Girls who like Boys who like Boys – Ethnography of ... - Yuuyami.com

How then does a locality affect our activities (or lack thereof) and
what are its implications for the formation of a fan-mode of identity? In the
following paragraphs these localities and their structures are more thoroughly
discussed; I will explore the connections between activity and identity
formation in later sections.
Wilson and Peterson outline the possibilities for anthropological
research in cyberspaces in The Anthropology of Online Communities by
offering the reader traditional themes such as identity, community, and power
concepts (2002). The article is a respectable survey, but all too readily adopts
previously stated theories of power, class, and culture without examination of
their current relevance. There are several points that may be attributed to an
overly discipline-traditional approach to researching the Internet: Most
pointedly, the use of the word “cyberspace” as a singular location only is
jarring as there is no singular “space” and certainly not prevalently in a
geographical context. Truthfully, the authors do use the term “virtual spaces”
at the conclusion of the text, but the change from singular to plural leads the
reader to think that the authors are not consistent in their understandings of the
dimensions discussed. In fact, we can and often do perceive the Internet as
one large space; an “online” to our “real-life” or “offline.” The point is, there
are vast differences between the concept of a single space and that of multiple,
infinite spaces. The authors seem to perceive those smaller “virtual spaces” as
a semi-reproduction of the smaller partitions of the real-life world.
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