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Ethnic and Racial Studies
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Moving ethnography online:
researching Brazilian migrants'
online togetherness
Mieke Schrooten
Version of record first published: 16 Feb 2012.
To cite this article: Mieke Schrooten (2012): Moving ethnography online: researching
Brazilian migrants' online togetherness, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35:10, 1794-1809
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Moving ethnography online: researching
Brazilian migrants’ online togetherness
Mieke Schrooten
(First submission February 2011; First published February 2012)
Abstract
This article contributes to recent scholarship on the changing nature of
fieldwork practices within migration research, focusing on the practice of
online ethnography. It makes a case for the significance of the internet and,
more specifically, social network sites, in the experience of many migrants.
I state that online togetherness is an integral part of the lives of many
migrants which also interrelates with ‘offline’ aspects of their social lives.
Therefore, I argue that current research on migration would benefit from a
more balanced combination of offline and online ethnography, taking into
account how online connectivity affects the nature of migration and the
conditions of being a migrant. Methodologically, I suggest that ethnography
is well suited for generating understandings of the significance of
the internet in the experience of migrants, but that a number of
adjustments in methods of data collection and analysis must be made.
Keywords: Migration studies; transnationality; online ethnography; social
network sites; online togetherness; Brazilian migrants.
Throughout history, human populations have constantly lived in
interaction with one another, crossing and levelling out territorial
borders. Today, global relationships between people, capital, commodities
and ideologies have even intensified, leading to a globalized
world that is typified by a ‘proliferation of cross-border flows and
transnational networks’ (Castles 2002, p. 1143). A strong illustration
of this transnational reality is the growing number of international
migrations. In the year 2005, there were 191 million people living
outside their countries of birth, more than ever before in history
(United Nations 2006). By 2007, estimates approached 200 million or
approximately 3 per cent of the world’s population, marking what
Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 35 No. 10 October 2012 pp. 1794Á1809
# 2012 Taylor & Francis
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former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan described as a ‘new era of
mobility’ (Adey 2010, p. 1).
The current ‘age of migration’ (Castles and Miller 2009) is urging
social scientists to rethink the study of migration. The classic
migratory picture that conceptualized migration as a (temporary)
sharp break from the home community is no longer tenable. Rapid
technological development, worldwide trade and a revolution in
communication are increasingly interconnecting individuals and
places, giving a new impetus to human mobility (Bauman 2000;
Urry 2007; Castles and Miller 2009; Audebert and Doraı¨ 2010).
In recent years, there have been a number of stimulating studies that
have attempted to bridge the gap between theory and this globalized
reality, resulting not only in a re-evaluation of a number of longstanding
conventions and assumptions but also in a gradual transformation
of classic research practices (see for instance Marcus 1995;
Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Amit 2004; Tsing 2005; Faubion and
Marcus 2009). The subject of this article Á the research of migrants’
online togetherness Á can be situated in one of the key transformations
of this discipline, namely the shift away from ‘methodological
nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) towards a theorizing
that is rooted in the concept of transnationality (Basch, Glick Schiller
and Szanton-Blanc 1995). Criticizing the taken-for-granted equation
of society with the nation state, contemporary scholars recognize that
‘national organization as a structuring principle of societal and
political action can no longer serve as the orienting reference point
for the social scientific observer’ (Beck and Sznaider 2006, p. 4).
Instead, the social sciences have been transformed by the emergence
of a transnational paradigm, referring to processes whereby people
structurally operate in social fields that transgress national borders
(Glick Schiller, Basch and Szanton-Blanc 1992; Faist 2000). Migrants
very often participate in social networks that are stretched
across multiple locations. For example, many sustain family relations
or support across national borders (Parren˜as 2001), contribute to
socio-economic development in their homeland and/or their country
of residence (Brinkerhoff 2009), participate actively in communities
that span the globe (Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton-Blanc 1995), or
enact their political engagement in multiple states (Smith 2007).
This focus on transnational communities urged researchers to adapt
their research strategies to the globalized world and to escape the
established practice of using the national geographic level as the spatial
unit of reference. The development of a transnational approach on
migration was accompanied by the introduction of ‘multi-sited fieldwork’
(Marcus 1995), a new form of data collection that allowed
researchers to investigate transnational units of reference. Differing
from a mere comparative study of localities, the ‘multi-sited fieldworker’
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quite literally follows people and their connections and relationships
across space (Marcus 1995, p. 97; Hannerz 2003; Falzon 2009).
