The 'virtual', the 'real' and the 'gap' in between: the case for hybrid approaches in anthropology of the twenty-first century
Trigger warning: mentions of sexual assault.
The 'virtual', the 'real' and the 'gap' in between:
the case for hybrid approaches in anthropology of the twenty-first century
I. Introduction
In 2022, when cryptocurrencies have significant values that impact the global economy in tangible ways and when conspiracy theories festered on Twitter concretely exacerbated the spread of COVID-19 by countering state public health strategies all around the world, societies across the globe can hardly be said to function independent of digital technologies. Indeed, no one is likely to deny how digital technologies have been radically shaping and transforming our lived experiences, in particular with the proliferation of Internet access and the advent of smart phones. The border between what used to be called 'real life' (as in the Internet abbreviated slang IRL—'in real life') and the 'virtual' life in 'cyberspace' have all but diminished to reveal a new paradigm of the human experience in which every facet of contemporary life, although multifarious in degree and nature, is deeply intertwined with if not dependent upon digital technologies. As Miller and Slater's research of how the Internet is used in Trinidad during 1999 demonstrates their interlocutors make little distinctions between what is 'virtual' and what is 'real':
...we encountered relatively little Internet use in Trinidad that could usefully be construed as 'virtual'. There are few places in this volume where a differentiation between, say, e-commerce and other commerce, playground chat and ICQ chat, religious instruction face-to-face or by email is treated by participants in terms of any clear division between the 'real' and the 'virtual'. (Miller and Slater 2000, 6)
If the interlocutors do not draw a clear distinction between them, then why should the anthropologists? Etic approaches are best crafted for existing emic systems rather than prescriptively imposed, which means field-specificity and subsequent methodological approaches in the twenty-first century will often necessitate the inclusion of digital approaches in addition to the traditional physical ones. Thus, to understand lived experiences in 2022 and beyond is also to understand 'the unanticipated, conjunctural, and above all rapidly changing cyberworlds through which we all in some way are now in the process of redefining the human project' (Boellstorff 2006, 33–34).
Out of the multitudes of ways that we may incisively analyse the infinitely different ways of how digital technologies have infiltrated and permeated every facet of life, one of the most prominent and visible is that of social media. Referring to specific websites or applications that are designed to connect people, social media significantly defines a large portion of contemporary sociality albeit with notable local differences. Most importantly, social media—amongst other digital innovations—have further revolutionised the relationship between the 'virtual' and the 'real' from dualism into rhizomatic processes that are always dynamically interacting and transforming each other, where the 'virtual' is no longer quite virtual and the 'real' is no longer quite real, and the propensity to sunder them should be challenged accordingly. This does not, however, mean that the most of human life is in general becoming an undifferentiated homogenous mix of the 'virtual' and the 'real'; rather, every facet of life can have components that are differently engaged, whether mediated through digital technologies or otherwise. Within such context, one of the most generative discursive space may be the gap in between the 'virtual' and the 'real' that only occurs when both are engaged simultaneously, 'For while the facts attached to any event born of a [virtual world's] strange, ethereal universe may march in straight, tandem lines separated neatly into the virtual and the real, its meaning lies always in that gap' (Dibbell 1994, 476). This essay argues that social media—and Internet technologies more broadly—have drastically transformed the multifarious ways of how people connect to each other, whether within one community or across many. Every aspects of these networks of connections are no more or less real than the other, rendering the relationship between the 'virtual' and the 'real' one that is defined by inseparability and mutual transformation. While there are actions and experiences that are clearly more virtual than physical or vice versa, it would be imprudent to conceive of any field site without considering what may the digital lives of research participants be like. Furthermore, the possible 'gap' between self-representations and practices of the online and the offline may be fruitful points of entry for a comparative project that would be accessible unless the 'virtual' and the 'real' are examined in tandem. To do so, I will draw from anthropological and ethnographic works in the past three decades that considers the digital aspects of their fields—some on social media platforms and others on different but nonetheless equally as social online communities, in addition to my own experience of investigating a hybrid field for my thesis project.
