a critical engagement with the issues. In actuality, the work would have been quite uncritical, despite the fact that the language and the literature I was drawing from were cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and third-world feminist theory.

All this was going on while I was aware of the rule that posts could only be shared with nonmembers of SAWnet if the poster gave permission to this effect. I had asked and received permission to use the posts I had used in my paper. I did not imagine that writing a description of SAWnet would be a problem for any of its members, since this does not involve the use of anyone's messages on SAWnet. However, in spring 1995, an anthropologist from New Zealand (not a South Asian) was also studying the same list at around the same time. She announced her intention of writing a paper about the community by posting her intentions to the list. It appeared that she was trying to sort out what methods and codes of ethics were appropriate in this environment. As an anthropologist, she treated the list as a group of people – not as scrolling screens of text, as I was inclined to do while writing up my research. She contacted some members of SAWnet personally, to ask for permission to use our posts. She announced her decision to study SAWnet and to write a paper about SAWnet (as I had done earlier on in 1994). This launched a series of discussions about the value of studying a group like SAWnet. Some women protested. They wanted to be “left alone” in what they perceived to be a private space. Discussions began to get very interesting, even heated. I decided to remind members of SAWnet that I, too, had been writing about SAWnet as part of my dissertation project since 1994. My entry into the discussions regarding SAWnet contributed to and further complicated matters (Gajjala, 2004).

As it turns out, my response to the posts and my interactions with members, both on and off the list (through a now antiquated chat feature in a DOS computer known as “talk”) took me in a direction where the participants became human subjects, even though I was researching them as “texts.” The “texts” were alive – they talked back to me. This realization became clear and evident to me once the group of members on the list began questioning the anthropologist about her research motives. The texts were talking back indeed.

It was then that I knew that I needed to be an ethnographer. I was too much a part of the life and community of this online group to be a detached survey researcher trying to understand users' reception of meanings or the audiences' meaning-making. I was, in very real ways, too much a part of the virtual community to be content with just analyzing what was happening on the list as “texts.” Thus, while textual analysis, just by itself, would have been fine to describe the content of the list during a specific period of time and to reveal how a very specific group of women with interests and links to South Asia were conversing at a very specific time and location, that would not have provided a glimpse into the process, form, or limitations of the medium. Nor would textual analyses give the researcher insights into the hierarchies that are produced through the human–computer interface and through the ways in which different social groups used this specific medium. A textual analysis, in other words, could only be a part of more immersive kinds of investigation, which would help me discover how voice and silence get played out in such an online space.

Online experiences and interactions are, simultaneously, discursive subjects and living texts, where each text may follow its own logical force but all of them are also speedily frozen into archives, as “the past” of texts living in the present. The participants producing these texts develop affective relations within such a space and develop contextual bonds in this social world – bonds that hold them accountable to each other through the logical force of the rules listed and of the content shared. This in turn produces what is often termed a “virtual community.” To get at the multiple mediations that produced voice and silence in online contexts, a combination of multiple methods under the umbrella methodology of critical feminist ethnography was needed.

The Postcolonial Feminist Cyberethnographer

Further, in that particular instant of studying SAWnet, in order to find help with the dilemma I faced regarding my subjects, I turned to the work of postcolonial feminists and feminist cultural anthropologists. The work of Kamala Visweswaran, Kirin Narayan, Ruth Behar, Deborah Gordon, Uma Narayan, Mary John, and others was very useful to me as I was articulating the issues at hand. I had already been drawing on work by Haraway, Spivak, Alcoff, Harding, and others, in addition to work by subaltern studies researchers. This body of work helped me examine and theorize on the basis of the dilemmas and contradictions I faced in the “field” of cyberspace as I was studying SAWnet and issues of method and ethics of research. Those theories allowed me to open new ways of understanding what I would later learn were the beginnings of South Asian digital diasporas (see Gajjala and Gajjala, 2008).

The “SAWnet refusal” raises complex issues in relation to feminist ethnography and feminist Internet research. While the study itself was interrupted (this is what I refer to as a “refusal”) and my attempt at studying the group failed, the discussions leading to the failure highlighted several important issues in relation to ethnographic practices online and in relation to feminist practices of representation relevant to media and audience ethnographies. How do ethnographic practices and the ethnographer evolve in an online context? How are they revolutionized? What constitutes the field and how do we define its boundaries? Further, can we transpose concerns that arise out of real-life (RL) anthropology or face-to-face ethnography onto the study of virtual communities without considering seriously the very important differences in the nature of face-to-face interaction and virtual interaction? When can RL anthropological and critical issues be considered relevant to online ethnography? (See Jacobson, 1999 for a discussion of some of these issues.)

