second life mini-ethnography

The first thing that strikes me about my tiny attempt at performing an ethnography in SL is how hard it is to navigate the world and take notes at the same time.  I greatly admire what Boellstroff was able to accomplish, not only within the incredible complexity of this space, but just in terms of data collection.  SecondLife, while it may not be as rich as the real world, is still a vibrant and changing space with a lot going on.

Another difficulty I encountered was simply not being able to find people.  I was frustrated by this, but now I'm thinking that the same kinds of frustrations might easily apply to any outsider. I can imagine a tourist looking for action in downtown New York City, knowing full well that there are a million things happening but not being able to find them.

The last difficulty I'll mention is the fact that the two people I did encounter were doing other things.  One was in a 'grid wide fishing contest' which she graciously invited me to join, and the other was simply waiting for his friends.  I felt like I was bothering both of them, regardless of the mode in which I was doing it.

This ties in with what I see as some of the difficulties in performing ethnography anywhere.  I think Barnard makes many of my points for me--but what I can add is that I think his critiques of f2f ethnography apply to SL as well.  

I think the biggest problems with my ability to manipulate the different features of my persona in SL also parallel those problems in f2f research.  I'm sure donning my role as "researcher" is not very much different to taking on my tall, flying elf persona.  In either case, I am interacting with a world that is interacting with me.  

One of the consistent shortcomings of ethnography in some of the works we've read, is interestingly one of its strong points in others:  the lack of objectivity.  I think it's interesting that we are so concerned with ethnographic subjectivity, but less so with the subjectivity we've seen as happening in surveys or focus groups or whatever.  I think that the question always forms the answer, no matter what the will of the inquisitor.  This is true across the board, regardless of how openly or sneakily the researcher posits herself.