The Fieldwork in Anti-Ageist VK Public Pages: Problems of Methodological Strategies

Abstract

Two interrelated methodological strategies are mainly used to conceptualise digital fieldwork. The first is drawn from the principle of non-digital-centric-ness, emphasising the social dimension of digital phenomena. The second is based on the method of “following” derived from George Marcus’s multi-local ethnography programme. The article presents an attempt to understand the limitations of this fieldwork approach in online settings. According to the author, under their influence attention to digital places has disappeared from the focus of digital anthropology. This methodological shift is based on the idea that fieldwork at a specific site has become inaccessible to a researcher, as their informants find themselves within a too fragmented, fluid, unstable, and ephemeral web. Based on the second version of the multi-local fieldwork technique proposed by Marcus and the methodological project of the classical fieldwork in virtual worlds conceptualised by Tom Boellstorff and his colleagues, the author suggests a way of understanding specific fragments of social networks as fieldsites, illustrating it with excerpts from her own research of anti-ageist public pages on the VK social network. The examples demonstrated how the analysis of a specific technology, its affordances, the perception of informants, and the political and economic context of its functioning and transformation, combined with long-term fieldwork in the VK public pages, can contribute to anthropological research into the digital phenomenon.