II. Immersive cohabitation as effective hybrid approach
The definition of social media is frustratingly vague, at least according to the Oxford English Dictionary: 'websites and applications which enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.' While the massively popular platforms such as Facebook (Dalsgaard 2016), Twitter and Instagram (Abidin 2016; Bluteau 2021) come to mind, many others also fit within this fuzzy definition. Video-centric platforms such as YouTube, Twitch (Jodén and Strandell 2021) and TikTok, messaging applications such as Whatsapp, Telegram, KakaoTalk and Line, dating applications such as Tinder (MacKee 2016), Grindr (Stempfhuber and Liegl 2016) and OkCupid are all in one way or another social media. Even videogames like Second Life (Boellstorff 2015), World of Warcraft (Kerschbaumer 2016; Nardi 2010) and textual games like LambdaMOO (Coe 1998; Dibbell 1999) have proven to have the capacity as community-building and content-publishing platforms that fit well within the definition of social media. To complicate the matter even more, the use of these social medias is often simultaneous (Madianou and Miller 2013) and complementary, which also highly differs from person to person, community to community, locale to locale. Any of these social media, whether in combination with each other or not, can provide a wealth of insight into the virtual-real dialectical pair and the paradoxical gap that exists between them. Bluteau's approach of 'immersive cohabitation' (Bluteau 2021) provides a useful methodological framework to tackle these ever-shifting and never-consistent ethnographic terrains.
During his fieldwork researching high-end tailors and their customers in London, Bluteau realised that much of his research participants maintain active presences online, either as businesses or sartorial aficionados, in particular on the highly visual platform of Instagram—a social network application centred around image and video publication. Observing the active presences of his interconnected research subjects on Instagram, Bluteau saw that construction and maintenance of an online self as an ethnographer amongst interlocuters is an important field practice:
Many researchers conducting ethnographic fieldwork have sought to investigate the use of various technologies being employed by their interlocutors, but Instagram seemed more involved. Less an investigation of a technology and more an enmeshed part of my informants’ day-to-day lives that I was ignoring. To address this failing I began to use Instagram in the same manner as my informants, developing a digital presence and learning through completing the same tasks as they did, taking and posting pictures of myself. (Bluteau 2021, 268)
Bluteau's proposition of this hybrid method is meant to address the challenges and complications presented by 'the blended nature of the online and offline in a postdigital field' (Bluteau 2021, 271). In other words, Bluteau's fieldwork would be significantly incomplete if he were to do away with the digital components with which his research subjects are so intimately involved. As a result, he gained access to the seemingly amorphous network that grew organically on Instagram. He was not only introduced to more interlocutors this way as community members recognised his digital self as a content creator, acknowledged his content quality, and subsequently accepted him as part of the community. Bluteau's 'immersive cohabitation' is a methodology of active participation that entails 'a set of working practices which enable the researcher to exist within this landscape as their informants do' (Bluteau 2021, 271) as the terrains of anthropological fields no longer remain only in physical geographies.
For Bluteau, then, the relationship between the virtual and the real is one where their division mean very little and even impedes his ethnographic project. In this context, Instagram should not be thought of as mere advertising and purchasing tool; rather, it is also a set of practice (e.g. taking photos and videos, sharing them, commenting on the publications of others, etc.) shared by a significant portion of community. As shared practices, these actions are not simply virtual; they have real life social, economic and political consequences for many who partake in them—from important business connections and customers who place orders in direct-message inboxes, the rise and fall of industry-wide trends, to gendered performances through particular choices in menswear, these are all people and phenomena in the physical world that compose the community at large. This echoes Miller and Slater's reminder:
For both researchers and participants, a central aspect of understanding the dynamics of mediation is to 'disaggregate' the Internet: not to look at a monolithic medium called 'the Internet', but rather at a range of practices, software and hardware technologies, modes of representation and interaction that may or may not be interrelated by participants, machines or programs (indeed they may not all take place at a computer). What we were observing was not so much people's use of 'the Internet' but rather how they assembled various technical possibilities that added up to their Internet. (Miller and Slater 2000, 14)
From an Instagram post that advertises a set of suit to a digital invitation to an offline fashion show, it makes little sense to exclude neither the digital nor the physical of Bluteau's field site—a spiralling social network of beautifully curated profile pages that overlaps and expands far beyond the beautifully curated shops of Savile Row.
