Suchergebnisse

The relative novelty of digital ethnography as a research methodology, along with the challenges that it moves to classical understandings of fieldwork, participation and representation, results in a repertoire of professional illusions through which digital ethnographers justify their work when confronted with the disciplinary culture of anthropology. This essay is based on the author's reflexive experience of researching digital media use in China, and updates Gary Alan Fine's 1993 article "Ten Lies of Ethnography" by identifying three lies of digital ethnography. Illustrating each of these lies through an archetypal figure – the 'networked field-weaver', the 'eager participant-lurker' and the 'expert fabricator' – this article argues for the need to confront methodological illusions and embrace the tensions behind them as useful heuristics for conducting ethnographic research on, through and about digital media.

Abstract
This introduction to the special issue 'ASIA.LIVE: Inaugurating Livestream Studies in Asia' briefly summarizes the virtual workshop at which it originated and describes its contributions to the central concept of liveness. After reflecting on the increasingly constitutive role of liveness in digital media, we argue that research on livestreaming should move beyond its focus on gaming and its Eurocentric approach to platforms, drawing on extensive debates over liveness and expanding its scope to the thriving digital economies in the Asian region. To understand how practices such as livestreaming are changing digital cultures in Asia and beyond, it is necessary to account for the ephemeral phenomena and under-documented practices that emerge from these regional contexts. By bringing together articles about China and Taiwan and relating them to workshop contributions about Hong Kong, Indonesia, and South Korea, we inaugurate livestream studies in Asia and offer some directions for future research in this field.

This special issue collects the confessions of five digital ethnographers laying bare their methodological failures, disciplinary posturing, and ethical dilemmas. The articles are meant to serve as a counseling stations for fellow researchers who are approaching digital media ethnographically. On the one hand, this issue's contributors acknowledge the rich variety of methodological articulations reflected in the lexicon of "buzzword ethnography". On the other, they evidence how doing ethnographic research about, on, and through digital media is most often a messy, personal, highly contextual enterprise fraught with anxieties and discomforts. Through the four "private messages from the field" collected in this issue, we acknowledge the messiness, open-endedness and coarseness of ethnographic research in-the-making. In order to do this, and as a precise editorial choice made in order to sidestep the lexical turf wars and branding exercises of 'how to' methodological literature, we propose to recuperate two forms of ethnographic writing: Confessional ethnography (Van Maanen 2011) and self-reflection about the dilemmas of ethnographic work (Fine 1993). Laying bare our fieldwork failures, confessing our troubling epistemological choices and sharing our ways of coping with these issues becomes a precious occasion to remind ourselves of how much digital media, and the ways of researching them, are constantly in the making.