Etnografiska utmaningar på nätet - Nätverket - Uppsala universitet

Surfing Conversations. The development of a methodological approach to the Internet as practice#Screen shot reproduced with kind permission from Torvet.dk. During a Surfing Conversation, the ethnologist would sometimestake ”screen shots.” The screen shot above shows the completed order at a Danish virtual grocery store. The user needed potatoes,chicken and root vegetables to make an evening dinner. She did not buy ingredients such as spices because she already had them inthe kitchen. The user also bought bananas because they were on sale, not because she was going to use them for the dish.on a specific place on the Internet (a virtual space), aswell as in a corporeal space (or potential non-place).The practice is constituted in both these spaces, andas such the gap between virtual and corporeal isinadequate. From addressing this as a methodologicalquestion, CKA developed the method of the SurfingConversation.Surfing Conversation 7The Surfing Conversation was developed as a methodthat went beyond the dichotomous understanding ofvirtual and corporeal spaces and produced empiricalknowledge concerning practices that occurredsimultaneously on and off the Internet. This wasespecially important because one of the main goalsof the project was to create a business model for theinteractive grocery shopping of the future.7The Surfing Conversation was developed with inspiration fromanthropologists Tim Ingold and Jo Lee’s concept of “walk andtalk” (2006) and also ethnologist Marie Sandberg’s critique of thephenomenological features of Ingold and Lee’s concept, which furtherdeveloped into “Walking Conversations” (2009).During a Surfing Conversation, the user and theethnologist were physically sitting next to each otherin front of a computer with Internet access. Theethnologist started with a presentation of what the userwas supposed to do, which was to go grocery shoppingfor a meal of the user’s own choice on a specific Danishvirtual grocery store. The user was instructed to ”thinkaloud” — that is, to explain what he was doing, suchas “Now I’m clicking on the picture of minced meat.”The Surfing Conversation should provide the settingof both a virtual and corporeal space in which theuser presents his reflections while using the interactivegrocery store. If the user forgot to explain what he wasdoing, the ethnologist would ask a question like, “Whatare you doing now?” — not to lead the answers, butto prompt the user to explain aloud. In this way, theSurfing Conversation got the user to solve a particularchallenge and provide information about the practiceof grocery shopping on the Internet. This was donethrough a user-reflexive process, where the user wasasked to solve a problem in a way that would makethe solution compatible with his everyday practice. Bydoing so, the Surfing Conversation gathered empiricalknowledge on Internet practice — both as entity andperformance, and also as a part of the more general13Nätverket 2010: 17: 8–16http://natverket.etnologi.uu.se