During my own year-long fieldwork in Taiwan studying the cotton doll objects as a part of trade with China, it immediately became obvious that Bluteau's immersive cohabitation is the best possible approach for my project. The Taiwanese cotton doll trading community operates almost exclusively online, and even though I had been fortunate enough to recruit research participants for offline interviews, meet-ups and hangouts, most of the community activities—conflicts, protests, social control and resistances—take place online. It would be a gross negligence to design a research project that fails to incorporate the primary way of how my interlocutors engage with their community at large. I have found that in-person interviews and meetups generate very different discursive content than online discussions, but they never stray far from it. In face-to-face interactions, research participants refer to anonymous discussions as if everyone keeps updated with the daily flow of topics and interpersonal drama across multiple social media platforms. They also defend unpopular points of views or criticise more severely than the anonymous discussion threads, which is behaviour that precisely belongs to the aforementioned productive and meaningful gap between the virtual and the real that can only exist because of how they constantly shape and transform each other, and that can only be observed when the researcher considers both the online and the offline through a hybrid approach.
In my findings, participating in these discussions are part of the shared community practices similar to what Bluteau's interlocutors did with Instagram. Through these discussions, the cotton doll community members express, recreate and reaffirm their nation-building desires and antagonism towards China while reconciling their robust trade relations with the Chinese community. The bellicose language against the Chinese community when the cotton doll world became engulfed in geopolitical conflict would not be immediately accessible to me because Taiwanese people tend to stay away from polarising political discussions with each other until it is confirmed that the other share similar political views. In any case, it would have been difficult to fully witness the radicalism the Internet tends to foster through anonymity in offline and face-to-face conversations. The vitriol of the online discussions was indispensable in understanding what kind of attack through semantic violence the community receives as a collective, and the sorts of pushbacks, resistances and counterattacks of its choosing. In this field, it surely appeared that people are more willing to speak freely and frankly than they would have in person.
Creating and maintaining an online identity in this community that demonstrates my position as not only a researcher but also someone who shares their enthusiasm of cotton dolls was crucial for me to gain offline access to community members. Most importantly, I needed to demonstrate that I was a part of the community that keeps up with the constantly updating anonymous discussions and trade or political conflicts, because it is a large part of what it means to be a 'community member' and therefore insider, in addition to the typical icy response with little patience to 'beginners' who did not do their due diligence before asking questions or making assumptions. Even if I choose to not publish any cotton-doll-related content of my own (which I did through Instagram and Plurk), I was still expected to know unspoken rules, community zeitgeist and antagonist parties through a regular consumption of the anonymous discussions. In other words, I had been expected to practice immersive cohabitation from the very beginning—in order to become a person 'inside the circle', as my interlocutors would say.
Without Bluteau's digital self as @anthrodandy[1] and my 'in the circle' (although primarily anonymous) identity, our research projects would have been incomplete in the sense that they may fail to capture a significant part of the field. Imagine Malinowski conducting fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands without tracing the Kula exchange: he certainly would gather much insights from living on one island or one village and participant-observing their daily activities, but it would be so at the expense of gaining significant insights in how the movement of material objects facilitate social hierarchies, material culture, political authority and etc. (Malinowski 1992 [1922]) Knowing and actively ignoring an obvious and accessible component of one's field site—whether physical or digital—need to be compellingly justified methodologically and theoretically.
