My profile: The ethics of virtual ethnography

This paper advances some specific recommendations for an approach to studying the spaces of online culture that draw on aspects of cultural (anthropological) ethnography. It aims to offer some provocations for researchers setting out to engage sympathetically with online culture, to account for the particular kinds of intimacy these spaces enable. Each online scene or space, whether declared to be a community or not, is organised both by its specific form and by an order of appropriate identity practices associated with that form. At the same time, across these different cultures, modes of belonging mediate these practices which are recognisable across many online communities and formats. While the forms of intimacy developed online are far from consistent, this paper considers how best to engage with the consistencies and variations of online intimacy.