Considering the interactive nature of online participation, questions arise as to who is an ethnographer, who qualifies to be a “native” informant, and what the options are for refusing to be a subject. Specifically, the experience highlighted for me some of the ways in which conducting ethnography in cyberspace is distinctly different from real-life ethnography, while it also underscored some issues/problematics that are specific to the technology/medium (Gajjala, 2004).

My quest to refine the study of online texts and online audiences led me to become an ethnographer and an amateur producer of online content. I examined how subject positions emerged in continuous interpersonal and group interactions and were simultaneously broadcast into public space, while creating the feeling (illusion) of privacy – sometimes even of intimacy – for the person offline in front of a single screen. The only way to study such an environment was to consider a shift in methods that would be synchronous with the contexts I entered. This was the understanding I took with me into the classes I taught. In these classes, along with various undergraduate and graduate students, I developed further insights into being a researcher of online contexts.

Ethnographies at Online/Offline Intersections

Traditionally, anthropologists and archeologists travel thousands of miles to faraway places in the world and live there for extended periods of time, in order to represent the people and culture there. Their legacy has left us with one of the most important qualitative research methods: ethnography. It is also important not to forget the colonial history of the imperial projects of nineteenth-century anthropology. Those of us who are feminists and critical researchers using ethnographic methods continually encounter points of complicity with those epistemologies.

Attempting to grasp the complexities inherent in issues of access, design, and production of Internet-based communities and other such communication spaces led me to concerns well beyond the scope of online texts and their visual cultures. I was compelled to go offline to look at what people do at the computer interface offline. I discovered (and this should actually be no surprise) that people do not sit at the computer interface and use the Internet unless there is an offline community that links them to the global interconnections possible through the Internet. I learned that I needed to study how the Internet served offline communities and why it was becoming a necessary tool of marketing and globalization. At a time when a website or some form of Internet connectivity was increasingly offered as an “easy” solution to reaching the market or to connecting to the global, I felt that I had to examine and check if indeed the Internet was a panacea to all problems of access and circulation.

In 1998–1999 I had the opportunity to converse and communicate in writing with Annapurna Mamidipudi of Dastkar Andhra. The editor of the journal “Gender and Development,” Caroline Sweetman, had contacted me and asked me to write about the Internet and third-world women. Having lived in the US for nine years by then, and not having actually done any extensive field research in any non-US or non-Internet context until then, I decided to invite Annapurna (whom I have known all her life) to write to me. During the writing of this article (see Gajjala & Mamidipudi, 1999), I realized that I was likely to make fallacious assumptions in my research on cyberspace contexts if I did not learn about the offline environments in which Internet technologies are being sold as solutions to all sorts of problems. I also realized that policymakers, activists, and academics (wherever their political–economic background and the ideology stemming from it) were prone to privilege “the Internet” as an entry point and to give less importance to years and years of work already done by field workers in offline communities. Just as the blinding emphasis on “new” media sometimes ignores the bodies of work on various media produced over time that historically contextualize and inform how these “new” media function in society, the popular discourse of the Internet as a savior of all unheard peoples of the world continues to blind researchers of Internet-mediated contexts, preventing them from looking at the complex, layered contexts that produce the artifacts we study “on” the Internet. Thus, an exploration of the Internet as a media form using ethnographic immersion as a methodology may yield shifting notions of the audience. The researcher must enter into the cyberspaces s/he is researching – yet be aware of the offline contexts, the layered literacies, and the nuanced negotiations required in order to navigate these online spaces and be audiences, users, or participants in such contexts.

Therefore my work now includes investigating contexts and communities formed around offline technologies such as the handloom – which has a very effective, collaborative community, formed around its use for the production of cloth in rural South India, weaving still being the second largest rural livelihood in India despite problems related to global markets and the oppression of modernizing discourses. Therefore the study of such “emerging technocultures” is about incipient forms of handloom technology (since weavers and marketers of handloom negotiate how transnational capital flows to and away from them) as much as it is about the study of newly developing forms of digital communicative environments and financial instruments.