III. Complete immersion in comparison to the hybrid approach
Complete immersive works such as that of Boellstorff (2015) present a challenge to the claim that a cohesive anthropological approach should seamlessly incorporate both the offline and the online—as it is reflected in the lived experiences of interlocutors—by demonstrating that an entirely immersive ethnographic experience is itself a legitimate methodological approach that is only different and not subpar to the online-offline hybrid model. Boellstorff points out:
Actual-world sociality cannot explain virtual-world sociality. The sociality of virtual worlds develops on its own terms; it references the actual world but is not simply derivative of it [....] The way persons from Korea participate in Second Life might differ from the way persons from Sweden do. But if Koreans and Swedes really do participate in Second Life differently, that difference will show up within Second Life itself; it will be amenable to ethnographic investigation inworld. (Boellstorff 2015, 63)
Indeed, precisely because of the inseparability and mutual dependencies between the online and the offline, the study of virtual sociality will necessarily reflect that of the physical world. A case study that demonstrate this reflexivity is Dibbell's famous essay, 'A Rape in Cyberspace' (1998), drawn from his ethnographic work in LambdaMOO, a virtual environment that is presented entirely in text. The captivating essay plummets the readers into the living room of a mansion where users interact with each other, as Dibbell himself once had, and takes the reader through his haunting account of witnessing a disturbing occurrence of sexual assault. Dibbell notes that in the aftermath and community reactions, no one treated this incident lightly despite its 'virtual' nature. Sexual assault, even in textual form, is treated and evaluated with gravity that ultimately resulted in the termination of the attacker's account.
Taking Boellstoff's point that the physical world very well reflects in the digital and considering Dibbell's account of how the virtual world reference and index ideas and issues in the physical world (Boellstorff 2015, 63), it may seem that ethnographically approaching the virtual world and only the virtual world would provide a sufficient field site to investigate and interpret. Depending on the angle of analysis, this can be true for particular projects, with Boellstorff's own work being an example par excellence. However, Dibbell's work also presents the other side of the argument. 'A Rape in Cyberspace' is most compelling when Dibbell follows through with his journalistic approach and extends his investigations into the offline. For example, he reveals that the attacker is not a single individual but an entire floor of a dormitory in New York University, and although this fact would not have change how the victims experienced the assault, it opens up broad and intriguing conversation about the virtual versus the real in important questions of subjectivity, identity and violence.
Dibbell was able to interview one of the victims named exu[2]—denuded of their textual persona as 'a Haitian trickster spirit of indeterminate gender, brown-skinned and wearing an expensive pearl gray suit, top hat, and dark glasses' (Dibbell 1998, 2), and paints an offline portrait that demonstrates the extent of the emotional toll on the victim. Dibbell's story would not be as cogent had he not been able to depict the offline side of both sides involved in the assault. Even more importantly, he was able to effectively illustrate the gap between the virtual and the real:
“Mostly voodoo dolls are amusing,” wrote exu on the evening after Bungle’s [the assailant] rampage, posting a public statement to the widely read in-MOO[3] mailing list called *social-issues, a forum for debate on matters of import to the entire populace. “And mostly I tend to think that restrictive measures around here cause more trouble than they prevent. But I also think that Mr. Bungle was being a vicious, vile fuckhead, and I...want his sorry ass scattered from #17 to the Cinder Pile. I’m not calling for policies, trials, or better jails. I’m not sure what I’m calling for. Virtual castration, if I could manage it. Mostly, [this type of thing] doesn’t happen here. Mostly, perhaps I thought it wouldn’t happen to me. Mostly, I trust people to conduct themselves with some veneer of civility. Mostly, I want his ass.”
Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face—a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words’ emotional content was no mere fiction. The precise tenor of that content, however, its mingling of murderous rage and eyeball-rolling annoyance, was a curious amalgam that neither the RL [real life] nor the VR [virtual reality] facts alone can quite account for. Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that exu and Moondreamer [another victim] were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim exu scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of “civility.” (Dibbell 1998, 4)
In Dibbell's description, there is a glaring gap between the frigid rage conveyed through exu's words and her raw, physical tears shed through recounting trauma. Dibbell has pieced together posttraumatic reactions of a person in both the online and the offline and notes the textural discontinuity between the two despite their being equal parts exu's experience. While I hesitate to claim that this approach paints a more complete picture than other approaches—as no ethnography or fieldwork experience can claim itself to completely describe a field site, community or culture, and anthropologists may only offer partial observation and analysis—Dibbell's work demonstrates the merit of presenting an online incident from offline perspectives. While Dibbell, a journalist, does not produce his ethnography for anthropological purposes, for someone else studying the occurrence of violence online (for example Kerschbaumer 2016), gendered violence, personhood and subjectivity, and many other potential anthropological explorations, Dibbell's work through his hybrid approach is a wealth of materials ripe for analysis, discussion and debates. How did a dormitory of young students at NYU managed to assault a woman, herself a doctoral candidate, across the country in Seattle, all the while only using programming and textual language? Understanding one event from both the online and offline helps us to ask important questions that challenges both the technology and the human actions (in this case, 'civility') we take for granted.
