A Method for the Times: A Meditation on Virtual Ethnography Faults and Fortitudes (Report‪)‬

Increasingly, identities and relationships are realised and performed in virtualised communities and spaces. To cultural and social interrogators, traditional ethnographic methods represent a contextually rich pathway to mapping intimate and meta-behaviours online. However, conventional techniques must innovate and transform to accommodate a polysemous eco-system and population. In this paper, I explore key strengths and weaknesses of the ethnographic method when applied to computer-mediated collectives, and highlight specific imperatives that should be considered by researchers. My goal is to offer insights into the deployment of ethnography in diverse digital fora, including how it can be adapted or combined with other techniques to create a hybridised methodology. I support the theory that "new media" is historically relative--and argue that--while unique qualities of contemporary connectors must be practically addressed in research, a macro-epistemological approach is most helpful to contextualise findings to, move scholars toward a best practice for virtual situation.