Being Here and Being There: Fieldwork Encounters and Ethnographic Discoveries

A brief history of the future of urban computing and locative media

“…By now it should also be clear that my experience of being in 'the field' included being online and on the ground, and just as in my everyday life, I simply experience these as different but complementary ways of being in the world with others. While anthropologists have thoroughly troubled the place, role and affect of fieldwork (see for example Strathern 1993;Gupta and Ferguson 1997;Marcus 1998;Watson 1999;Anderson et al 2004), it is worth drawing attention to the fact that more recent online communications further complicate relationships between people and places. While "virtual ethnography" (see Markham 1998;Hine 2000) generally refers to doing ethnography online, references to using collaborative or collective online applications like wikis, blogs and social networking sites to disseminate and discuss research ideas in progress are few and far between.…”