IV. The 'virtual' and the 'real': varying degrees of representational overlap of social media
Pulling away from socialities mediate through deliberately constructed virtual worlds for entertainment purposes such as Second Life and LambdaMOO, and turning towards more conventional social media platforms, the argument for a hybrid approach still stands. What I perceive as the most significant difference between the former and the latter are their varying degrees of how the self is represented on these platforms, although this difference may matter less than it seems. For example, compare World of Warcraft (WoW) to LinkedIn, a massive online multiplayer game and a career networking social media platform respectively, the player in WoW maintains an identity or multiple identities highly removed from their offline self, yet still represents them (e.g. Nardi as a Night elf priest) in its contextualised world. On the other hand, the average LinkedIn users have profiles that reflect much of their offline credentials or professional experiences (e.g. Nardi as a professor of informatics at University of California, Irvine). However, this does not mean that the selves presented in WoW is any less 'authentic' than through the LinkedIn profile.
It is entirely possible or even reasonable for someone to interact with anonymous others who have no stakes in their lives with the same amount of performance as they would present a professional self manicured to attract potential employers. Following this premise, then, is the idea that the relationship of the virtual and the real are but varying degrees of representational overlap: the nature of the platforms call for different levels of such overlap. LinkedIn or Academia.edu[4] require high degrees of overlap, Instagram and Facebook are often treated as spaces to express a self-image curated for the consumption of those we know in physical life, and game-oriented spaces allow for creative expressions and representations of the self that have little resemblance to the physical self. Most importantly, these digital facets have massive potential to transform the physical facets and vice versa. As Miller and Slater observes, Trinidadian identities such as 'religion, nation, and family' are 'embraced online', and may even 'be seen by many as primarily a means of repairing those allegiances'. (Miller and Slater 2000, 18)
Miller and Slater emphasise in their work that 'Trinidadians have a "natural affinity" for the Internet' and that the Internet 'provided a natural platform for enacting, on a global stage, core values and components of Trinidadian identity such as national pride, cosmopolitanism, freedom, entrepreneurialism.' (Miller and Slater 2000, 2). It also lends itself to be a medium that affirms diasporic connections and the paradoxical axiom that to be Trinidadian is to be international. All these are, as Miller and Slater argue, are evidences that demonstrate the continuity of the online and the offline fabric:
If the Internet appears so bound up with features of Trinidadian society as to appear 'naturally Trini', then we are certainly not dealing with a case of cyberspace as an experience of extreme 'disembedding' from an offline reality. Nor can we understand or explain this situation—'denaturalize' it—by treating the Internet as a kind of placeless place, a 'cyberspace', or by taking as our point of departure those features of it that disconnect it from particular places, such as its 'virtuality'. (Miller and Slater 2000, 4)
Indeed, Internet-mediated connections and activities—on social media platforms or otherwise—are necessarily connected to local ideas, cultures, socialities and practices.
For an anecdotal example in personal experience, I have noticed very different manners in which users engage with each other on Japanese-speaking Twitter in comparison with English-speaking Twitter, where unspoken social rules such as proper greetings, highly specified profile labelling, search-term avoidance constitute basic manners that are rarely seen in other Twitter geographies. Even unfollowing others have etiquette protocols to follow. Twitter manners, although no always strictly observed, reflect the local Japanese manners, and in this case the study of the gap between the online and the offline would entail asking the questions of how and why they are followed or in some cases, deliberately breached.
