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Project Report of 2023: SVP-2363

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“Virtual Ethnography”

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IQAC
Sri Venkateswara College
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University of Delhi
Benito Juarez Road, Dhaula Kuan, New Delhi
New Delhi -110021

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 SRIVIPRA PROJECT 2023

Title: Virtual Ethnography

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Name of Mentor: Dr. Urmi Bhattacharyya
Name of Department: Sociology
Designation: Assistant Professor

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List of students under the SRIVIPRA Project

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student
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0821011 B.A. (Hons)

Sociology
Bhoomi Bohara
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0721603 B.A. (Hons)

Political
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2 Darpan Bhalla
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0821033 B.A. (Hons)

Sociology

3 Sneha Alexander

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Signature of Mentor

Certificate of Originality

This is to certify that the aforementioned students from Sri Venkateswara

College have participated in the summer project SVP-2363 titled “Virtual

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Ethnography”. The participants have carried out the research project work
under my guidance and supervision from 15 June, 2023 to 15th September
2023. The work carried out is original and carried out in an

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online/offline/hybrid mode.

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Signature of Mentor
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 Acknowledgements

I take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to our Principal Prof. C. Sheela
Reddy for providing me with this opportunity to carry out my project under the Sri
Venkateswara Internship Program for Research in Academics, and I would also like to
thank the Sri-Vipra Convenors for facilitating the programme and ensuring its successful

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completion.

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Dr. Urmi Bhattacharyya
Assistant Professor
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Department of Sociology
Sri Venkateswara College
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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

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1. Digital Hate: An Analysis of Social Perceptions 6-12

Bhoomi Bohara

2. Impact of Social Media on Community Life in 13-16

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Odisha
Darpan Bhalla

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3. Virtually Walking the City 17-21
Sneha Alexander

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 Virtually Walking the City

Sneha Alexander

Introduction

The modern city is an amalgamation of myriads of experiences and ways of life. Offering
employment to some, education to others, the city has us all competing for space in its
orderly chaos. The city itself has many faces and functions for the many people it holds.
However, in times of modernity, it is made accessible to us in different forms. From

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memoirs of experiences to detailed maps, the city is experienced, its experience
abstracted and represented in various forms. Standing at the intersection of
phenomenology, ethnography and virtual reality, this paper tries to understand the city as
a virtually lived experience - How does one walk and experience the city virtually? How

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is this experience different from physically walking the streets? And finally, what remains
when we abstract the experience of walking, away from its physicality?

Phenomenology and the idea of Experience

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Despite being a widely influential stream of thought in post-modern times,
phenomenology often escapes easy definition due to its internal diversity and emphasis
on the subjectivity of experience. Developed by German philosopher Edmund Husserl
and later by Alfred Schutz, phenomenology understands all of the physical and social
world as a construction. Nothing is real, but only exists in relativity. All that we
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experience and believe to be real, is a product of the ability of human consciousness to
understand and interpret the world. Phenomenology then, studies human experience and
structures of consciousness.
“All empirical sciences refer to the world as pre-given; but they and their instruments are
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themselves elements of this world. Only a philosophical doubt cast upon the implicit
presuppositions of all our habitual thinking - scientific or not - can guarantee the
‘exactitude’ not only of such a philosophical attempt itself but of all the sciences dealing
directly or indirectly with our experiences of the world.” (Schutz, 1975, p. 54)
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This emphasis on the subjectivity of experiences allows us to understand the various

meanings encoded in the city and our actions in it.

Walking the City

This subjective construction of own’s experiences becomes extremely important an
aspect of urbanism, wherein the individual is confronted with a vast variety of stimuli on
a daily basis. How each person experiences the city is different based on their way of life.
How you commute, where you live, whom you interact with all come together to shape
one’s idea of the city. These subjective realities of the city dweller, may be irreconcilably
different from each other.

One of the many ways of experiencing the city is by walking. One of the first to highlight
walking as a means of understanding the city, was German philosopher Walter Benjamin.

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He drew from the work of Baudelaire, to talk about ‘the flaneur’. The flaneur was a
mythical-like character who would roam the streets of Paris, strolling, wandering,
observing, personally detached from all that he sees happening in the city, yet keenly
interested in the same. The concept of the flaneur soon became a methodological tool;
emphasising detached observation and study of the industrial city. Benjamin provides a
rather romanticised take on the stroller when he says, “The person who travels a street, it
would seem, has no need of any waywise guiding hand. It is not in wandering that man
takes to the street, but rather in submitting to the monotonous, fascinating, constantly,
unrolling band of asphalt.” (Benjamin, 1999, p. 518).

