Outside Reading: Leander and McKim's Tracing the Everyday 'Sitings' of Adolescents on the Internet

Kevin Leander and Kelly McKim’s Tracing the Everyday ‘Sitings’ of Adolescents on the Internet: a strategic adaptation of ethnography across online and offline spaces

Leander and McKim’s article is primarily concerned with how to integrate the online realm with traditional participant observation. Their particular population, adolescents, spend time interacting in the physical world as well as the virtual one, and so Leander and McKim are driven to follow their participants.

This article brings up a situation that seems to go unaddressed in many descriptions of internet ethnographies: studying participants both online and off. A great deal of the information on internet ethnography (at least that I’ve found) focuses on internet-only communities, and an important part of that work is in defining what is relevant to participant identities. With an online-only community, participants’ offline identities can be seen as largely irrelevant. In Leander and McKim’s situation, the participants are followed online, which means that it is important to tie both on- and offline identities together, fitting together the online participation with the everyday life, like two puzzle pieces.

The authors problematize a few other factors of online participant observation. They acknowledge the problem posed by ‘lurkers’—the unseen readers of websites who do not post or interact. If an ethnographer needs to be fully aware of their environment, how do they account for those who cannot be seen? Leander and McKim also bring up the issue of the extent to which a researcher can participate in online activities, noting that simply lurking is not fully engaging, but making oneself known as an ethnographer can hinder or otherwise influence the behavior of the participants. It seems that this dynamic would be present anyway, online or offline.

Leander and McKim suggest reconceptualizing the methodology of connective ethnography (connecting the online and offline worlds) through Latour’s idea of flow as presented in Actor Network Theory. Though this suggestion seems intuitively correct (to observe a participant’s behavior flow from activity to activity and the malleability of their identity and cultural practices at each site), it does not seem to add anything that has not been done or understood already by an experienced ethnographer.

The authors conclude the article by listing different things for ethnographers to observe in online behavior. Looking through the list (flow/place-making, paths, metonyms, metaphors, and textual construction of space and self), I remain unconvinced that there is anything particularly unique about doing ethnography online. Leander and McKim make a good argument for why it ought to be done, particularly in conjunction with traditional participant observation, but their recommendations for methodology seem to be nothing new.