1.5 Digital Ethnography and "Online/Offline Scholarship"

The terminology for an ethnography of digital and digitally networked media processes—in brief "digital ethnography"—has not yet been established in current literature, and apart from "virtual ethnography" (Hine, 2000), we can also find other terms like "ethnography on/of/through the Internet, connective ethnography, networked ethnography, cyberethnography, etc.“ (Dominguez et al., 2007: 1), "anthropology of cyberculture" (Escobar, 1994) or "online groundedness" (Rogers, 2009: 8f.). By now, however, these approaches converge in joint methodological experience. If at the beginning of ethnographic approaches for the study of the internet under the premise of studying "a non-traditional nonspace" (Markham, 1998: 62) and its "virtual communities" (Wilson/Peterson, 2002) with new methods but with the habitual sensitivity, the current approaches now favor either a focus on "natively digital objects" (Rogers, 2010: 241) or—as in the case of digitized phenomena—on a constant adjustment of online and offline studies (Wilson, 2006; Markham/Baym, 2008). On the one hand, this online/offline approach is necessary in order to do justice to the new mobile media applications through which users can multi-modally change virtual and physical spaces (Büscher/Urry/Witchger, 2011). On the other hand, it takes the results of media studies into account that have found that identities in the net not only are based on online experiences, but also on offline ones (Woolgar, 2002). The range of digital ethnography is still incalculable; therefore two important focal points will be delineated below.

Since the 1990s, video and computer games belong to expanding worldwide media practices. However, game studies and the studies of media impact almost unanimously presuppose generalized users of the computer games. For some time now, this factor has been analyzed in game studies (Venus, 2007) but its methodological consequences still remain to be considered. An ethnographic study of computer games will extend the following ideas and make them usable: On the one hand, video and computer games are embedded in a diversity of practical usage constituting heteromorphous attitudes and experiences in gaming that lie beyond the material homology of the technical artifact. Currently, developers already differentiate between casual and heavy gaming and eSport and in institutionalized forms like festivals and online forums different types of processing like "modding" (Kücklich, 2005) or the production of "machinimas" (Reichert, 2008; Lowood/Nitsche, 2011) are being practiced. Locative and situational research is able to draw on the long forgotten fact that gamers have the tendency to be reflexive. They cognitively recognize frames and scripts that influence the development and production of games (Bogost, 2007). On the other hand, the use of computer games creates a scenic nexus: They attribute places, tasks, and ways of behavior to the participants and artifacts and are at the same time themselves involved in the spatial and temporal systems of everyday life (Hjorth/Chan 2009). Currently this is still summarized under metaphorical terms like immersion, involvement and virtual reality. It can simultaneously be said with Bruno Latour that the new arts of simulation have clearly established a new type of "immutable mobiles" (Latour, 1990) whose social practices are still hardly understood. Here the multiplayer online role-playing games (MORPGs) played on a massive scale represent a significant and sophisticated study object (Wenz 2008a, 2008b) insofar as they are combining massive participation and a dispersive audience with microsocial phenomena (of interaction in small groups and clans).

Digital mobile communication has gone through a similar dynamic development with all the difficulties of its online/offline research. Mobile technology has dissolved solid locative anchors, thereby introducing a fundamental transformation of communicative practice without, however, forfeiting the scholarly relevance of questioning spatial situatedness (Linz, 2008; Nyíri, 2005; Höflich, 2005; Höflich/Hartmann, 2006; Gleitman, 2007; Ling/Campbell 2009; Licoppe 2009). It is well known that this is also true for cultural and regional localization: While the mobile phone in many regions with scant landline infrastructures very often occupies the place of a landline—for example in rural areas of Asia, South America, or Africa—and is being used collectively from a fixed place (Donner 2006; Bell 2006; Katz 2008), in the Western and Asian industrialized states it has developed into a personalized medium of individualized users. By personalizing the mobile phone, a "person-place-convergence“ (Fortunati 2005) is carried out that leads to an interconnection and overlapping of physically co-present and tele-present forms of communication. From a linguistic and interactional point of view, one can observe both the preservation of interactional spaces by way of the medium beyond the space of physical co-presence and the reorganization of local interactional systems by way of the parallel—and increasingly integrated—communication via the mobile phone (Katz/Aakhus, 2002; Geser, 2004; Höflich/Gebhardt, 2005; Ling, 2004). So far, these new forms of a "Connected Presence" (Licoppe 2004) have hardly been studied with regard to their practices of media changes and of temporal rhythmizing or to the linguistic methods of contextualizing (Auer/di Luzio 1992; Duranti/Goodwin 1992) by way of which local and technically transmitted spaces of interaction are being coordinated and synchronized.

With Apple's iPhone and other smart phones, the mobile phone has also inherited the PC apart from the old telephone network; it serves more and more as a portal for new forms of distribution and networking through media. Mobile media are no longer extensions of the landline; they have become technological prototypes for all other media (Jenkins, 2006; Goggin, 2011). This development contains unforeseen results that still have to be analyzed regarding their relations to place and situation. For example, in Western and Asian countries with smart phones, a gadget- and app-culture has developed that, as forms of distributed aesthetics, are legitimized because they aestheticize everyday life (Verhoeff, 2009; Hjorth, 2009). Cell phones in sub-Saharan Africa have developed into important instruments of payment and have become a central element of a new informal economy. Many of these digital media supplies now do not emerge by reconfiguring the contents of other media (Bolter/Grusin, 1999), but by creating new hybrids by way of transforming media into software that react locally to concrete new media demands. Thus, as a result of the hurricane Katrina, placemarks and map mashups were spread in the web at first by residents who knew their way around before this function was incorporated by Google into its software products (Crutcher/Zook, 2009).