Virtual Methods

Doing Anthropology in Cyberspace • 151
the teachings of social anthropology and ethnography handbooks are valid for
online contexts as well as offline ones. That is, the same skills of knowing how to
listen to an informant, learning the proper way to behave and so on are as valuable
online as offline. The main prerequisite for entrance to the group remained being
attentive to the small details of everyday life and how they ‘talk’ about the broader
culture of the environment. Reciprocity is also present in online social environments,
and plays an important role. That is, the people gather there to be together,
to share a common space where they can talk about their issues, and to listen to
other members of the group. The symbolic exchange of attention and concern
plays a very important role in the fabric of daily life, and must not be ignored. This
kind of development is mainly detectable through an ethnographic approach where
the researcher can afford to spend enough time to develop acquaintance and confidence
with informants (although see also Kivits and Orgad, Chapters 3 and 4 in
this volume, for discussion of the need for attention and concern in interview relationships).
Another form of reciprocity relates to objects and knowledge. One of the
group’s collective activities was building and decorating Palace servers or rooms.
Despite the full resources to configure a room being available only to Gods and
Wizards, the entire group participated in the creation of their space. There was
trade in objects, pictures and sounds as well as the knowledge necessary to create
and configure them. As it is relatively complex to build an avatar from scratch,
there was an intense trade in ‘tailored’ avatars, as well as the knowledge of how to
make them. The everyday small problems with computers and their solutions were
also a topic of talk and mutual help among the members of the group.
Regarding fieldwork techniques, the way to apprehend the subtleties of bodily
behaviour is by observing, learning through one’s own experiences and sometimes
making embarrassing mistakes. As this learning stage happens with every newcomer,
experienced users already had some confidence in teaching the basics of
everyday proxemics. There are many social resources available such as jokes and
funny tales of past users that make the process easier. As a newcomer, I made
many common mistakes, and my own process of learning was an excellent opportunity
to grasp an insight into the role of the avatars and their physical performance.
During my first experiences in the field I found it hard to follow the many interactions
going on in the environment and at same time keep the awareness of the
‘whole’ scene and make notes in the diary. This kind of experience is also common
in offline ethnography, but the online contexts provide another level of difficulty:
the possibility of simultaneously taking part in many conversations. These simultaneous
interactions can take place: in public, addressing the different interlocutors
by name or by the avatar’s physical cues; in private, through utterances addressed
for one specific person that can be ‘heard’ only by her or him; or even through the