Virtual Methods

86 • Jason Rutter and Gregory W. H. Smith
number of RumCommers in order to interview them. We attended four
RumRendezvous in a variety of locations in the UK. These meetings were held
over a Saturday and Sunday and offered an opportunity for those who had met only
online to test their assumptions face-to-face. We took notes after these meetings
and compared them to the accounts lodged on the newsgroup and on personal web
sites in the days that followed. We drank coffee with RumCommers, ate meals and
got drunk with them, sat on their furniture or floors and slept in their homes. No
great privations to be sure – certainly nothing on the scale of those faced by
anthropologists – but we ‘went out’ (Molotch 1994) rather than adopt the supposedly
easier task of just watching our computer screens. Like other ethnographers,
we had many reasons to be grateful to the generosity of our informants. We used
our ordinary skills of sociability in order to study sociability practices. A web site
to disseminate research findings was set up (but was never used when we realized
it would compromise our assurances of anonymity and confidentiality).
We adopted overt roles as researchers in all our dealings with RumCommers.
These dealings mainly concerned arrangements in connection with interviews and
RumRendezvous meetings. In our self-presentations we endeavoured to be
innocuous in appearance and attitude. There was a slightly age-graded division of
labour when interviewing. The less old in years of the two of us (and more computer
literate) (JR) interviewed younger RumCommers. The other (GS) became
skilled at disguising his lack of computing knowledge; he interviewed many of the
older RumCommers, who tended to be less preoccupied with technical concerns.
In fact the level of technical knowledge needed to address the sociological questions
that concerned us was not high. We cultivated the role of unobtrusive, interested
outsiders seeking to learn about the history and ways of RumCom. Our
participation was ‘minimal’ and ‘restrained’ (Emerson 1981: 368) and we seldom
posted to the group.
Our major method of data collection was the messages that were placed in a
database for ease of retrieval. This proved a valuable resource since many
RumCommers did not have a clear recollection of threads, even the ones they had
actively participated in themselves. We constructed a simple questionnaire that
gave us some very basic demographic information but which more importantly led
to an interview in a substantial proportion of cases. Phone and face-to-face interviews
were carried out mainly in the second half of 1998 to find out how people
became involved in computing and the Internet and what they got out of participating
in RumCom. We managed to interview about 18 per cent of the total
number of active posters on RumCom.local, including several of the heavier
posters. Interviews were taped and transcribed. One of us visited the administrative
headquarters on a Scottish island, a visit that also permitted interviews with
some of RumCom.local’s longest established members. The managing director
supplied organizational data. These were the data-gathering activities that, along