Virtual Methods

148 • Mário J. L. Guimarães Jr
cultural framework is accessible not only through the informant’s discourse but
also through many other everyday features such as physical behaviour, the form of
interactions, how the acquaintances mature through time and many others. The
group’s identity is bounded by these cultural features, which at same time perform
the boundaries of the social environments in cyberspace. These social environments
can be either based on a single platform and server or spread through different
servers and platforms.
Tracing the Fieldwork Boundaries
Tracing the boundaries of the chosen social groups remains a challenge for the
ethnographer interested in the local cultures in cyberspace. Reviewing the literature,
the amount of work which has studied online social relationships and which
has employed the software platforms as the main – if not the only – criteria to
determine the object is quite amazing (as in Reid 1991; Hamman 1996). This can
be the natural approach if the question being researched relates to the specificity
of the medium itself (as in McLaughlin, Osborne and Smith 1995). Nevertheless,
when the focus is the culture developed inside bounded social groups, it is more
appropriate to look at their actual behaviour and how they employ different
resources in order to perform their social life.
The data gathered during the preliminary fieldwork revealed that it was possible
to trace the group’s boundaries through its network of social relationships and
through the shared meanings that gave a sense of ‘group’ to its components.
Nevertheless, it was very difficult to specify a single location in cyberspace where
this group lived. The main platform employed was The Palace but the group used
to travel around different Palace servers. Often instant messaging (specifically
ICQ) was also used to counter temporary network ‘lags’ on the servers or to create
another layer of interaction. Whenever Palace servers were down, web-based chat
rooms or IRC were used. There was also an email list used to publicize events and
web pages were maintained with news, pictures and links.
Social life in cyberspace has features similar to large urban centres, where the
use of a particular urban space is not necessarily associated with being part of a
specific social group. 10 In fact, the most popular Palace servers were frequented
by very different groups, which managed to keep their specific boundaries despite
sharing the same space. The eventual conflicts that arose from these contacts and
consequent strategies employed to solve them provided valuable data about the
group on which the ethnography was performed.
In order to conceptualize both the place of this group and its boundaries, I
employed the idea of social environment, a symbolic space created in cyberspace
through programs which allow communication between two or more users. 11
These environments are created and inhabited by social groups and can consist of