Bourdieu traced a link between manners of walking and one’s cultural identity. A way of

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walking, for him, was not merely an expression of the thoughts and feelings indoctrinated
through an education in cultural precepts and properties. It was a way of thinking and
feeling such that these cultural precepts and identities are continually being created and
re-created. (Bourdieu, 1977, p.87). Lee and Ingold remark that walking has always been

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intrinsic to ethnographic research insofar as the researcher walks along with the
interlocutors in their attempt to study their way of life. While often mentioned in field
notes, the process of walking rarely makes it to the final research paper, wherein it is
sidelined to make space for the more essential destination. They have also suggested that
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‘the locomotive aspect of walking allows for an understanding of places being created by
routes’ (Lee and Ingold, 2006, p. 68).

The differentiation between place and space allows scope for subjective understanding of
the city. While place refers to the physicality of a location, space highlights the
socio-cultural meanings that the landscape is imbued with. Even while walking, for
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example, men and women might have starkly different experiences for the cultural ideas
of safety and danger are encoded differently for different genders.
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Ethnography of the Virtual World

In the 21st century, human lives are increasingly mediated by technology. It is technology
that fosters communication, learning and even life experiences. The internet allows for
huge amounts of data to be created, stored and consumed by people all over the world. It
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has also radically transformed the scope of research and opened us up to new horizons.
Virtual ethnography is one such field, the rise of which was rather unprecedented. While
ethnography has long since been an integral part of social anthropological research, its
digital manifestation has now taken root. Ethnography is the in-depth study of a society,
wherein the researcher lives with their interlocutors for months and even years to
understand, interpret and study their ways of life. O’Reilly understands ethnographic
research as iterative-inductive research which draws on a family of methods. It
acknowledges the role of theory as well as that of the researcher themself. The
interlocutors are then viewed as part object, part subject. (O’Reilly, 2005) Pioneered by
the likes of Bronislaw Malinowski and E. E. Evans Pritchard, ethnographic studies in
sociology focused on description and comparative analysis.

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Hine writes of virtual ethnography thus, “Ethnographic studies of online settings made a
major contribution to the establishment of a view of the Internet as a culture where the
uses people make of the technology available to them could be studied. These approaches
established cyberspace as a plausible ethnographic field site” (Hine, 2000, p. 9).

She understands the internet both, as a culture and also as a cultural artefact. In
understanding the internet as a culture, we see how it provides a context and creates a
culture, within whose precepts the people interacting in its context operate. As a cultural
artefact however, the internet becomes a product of a cultural context larger than itself,
such that “what it is and does are the product of culturally produced understandings that
can vary” (Hine, 2000, p. 9).

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One’s experience of the city is also increasingly mediated by the use of technology.
Navigating the city no longer requires memory or familiarity due to the advent of maps
and furthered by the digitization of these maps. Google Maps as a means of navigating
the city has become rather common. This radically transforms one’s experience of the

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city in so far as it allows one to explore new places virtually before stepping foot there.
Urban spaces are not mere geographical locations, but are created and recreated by the
meaning and cultural precepts encoded in them by our everyday activities. “We do not
live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We live in a
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set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely
not superimposable on one another” (Foucault, 1986).

Technological advancement has not only impacted our daily lives, but also how research
takes place. In utilising various advancements in technology, sociological research has
formulated intriguing and rather unconventional methods of research. A rather interesting
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study was conducted by researchers at University of Oulu, Finland. They made use of
Google Street View that allows one to virtually walk the streets of any place by merely
navigating certain computer controls. This was further enhanced by the use of a VR
Headset which made the experience of walking feel extremely real. “The goal is not to
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learn about the object or the place but instead to learn about the informant through the
object or the place” (Leon and Cohen, 2005) A limited sample size of 6 people were
called in to test this unique methodological experiment. Each of them were taken along a
pre-decided specific route in the University campus and asked of the changes they
observed along the route, whether they were familiar with the places they saw and
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whether they had any specific memories related to that place. It provides intriguing
insights into how subjective meanings are encoded into our understanding of space. “Our
observations highlight how cultural influences, familiarity with the site, seasonal and
other temporal changes inform the contextual perspective of participants when visiting
heterotopic spaces.” (Kostakos et. al., 2019, p.5) This method allows for complete
immersion in a virtual replica of the real world, thus opening the scope of virtual
ethnography to far-off places without the researcher or interlocutor being physically
present there.