Among other things, I ask the following question: What encounters occur between people from contradictory worlds, and under what conditions would these encounters lead to dialogue as well as to further understanding and action toward a common emancipatory goal? My investigation led me to question the kind of subject implicit in cyberfeminist discourses, as well as to examine the kind of subject that emerges online. In my offline journeys through rural South India, ethnography is my main mode of investigation. However, while entering the field, I also work for the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Dastkar Andhra, which acts on behalf of handloom weavers in a variety of ways. Parallel to this, my offline ethnographies include travelling to various craft guilds and craft and fiber shows and expos and investigating the amateur practices of weaving, spinning, quilting, knitting, crocheting, and dying the yarn. Therefore my ethnographic method intersects with action research. Whether I travel as a collaborator with the NGO workers and officers, as a participant in craft guilds, as a shopper, or as an ethnographer, I am continually marked. In India I am marked as a non-resident Indian tourist, consumer, and collector of handloom fabric and crafted artifacts to be transported back to the US in order to be used/displayed in my home or given as gifts to friends living here. In the US, among predominantly rural northwest Ohio communities, I am marked in certain ways as an outsider (even though I am a citizen of the United States), and I am sometimes included as an insider in select groups when I participate in rituals and behaviors that these communities find familiar.

I must note that, in itself, the social marking of my outsider or insider status neither places me in a lower position in a hierarchy nor frames me as more or less powerful than those I work with. What frames me as possibly more powerful than them is my academic position and the possibility that I may misinterpret and distort events on site. Therefore the scholar's enactment of “with” in “working with” a community outside the academy must be considered a very tenuous and delicate process of collaboration. This marking of my outsider status serves as a continuous reminder to me as an ethnographer that humility and uncertainty are an integral part of the learning process. Assumptions of intrinsic scholarly authority on the part of the researcher get her nowhere in her attempt to understand the contexts and motivations in any situation she investigates. The researcher's authority and power is not in the field per se; rather it resides in how she represents the field and in how her work mobilizes the field toward specific power formations.

Latour (1996) notes the power dynamics implicit in the process of translation from other contexts to academic writing and describes how this happens through the formation of “immutable mobiles.” He writes:

Therefore I am not suggesting or claiming that expressions of humility, participation, contribution, or what I term “epistemologies and pedagogies of doing” (Gajjala, Rybas, & Zhang, 2010) are ways of extricating the researcher from such potential complicity and appropriation. Rather I am attempting to disrupt and upturn previously established binaries – “immutable mobiles” – through the snapshots I produce, understanding fully that the latter may be interpreted as “native” information on faraway premodern lives, regardless of all the disclaimers I make. The difficulty is not in gaining understanding through learning, travelling, and doing; the difficulty, the struggle, and the dilemma are in the craft of writing. If, as a researcher and as an academic, I am to establish that I can write appropriately for an academic audience, then I must risk the flattening of what I have learned. If I am to break with the tradition of academic writing, I must risk doing it not effectively, sounding uninformed, or losing my own voice and location as a “scholar.” Within these stated constraints, my methodology is a struggle that includes the process of crafting the academic text.

Online, in cyberspace, the ethnographer does not always have to travel in the kind of physical space where the whole body encounters the field face to face. But the travel in time and in cyberspace allows her/him to live in the field in a different way and to carry out concrete participant observation. In order to conduct her research effectively, the ethnographer must first code herself into existing in these online worlds.

For instance, in Material Virtualities, Jenny Sunden (2003) writes of the typing into existence that is a requirement for any sustained online identity. This act of be-coming online creates a close relationship between the typist and the character she/he types into existence in the online world. This sort of relationship is no doubt the basis for the process of transformation described in the three-dimensional film “Avatar” released in 2009. It is of course no coincidence, I am sure, that the character, Mary, played by Sigourney Weaver, who heads the team that is providing intelligence (implicitly and explicitly) to the military and to the corporation, is clearly modeled on popular images of the female anthropologist (in short, she seems very Margaret Mead-like).

The online avatar/identity is curiously the production of both the offline and online world. Gonzalez (2000) critiques the naïve assumption that there is the virtual/real binary separating the reality from the virtuality. Actually, the closer one observes and participates in an online community, the more s/he would agree that the interplay of real and virtual is always present. No one can transcend the social categories and the repertoire of experiences, skills, and literacies that define who s/he is in the offline world, even as s/he connects to online worlds. Likewise, the learning and understanding produced through online living definitely exerts influence on the perception of the offline world.

Methodological approaches informed by “epistemologies of doing,” in conjunction with visual and textual readings and ethnographic investigations, lead to an actual examination of subjects in process. The production of layered, situated subjectivities in techno-mediated environments – online and offline – allows an understanding of situated agency within spectra of choices and constraints. Examining where we place our bodies or where our bodies are placed (whether visually, textually, or through architectural and city design and mapping) in time and space – in relation to technologies old and new – and how we interact with these environments leads to an understanding of the complexity of unequal power relations and structural formations within a global cyberspace.

