Fieldwork has been a key tenet of anthropology since roughly the beginning of the 20th century. It’s a core topic in university studies and has been the subject of multitudes of books. At first, fieldwork was intrinsically linked to going somewhere else and studying a cultural group that was definitely not ‘our own’. However, around the later half of the 20th century, notions of studying ‘own cultures’ started to emerge. Naturally, that sparked a series of debates on how fieldwork can be done ‘at home’ and yet more books got written. Obviously, the world doesn’t stay static and when the Internet came into being, that would become the next space of debate about fieldwork.
Can online research be fieldwork? That all depends on what you need for something to qualify. By now, most anthropologists will reasonably accept that you don’t have to go to the rainforest or some tiny tropical island for it to count. You can do fieldwork in your home country, city, village… the online world is reachable anywhere and takes you everywhere – in a way the Internet is the ultimate travel whilst staying at home.
The next question could be – can you do participant observation? Notions of what participant observation entails are also complex and full of debate, but the basic is that you join in with a group’s activities and culture (participant) and you make notes and records about it (observation). The Internet certainly allows for rather straightforward access to both observation and participation with relatively low gatekeeping thresholds in most cases. The extended question there is more about immersion – can online research achieve the same or similar levels of immersion in the group studied as living with the group? The obvious response to that is that no-one lives literally online, we all dip in and out, so, by its very nature, there’s no such thing as true continuous immersion for anyone. You are always experiencing a similar level of immersion as the group ‘natives’ you are studying.
Like with any other research, you can do immersive participant-observation. You can engage in fieldwork practices such as interviews, questionnaires and extensive unstructured conversations with members of the group you study. All you need there is to gain the trust and access to individuals, much like you would in any other fieldwork context.
Online research just means that you need a computer and a connection to the Internet. It seems like the easiest path with least barriers to research, but it is no less valid for it.