Cheryl Gilge, in her paper, ‘Google street view and the image as experience’,
deconstructs Google maps’ street view (GSV) and evaluates what constitutes the
experience of exploring the city virtually. “As a spatial representation, it (Google street

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view) brings together two distinct ways of knowing the world through empirical
documentation: mapping and photography. Whereas maps offer visual diagrams of spatial
information, photographs offer documents with spatio-temporal specificity” (Gilge, 2006,
p.2).

Google maps, created in 2004, expanded to offer a third representational mode of the
street view in 2007. Capturing images on cars, bike and cycles, it allows the user to
obtain a 360 degrees view of where they stand and move along the roads using the arrows
on their device. There have been numerous instances of people finding their deceased
relatives on an old frozen frame in GSV (Heilweil, 2021). In walking the city through the
images of GSV, one is able to embody the spirit of the flaneur; observing unobserved. “If

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we accept that to walk, fundamentally is to lack a place, it implies a condition of
non-belonging” (Haaland, 2013, p.606).

However, it is important to highlight that virtual replicas of space are fundamentally

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different from the real space in many ways. In capturing spaces in a single frame, GSV
freezes a place in a moment of time and denies spaces their intrinsically dynamic nature.
Sri Venkateswara College on the map will be as it was seen on a hot afternoon in May
2022. That is, until the next data update on the software. It also reduces the three
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dimensionality of a place into the two-dimensionality of an image which may present the
world to the viewer in an alienated, detached and desensitised manner.

In a very intriguing paper titled, ‘The Corporeal Body in Virtual Reality’, Murray and
Sixsmith discuss how the physical body is embodied and disembodied in one’s
experience of the virtual world. Virtual reality based technologies, in the history of their
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development, have often focused on the development of visual technology, being
primarily optical in nature. They input first the eyes, then the hands, sidelining or
ignoring the sensorium of the rest of the body. For one to then feel completely embodied
and immersed in a virtual world, it is important to block all sensory impressions from the
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physical world. In this attempt however, virtual reality set-ups tend to cater to the visual
needs of the human body. For example, the point of projection in VR is at standing
height, so the perspective offered to viewers mimics their real-world experiences.
Another interesting observation they present is that people tend to carry their real-world
cultural ideas, social understandings and real-world experiences into how they behave in
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the virtual space. Thus there is not an absolute disconnect from one to the next. Murray
and Bowers’ study on how people navigate through a virtual cityscape, in which the
computer allowed them to progress anywhere, found that people tended to walk on the
ground and the roads, avoiding the buildings and trees. Thus we see the same
socio-cultural patterns being followed. Finally, feminist scholars have often critiqued the
common utilisation of white, male bodies wherever physical characters are represented.
This lack of diversity in the embodiment process can make it all the more alienating and
difficult to relate to.

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REFERENCES:

Benjamin, W. (1999). The Streets of Paris. In The Arcades Project (pp. 516–526).
essay, Belknap Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1977). STRUCTURES AND THE HABITUS. In R. Nice (Trans.),

Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural
Anthropology, pp. 72-95). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
doi:10.1017/CBO9780511812507.004

Gilge, C. (2016). Google street view and the image as experience. GeoHumanities,

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2(2), 469-484.

Haaland, T. (2013). Flânerie", Spatial Practices and Nomadic Thought in

Antonioni's" La notte. Italica, 90(4), 596-619.

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Heilweil, R. (2021, June 19). People keep finding late loved ones on google maps.
Vox.
[Link]
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Hine, C. M. (2000). Virtual ethnography. Virtual ethnography, (pp. 1-40). Sage
Publications.

Jason Patrick De Leon and Jeffrey H. Cohen. 2005. Object and Walking Probes in
Ethnographic Interviewing. Field Methods 17, 2 (2005), 200–204. Https:
//[Link]/10.1177/1525822X05274733
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Kostakos, P., Alavesa, P., Oppenlaender, J., & Hosio, S. (2019, November). VR
ethnography: a pilot study on the use of virtual reality'go-along'interviews in
Google street view. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Mobile
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and Ubiquitous Multimedia (pp. 1-5).

Lee, J., & Ingold, T. (2006). Fieldwork on foot: Perceiving, routing, socializing. In
Locating the field (pp. 67-85). Routledge.
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Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics 16, 1
(1986), 22–27. [Link]

Murray, C. D., & Sixsmith, J. (1999). The corporeal body in virtual reality. Ethos,
27(3), 315-343.

O'Reilly, K. (2012). Ethnographic methods. Routledge.

Schutz, A. (1975). Phenomenological Baseline. In Alfred Schutz: On

phenomenology and social relations: Selected writings (pp. 53–71). essay,
University of Chicago Press.

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