Embodied and Virtual Ethnography: Doing Research in the Digital Age

Abstract

On a spring day in 2008, I was getting ready to meet a Muslim Brotherhood blogger at a café in the upscale neighborhood of Zamalek when I received text from him telling me to bring my computer and that he was bringing a well-known Ihkwani blogger for me to meet. When I arrived he quickly got online because he wanted to edit his blog, but we had to change the language settings to Arabic so that he could navigate. His told me his friend and fellow blogger had been arrested the day before and he had written a post about it. But today his friend and the lawyers said he should take the post offl ine because the blogger had been transferred to state security and they were afraid that the blog post could put him in greater danger because it discussed a previous arrest and his work as a blogger, putting lots of potentially incriminating evidence (from the government's perspective) in a cohesive article that would make it much easier for secu-rity to discover than if they had to dig it out for themselves. Not long after he made the updates and we were in the midst of talking, he received a call. The blogger had been tortured and that the security offi cials had asked about his own blog. He was going to have to take extra security precautions and be extra careful about what he posted in the coming days. All interactions with bloggers whether in a formal interview setting or not were always opportunities for participant observation since a blogger or cyberactivist could enact this identity at any time. Any experience or observation was potential fodder for the blog, a Facebook update or a tweet, and the way this fi t into the activist repertoire was in some cases only E mbodied and V irtual E thnography : D oing R esearch in the D igital A ge observable through participant observation and in real time. In this case, I had cultivated a relationship with a particular MB-affi liated blogger: visit-ing his university, meeting for coffee, exchanging emails, and information about events one or the other might be interested in attending. Geertz has identifi ed how such " commitment acts " help build rapport and trust with informants, and in my case, they made it possible to participate and observe how cyberactivism worked in real time (1979 , 85). Studying the impact of new media technologies, and specifi cally, social media requires new approaches and reinterpreted methods that must account for the mutual constitution and reconstitution of the embodied and virtual. The dimension of newness is central not only in the analysis but also in the research design and approach. I drew on new ways of con-ceptualizing how to do ethnographic research and participant observation online and how to link it with the more standard approaches to doing so offl ine in the embodied world; new ways of gathering data in the blogo-sphere and on social media networks given the newness of the subject matter and the platforms themselves; and how to negotiate the complex, technologically infl ected and/or embodied relationships with informants in different spheres. I suggest how to go about studying technologically infl ected groups and movements, and the contributions that an ethno-graphic approach can make to understand the complex process of identity construction, movement formation, and the development of contentious repertoires. I make the case that particular dynamics of cyberactivism can only be seen in real time, and thus call for " virtual ethnography " and participant observation, or what Mankekar terms " conjunctural ethnogra-phy " (Hine 2000 ; Mankekar 1999). This chapter therefore begins with a discussion of my methodological approach, namely, textual analysis and ethnographic methods of online and offl ine data collection, informed by a grounded theory approach for data collection and interpretation. It discusses the reason for using this methodology to collect data as well as how this works in cyberspace. The next section, data collection, discusses the procedures I employed as well as how I gained access to participants in the physical fi eld (Egypt) and in cyberspace. I discuss the data analysis and the methods I used to make sense of the data I had collected. In the fi nal section, I address particu-lar issues in the application of that method, including the role my iden-tity played in gaining access and how it infl uenced my ability to conduct this research. This section puts the research into context by addressing how the environment in which I conducted the research infl uenced how 58 C.C. RADSCH