Forum Ethnography

I must admit, I was a little wary about doing an ethnography at first. I am no good at inserting myself into a place where I can make observations about a group of people. However, I think the ethnography I did with Kevin Kwan worked pretty well.

Considering that we weren't exactly seeing the people posting on the forum, I think we were able to see some good data on them. I personally don't post on forums at all, so this was entirely new to me. Some of the comments were highly entertaining, while others I felt were somewhat inappropriate. On the other hand, though, Kevin made it sound ike these sorts of comments are fairly normal. From what I know in real life, sheltered as I have been, I realize that these sorts of comments are more than likely used off the internet as well. Of course I know I can't completely generalize online forum thread posting with offline discussions. This is because once a discussion is off-topic in a person to person conversation, it will typically stay off-topic, especially if there are lots of people. It will, on occasion, come back to topic if it's more a question and answer session.

...I just realized that I linked our forum ethnography to real life. This is something I hadn't thought of originally, nor when I was working on the paper for the ethnography. But, people are the same either posting online or having a conversation. The type of person doing each might be different (since when you post online you're more hidden from other posters), but overall what they tend to say will be similar.

So, I hope I've hit something I should be blogging about. I more or less ended up off-topic. In the long term, though, this is what I got out of the ethnography I did with Kevin after letting it sit in my mind and mulling it over a little.