Wholehearted Participation: Attuning to Affect and Immanence in a Virtual Field

Abstract

Diving into a virtual field in response to , my orientation to ethnographic inquiry and writing changed as I joined the ranks of thousands of editors worldwide in contributing to the free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Honing practices for participating in this dynamic virtual field attuned me to felt senses of flow and more-than-human connections that I relate to posthuman concepts of affect and immanence. The essay concludes with potential implications for embracing wholehearted participation as a method. [digital methods, felt sense, more-than-human subjectivity, participation as method, virtual spaces] Why does this writing feel so different from writing elsewhere and other types of writing? Why do I feel so buoyant and lose track of time?Reviewing notes written since COVID-19 hit and I began exploring a virtual field I had long found intriguing, my own words jump out at me. In early 2020, Wikipedia, the global collaborative authorship experiment and free online encyclopedia, lured me as a potential source of organized, fairly reliable information on the novel virus beginning to wreak havoc and heartache worldwide. I quickly learned that pursuing my intention to study Wikipedia's inner workings would require my active participation. My engagement produced felt senses of flow and more-than-human connections that changed my thinking about ethnographic writing and practice. Personal Felt Sense of FlowI know there are people here logging in from across the world to contribute. I see their comments and debates about specific articles on the corresponding Talk pages. But I know they connect to conduct more coordinated collaboration. So, where else are they?After editing coronavirus-related articles, I longed to write about other topics and connect with other editors. Researching Wikipedia awakened me to the encyclopedia's persistent gender issues and the efforts of Wikipedia communities, like Women in Red and Art+Feminism, to combat gendered representations of women, increase the number of biographical articles about women,

Embodying Affective Intra-Actions Online: Enacting Posthuman Methods in Virtual Spaces

“…Artmaking practices in online small group learning contexts present methodological opportunities for engaging and enacting posthuman concepts in online spaces. They possess the potential to awaken participants to posthuman subjectivities involving their intimate co-creative relationships with digital tools and spaces (Perry, 2021(Perry, , 2022 as well as the often invisible intra-active relationships that exist between humans.…”