Miller and Slater's physical approach is now less possible as Internet cafes or offline locations where Internet users gather have dwindled drastically in the last three decades in the face of smartphone proliferation. As the most prevalent access point for connectivity to the Internet—an estimate of 6.34 billion smartphones in the world with a population of 7.96 billion as of 2021 (Ericsson 2022)—we face shifting modalities of the Internet that will surely only continue to change. Bluteau's immersive cohabitation can be a solution to this problem; instead of attempting to locate elusive physical sites to online communities, participating in the online as an ethnographer in the same capacities as one's informants allows for a more practical realistic hybrid approach. As Miller and Slater point out, there will always be an offline counterpart to the online and vice versa, no matter how the modalities shift, change and revolutionise.
V. Conclusion
In order for anthropology—the epistemologically holistic discipline that it is—to capture and study the worlds of today with all its meaningful gaps between the virtual and the real, it needs to incorporate the digital lives of its research collaborators in order to sufficiently accomplish participant observation, the defining methodology of ethnographic approaches as disciplinary cornerstones. Without immersive cohabitation—ethnographic participation through the creation of self-representation in the same digital facets as our interlocutors, Bluteau would not have been able to observe, access and connect to the implicit social network of sartorial London through Instagram and understand what it entails and means to be a content creator within the community, and Dibbell would not have been able to experience his growth from someone who could not understand the real trauma a digitally-mediated act of violence can cause to someone who sees the full weight and gravity of such an assault. I would not have been able to simultaneously observe and participate in the intense debate about the political and nationalist meanings the cotton dolls may carry, because conversations in person simply are unlikely to yield to such emotional intensity.
While entirely digital approaches have their own merits and provide intriguing case studies that reflect and index socialities, ideas and issues in the physical world, works that ambitiously tackle both the online and the offline following hybrid approaches such as immersive cohabitation have a greater potential to offer anthropological insights that address the meaningful gap between the online and the offline, the digital and the physical, the virtual and the real. I believe it is within this gap that many of our questions of how has our contemporality been transformed and revolutionised by digital technologies can find hints if not answers.
In "Deep Hanging Out" (1998), Cliffort Geertz's literature review that compares the works of Pierre Clastres's Chronicles of the Guayaki Indians (1998)—written in 1972 and translated into English in 1998—and James Clifford's Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997), Geertz observes the their divergent approaches are reflexive of the broader anthropological challenges of their respective times, twenty-five years apart. He concludes that to move forward from the crisis of representation is to forge a path that calibrates its traditional self with newer considerations:
The choice is not between regretting the past and embracing the future. Nor is it between the anthropologist as hero and as the very model of a postmodern major general. It is between, on the one hand, sustaining a research tradition upon which a discipline, "soft" and half-formed perhaps but morally essential, has been built and, on the other, "displacing," "reworking," "renegotiating," "reimagining," or "reinventing" that tradition, in favor of a more "multiply centered," "pluralistic," "dialogical" approach, one which sees poking into the lives of people who are not in a position to poke into yours as something of a colonial relic. (Geertz 1998, 4)
I believe this transitional approach is still generative even today, almost another twenty-five years later. To be able to fully engage and represent the postdigital age as we continue to move forward in the rapidly changing context of our time, it is imperative to continue the same course-correction of our methodology, one which addresses the mutually-shaping and transforming relationship between the virtual and the real that will only continue to give away to further complexities and nuances residing within their meaningful gaps.
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[1] @anthrodandy is Bluteau's Instagram and Twitter account handles that he uses to engage in digital ethnography on these platforms.
[2] The original name contains no capitalisation.
[3] MOO is short for multi-user domain object oriented. Multi-user domain (MUD) a digital and textual virtual reality system of which MOO is a subtype. It has mostly gone out of fashion since the advent of computer graphics that enable visual representations of such digital spaces beyond simply text.
[4] Academia.edu is a digital platform for academics and scholars to network with each other and publicise their papers.