Blurring Boundaries: The “Real” and the “Virtual” in Hybrid Spaces

Abstract

This chapter introduces a sequence of four papers that focus on the theme of knowledge and information flow in hybrid and virtual sites of interaction. As the Internet and the World Wide Web proliferate, people live increasingly hybrid lives where the physical and the digital, the real and the virtual, interact. In this world, online and offline identities may overlap and interdigitate, erasing prior boundaries in social, cultural, linguistic, political, and economic domains. My central argument proposes that we are witnessing an underlying process of technology-spurred blurring, resulting in major shifts in the cultural landscape of the 21st century. Providing context for the papers, I argue that the blurring of boundaries and the fusion of the real and the virtual in hybrid settings may require rethinking conventional ethnographic methods in the future, and beyond that, the actual problem space for anthropology. To frame the papers methodologically, I suggest that we are in a process of experimentation during which conventional ethnographic methods are being adjusted, or will need to be adjusted, to the requirements of a truly hybrid ethnography, i.e., one that combines research in virtual and real-world spaces. I specifically examine some of the issues that arise in and for online and offline research, gauging the impact on core concepts in anthropological ethnography such as "fieldsite" and "participant observation."