Epistemologies and Pedagogies of Doing

To further understand the nuanced and layered ways of being online, I introduced assignments in my classrooms where students would be required to be immersed in explorations and in the production of environments and selves in online environments such as text-based MOOs (multi-user domains/dungeons, object oriented), Web 2.0 tools such as YouTube, wikis, and blogs, social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, and three-dimensional environments such as Second Life and World of Warcraft.

In class settings I engage the continuum of possibilities along key dialectics of space/place, virtual/real, embodied/disembodied, membered/dismembered, and voice/voicelessness, in order to talk about technocultural identity. These identities are produced at various online/offline and global/local intersections through the following: visual performances and discursive self-representations; simultaneously disembodied and multiply-embodied performativity; and layered sociocultural, linguistic, and technical literacies. Students from my various classes engage as amateur ethnographers in such virtual worlds and online social networks. As an anthropologist, Boellstorff has shown, in his Coming of Age in Second Life (Boellstorff, 2008), that immersion in the context allows an understanding and a familiarity that in turn reveal multiple modes of meaning-making in these contexts. To borrow a phrase from a student in one of my classes where we used Facebook as a site to examine digitally media identities, online social networks and virtual worlds are “places” where “we put our stuff out” to share it with friends.

Further, over the years, online global networking and gaming practices have shifted our understanding of “friends” and the relational ways in which we exist among our communities and networks of peers. We no longer use the term “friend” to refer only to the one or two people whom we interact with in face-to-face encounters, or to people with whom we share our deepest confidences. There is also an interesting convergence between friends and audience, in an almost theatrical sense. It is at the intersection of placing objects in Internet space and in performing for networks of friends that current manifestations of online voice and agency emerge relationally.

This notion of placing objects, or “putting stuff out there,” as the student referred to above called it, and the perception of online space as a place are not limited to social networking sites such as Friendster, Facebook, orkut, hi5, MySpace, and so on. Neither is this notion of placing the self, relationally and performatively, for an imagined and real audience of friends new only to the post-online social networks. The idea of investing identity in objectified symbols, where the symbols take on a meaning of their own within the internal logic of the online world, has existed from the time of purely text-based MOOs and MUDs (multi-user domains). This notion of owning, placing, and sharing exists in music sharing software, computer games, and other virtual worlds as well. In fact the placing of the self relationally leads directly to the production of contextual and relational avatars (online identities) that are constructed and narrated technically, textually, and relationally through the encounters of individuals with online social contexts, and these encounters in cyberspaces produce different kinds of sensory experiences. The individual's response to the new media environment is nuanced and layered as s/he learns to live and work in yet another global social world, and these experiences of immersion challenge older, established notions of “audience” and “user.”

Thus subjects (nots audiences or users) are placed historically, contextually, and relationally in online networks. This placing leads to a reconfiguration of identity, labor, and literacies in tandem with transnational capital flows. This production of virtual identities simultaneously generates and dismantles shifting labor relations within the global economy, as labor forces are retooled and reskilled to work in digital economies, while specific offline production processes and labor conditions are made invisible.

As a student in my class pointed out after her experience in Linguamoo (an academic MOO-based community in the early 1990s and early 2000s): “[T]he meaning of language isn't what we expect it to be necessarily when we put it out into the world in a particular rhetorical situation” (MA, 1997). This was one of the first times when, before asking the students to enter the MOO, I had also programmed and placed objects strategically in the environment, for these students to engage with. Each of the objects I had built was meant to engage specific concepts, on the basis of the course content. This student's reaction leads us to understand what the blogger at cultureby.com is signaling when he says:

Therefore, whether this happened in Second Life in 2007 or in LinguaMOO in 1997, the objects and contexts within these virtual worlds started functioning with a logical force that placed them firmly in the virtual world context. This virtual world context is related to the offline context, of course; it seems to mimic offline worlds, and indeed it has an impact on the body and mind that get affectively incorporated into the interface. However, just as physical objects carried out of their habitual context into a different one acquire a meaning specific to the new context, virtual objects, words, and labels do the same. This travelling of the objects and symbols shifts the meanings and requires different contextual literacies and skills for their re-placement and re-negotiation.

