Digital anthropology: Research methods and principles

Abstract

The article outlines the principles of anthropological research on virtual communities and digital technologies and their respective transformative impact on the quotidian culture and practices, writing and speech manners, forms of identity and sociality. Among the peculiarities of the cyberspace the author points out the mediatory nature of online communication, the fundamental incompleteness of its context, its temporal discontinuity, and its routine and banal character that contributes to the invisibility of the digital technology infrastructures. These characteristics of the new media define the modes of application of standard anthropological approaches and in many cases require elaboration of new research methods suited to the needs of a particular research project. Finally, the author comments on the fluid and contextual character of the online reality that raises the issue of the research field and object's boundaries, which differ from those found in offline fieldwork ethnography.