Virtual Methods

Doing Anthropology in Cyberspace • 153
The interactionist approach of Goffman (1959) is useful as an empirical tool to
understand the performative aspect of the multiple belonging of individuals in
contemporary societies. According to Goffman, in every context of social life
actors play different roles consistent with the respective contexts that are dynamically
negotiated with other actors. The social sciences are not necessarily concerned
with persons as individuals, but as subjects of situated social relationships.
Therefore, according to the topic under investigation and the empirical approach
adopted, the informants of an online ethnography can be the personas that create
the social environments in cyberspace. It is not always possible to equate one’s
online and offline personas in so far as the same individual can participate in many
overlapping social groups playing different roles in each. The aim to find the
‘truth’ behind the social masks, therefore, must be abandoned because the intrinsic
richness of the sociability created at the level of these masks could be lost in this
quest. Either to create a character far away from one’s own ‘reality’ or to be
‘sincere’ the individual must behave according to the environment’s meaning
framework, revealing in this way the culture of the group. 17
In the Living in the Palace project, the informants were predominantly considered
to be the online personas. Naturally, the individuals behind the keyboards
were not ignored, but the empirical and analytical focus was the interactions and
performances in cyberspace in so far as the informants themselves did not meet
each other in contexts other than online. 18 The social life in cyberspace was considered
by the members of the group as one aspect of their lives. In the same way
as other domains of everyday sociability such as workplace, leisure activities or
religion, cyberspace plays a role in their life which varies in intensity and importance
according to the specificity of each individual case. Some informants consider
the Palace as a leisure option and a place to meet interesting people. For
Brazilians living abroad, life in the Palace is a chance to chat in Brazilian-
Portuguese and to be in touch with the country. For some informants cyberspace
can be their main place of social contact if access to other places is difficult for any
reason. Some see cyberspace life as an interesting novelty that can lose appeal
after some months while others frequent it daily, for long periods sometimes
making it a workplace. Teenagers, elders, mothers, insomniacs, web-designers,
cyber-anthropologists, children using the computer sneakily late at night, all of
them met to create a culture through friendship, flirtation, information exchange,
conflicts and all other features through which social life is created. Nevertheless,
the informants of this research were not these persons, but the personas lived by
them in the context of their online experiences. In other words, the research aimed
to describe ethnographically the culture of a group constituted in cyberspace therefore
taking account of the informant’s online selves.
As a normal outcome of ethnographic work, even the researcher self was
affected during the fieldwork. Despite the fact that I did not have to travel to an