In this article, I demonstrate that the ‘methodological transnationalism’
that results from a multi-sited approach also generates ‘new’
research locations that are important for social scientists to take into
account. The shift from the study of the ‘uprooted migrant’ to that of
transnational and fragmented networks involves more than a simple
multiplication of the physical locations at which social scientists
should conduct research; it also involves researching new types of data
and research sites. The focus of this article is on one specific ‘new’
fieldwork site, namely the internet, and, methodologically, on the
application of online ethnography to migration research.
In what follows, I seek to expand the discussion of internet use
among transnational migrants by exploring the example of Brazilian
migrants’ online togetherness on the social network site ‘Orkut’, which
is enormously popular among Brazilians, both among those residing
within Brazil as well as among Brazilian migrants. I argue that
migration researchers should adapt their fieldwork locations and
research methods to the environment in which today’s interconnected
migrants live.
Migrants’ move online: transnational social networks
On 5 February 2011, the New York Times published an article titled
‘Movement began with outrage and a Facebook page that gave it an
outlet’. The article focuses on the revolts that have sprouted in Egypt
and Tunisia and shows how Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and cell
phones have offered a way for the discontented population to organize
and mobilize and to spread the word about the demonstrations against
the regime (Preston 2011). The digital public sphere was not only
useful for the Egyptians and Tunisians to spread information within
an oppressive regime, but it also allowed them to build support in the
transnational community. As Benhabib noted: ‘What we have witnessed
is truly revolutionary, in the sense that a new order of freedom Á
a novo ordo saeclorum Á is emerging transnationally in the Arab world’
(2011, emphasis in original).
The cases of Egypt and Tunisia are illustrative for the fact that more
and more people are increasingly engaged in what have come to be
called ‘transnational social fields’ (Glick Schiller, Basch and SzantonBlanc
1992). Advances in information and communication technologies
(ICTs) and the rapid evolvement of applications for using and
accessing these technologies have strongly contributed to the creating
and maintaining of these transnational fields, enabling ideas, information
and social networks to flow quickly through and across
geographical and political borders (Wilding 2009). Various commu-
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nication modes, such as mobile telephony and short message service
(SMS) texting, the internet and email, as well as digital broadcast, have
become increasingly and undeniably central for global communication,
thus affecting the lives of migrants as well as non-migrants.
At the same time, it is clear that, despite the fact that global access to
these technological advances is continuing to grow, certain groups are
under-represented online and some individuals are more readily able
to access ICTs than others (Mann and Stewart 2000; Murthy 2008).
The impact of new technologies on the everyday lives of people has
received considerable attention among scholars in many disciplines,
including anthropology, communications, sociology, linguistics and
interdisciplinary fields such as marketing and consumer research.
Already in 1994, when research on these issues was still in its infancy,
Arturo Escobar suggested that researchers should pay more attention
to how the integration of new technologies into daily life modified and
negotiated the social construction of reality (Escobar 1994). Addressing
Escobar’s challenge, several studies have since been launched on
this issue.1
In 1999, Lyman and Wakeford noted that ‘the study of digital and
networked technologies is one of the fastest growing fields of research
in the social sciences’ (1999, p. 359). Today, this statement is even more
true than it was more than a decade ago. As Burnett, Consalvo and
Ess noticed: ‘What began as a scattered series of first efforts to come to
grips with the Internet has now matured into a body of literature that
represents not only a wide range of extensive and increasingly finegrained
findings and discoveries Á but also an increasingly sophisticated
set of theoretical reflections regarding appropriate methods and
research ethics’ (2010, p. 2).
After an initial surge of excitement as to the boundless possibilities
for the creation of online identities, the discussion in the literature has
moved to more nuanced accounts of the meanings of the internet. Early
studies of the internet tended towards a technological determinism
perspective, suggesting that the internet provided a poor foundation for
cultural and social activity. Moreover, initial research often radically
distinguished between online and offline worlds, and between realworld
and virtual communities (Boyd and Ellison 2008).
More recently, many scholars have moved beyond the assumptions
and frameworks that guided much early research, and have, for
example, demonstrated the complex interactions between online and
offline. The recent revolts in Tunisia and Egypt have provided another
example of the multiple ways in which the internet is intimately
interwoven with people’s offline lives. Furthermore, the scientific debate
focuses more and more on the ways in which individuals make use of
the technology, rather than investigating the technology itself.