A new interface, a lot of times, poses challenge for users who are not familiar with it. The new environment, the new technoliteracy required, and the need to interact with people even if only virtually, all contribute to the uneasiness many users feel when they are first introduced to MOO, Facebook, or Second Life. From registration to the creation of avatars, Second Life guides the users through the journey of acquiring a digital being that participates in meaning-making in the virtual world and definitely has material consequences and material anchors.

So where is the “audience” today? When the viewer is no longer “outside,” viewing from a distance, but is involved in the production and circulation of the text, movie, or game, we must shift the relational viewpoint that allows us to understand how the media pervade our lives.

Conclusion

As we have seen in this chapter, my approach to the study of online media contexts draws from multiple disciplines out of necessity. I adopt critical ethnographic methodologies, whether under the heading of “cyberethnography” or “epistemologies of doing,” for research and pedagogy at these online/offline and global/local intersections and nodes. These ethnographies, interspersed as they are with my personal experience of being in communicative spaces of the diaspora through my own life, inform my continuing research in these areas.

My encounter with SAWnet in my initial forays into research on Internet-mediated communication has strongly shaped the way I continue my own research and advise my graduate students on the issue of methods for online research. In addition, my offline ethnographies, travelling with non-profit workers in urban and rural India, have shaped my perception and understanding of the impact that academic and corporate research about the Internet can have on shaping policy that affects the everyday life and the livelihood of people who have no say in how they are made to participate in or denied access to technological and financial structures of power.

Paradigms that Internet researchers engage with have allowed us to complicate the definitions of “audience” and audience research. But this is not the only point I wish the beginning researcher to walk away with. Identities produced within digital contexts enabled by computer software and hardware are made possible through the cooperation of the sociocultural digital place and of global networks involving time–space compression. These sociocultural contexts are co-produced by inhabitants who access these contexts. Both offline and online contexts that co-produce online environments – through presences and absences – are situated in uneven hierarchies of race, gender, class, caste, geography, language, technical literacy, and so on. At any moment in time, the individual researcher's goal to understand these multiple layers can only be partial. The researcher needs multiple methods – sometimes textual analysis, sometimes a “deep hanging out” (Madison, 2005), sometimes a quantitative analysis or in-depth interviews. The researcher must continually be self-reflective concerning her/his own role – but not to the extent of becoming paralyzed and silent. The issues that come out of this struggle are often as important as the partial descriptions and so-called objective analyses of interpretative and quantitative data. The researcher must name herself.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank Yeon Ju Oh, my research assistant, for her excellent feedback and encouragement on several drafts of this chapter and for her help with proofreading and editing. I also want to thank my newest mentee, Aditi Paul, for her encouragement and positive feedback as I was revising.

NOTES

1 I wish to ask my colleagues of that time (and those of now) to forgive any omissions: I have probably not mentioned some of my dearest friends and some of my most important colleagues.

2 See http://www.aoir.org and http://www.amst.umd.edu/cwg/

3 Television shows from the 1960s and 1970s such as I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched had set me up to desire such magic in my life, so that I could indeed aspire to be a “super-woman” and to perform double shifts with great ease – a snap of the fingers and a blink, and I could be the perfect home-maker, mother, and creative writer.

4 Once the outsource/offshore IT workers were studied to reveal how “empowered” they were through IT, the researchers' gaze shifted to examining online spaces of work and play. Thus the brown and black bodies laboring for the global IT industry were celebrated as empowered and conveniently packed away. At the same time the discourse of fan labor, consumer labor, play as labor, and so on emerged. This global “labor” force of users, consumers, fans, and computer-gamers has now become the focus of researchers, much like the celebration of “resistant” audiences of television in previous audience studies scholarship. Let me hasten to say, however, that this research is not without value when it is done with a great deal of reflection on the hierarchies produced and the kinds of labor it privileges. Neither are the two – the labor of brown and black bodies and the labor of fans and gamers – mutually exclusive: in my continuing work on transnational labor, digital labor, affective labor, and globalization I examine some of these intersections.

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FURTHER READING

Baym, N. K., & Markham, A. N. (Eds.). (2008). Internet inquiry. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Boon, S., & Sinclaire, C. (2009). A world I don't inhabit: Disquiet and identity in Second Life and Facebook. Educational Media International, 46(2), 99–110.

Gajjala, R. (2000). Cyberethnography: Reading each “other” online. Unpublished manuscript.

Markham, A. (1998). Life online: Research real experiences in virtual space. London, UK: Sage.

Press, A., & Cole, E. (1999). Speaking of abortion: Television and authority in the lives of women. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999.