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During the past decade, the field of internet studies has seen an
explosion in scholarly interest (for a comprehensive overview of
internet studies, see Wellman 2010). In this article, I argue that
research on migration would also benefit from a more explicit focus on
the way this online connectivity affects the nature of migration and the
conditions of being a migrant. The rise of ICTs has greatly changed
the world of many migrants. As the example of the social network site
Orkut will demonstrate, we are no longer in the age of the uprooted
migrant, but have instead entered the age of the ‘connected migrant’,
who is both internationally and digitally mobile (Diminescu and
Pasquier 2010; Kissau and Hunger 2010). On a large scale, migrant
communities are experiencing new forms of connectedness through
acting in and occupying digital territories.
There are many existing studies of migrants’ use of the internet,
looking, for example, into the use of the internet by migrants for civic
engagement (Kim and Ball-Rokeach 2009), enabling freedom of selfrepresentation
(Landzelius 2006), putting themselves on the global
stage (Miller and Slater 2000), maintaining their affiliation with the
local community in which they grew up (Komito 2011), and having an
impact on international affairs (Brinkerhoff 2009). Despite this
growing body of literature, it would be too strong to state that the
ethnographic practice of following social groups online has been
established within migration research (Murthy 2008, p. 838; Kozinets
2010, pp. 1Á3). Studies of migration are often still exclusively situated
in the ‘offline’ social world.
Theoretical contributions and empirical research focusing on
transnational communities have a tendency to neglect the influence
of the increasing virtual mobility that marks the life of many
contemporary migrants. There have even been a number of discussions
about the appropriateness of the internet as a field of study for
migration research (Beaulieu 2004, p. 142). But when one starts
looking at how people enact transnationality on a daily basis, it
becomes apparent that migrants’ use of the new technologies is deeply
embedded in their transnational lifestyle. In particular, the way social
network sites (SNSs) (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Orkut) affect the
nature of migration and the conditions of being a migrant needs more
scientific attention. As the next section will show, online togetherness
on Orkut is as important to many Brazilian migrants as their offline
togetherness. Moreover, there are many similarities, connections and
overlappings between the two.
Brazilian migrants’ online togetherness
The research presented here is part of a larger study on migration
and transnationality among Brazilian immigrants in Belgium
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(2008Á2013). The study makes use of a multi-sited research design.
Besides geographical research sites at points of departure and points of
arrival, the social network site ‘Orkut’ also became one of the central
sites of the ethnographic fieldwork. Launched in January 2004, Orkut
was named after Orkut Bu¨yu¨kko¨kten, the Google employee who
developed the service. Although the site traces its roots to the United
States, originally having an English-only interface, Portuguese-speaking
Brazilians quickly ‘invaded’ the site and became the dominant user
group (boyd and Ellison 2008). Today, the social network site is one of
the most widespread online communities in Brazil. According to
Orkut’s own data, 50.6 per cent of the more than 100 million users
worldwide come from Brazil, followed by India with 20.44 per cent
and the United States with 17.78 per cent. Pakistan, fourth in rank,
only has a share of 0.86 per cent (Orkut 2011).
During the research, I studied Brazilians’ online togetherness in the
two largest Orkut communities that were referred to by Brazilian
migrants in Belgium, namely Brasileiros na Be´lgica (Brazilians in
Belgium) and Brasileiros em Bruxelas (Brazilians in Brussels), as well
as one smaller community, Brasileiros em Leuven (Brazilians in
Leuven).2
The largest community, Brasileiros na Be´lgica, was created
in 2004. At the time of the research, the community was already well
established and was attracting many new members. In September
2010, 4,369 people had already joined this Orkut community.
Currently, even more people have become members (4,822 in July
2011). The founder of this community, a Brazilian man who lived in
Belgium, wanted to create a place where Brazilians who (had) lived in
Belgium or were thinking about moving to Belgium could meet and
exchange ideas and experiences. By the time of the research, the
community founder had left Belgium and another Brazilian man had
become the moderator of the community. Despite this change of
moderator, the objectives of the community stayed the same.
In 2006, the community Brasileiros em Bruxelas became the second
Orkut community that addressed Brazilian migrants in Belgium.
Counting 1,077 members in September 2010 (1,164 in July 2011), it
was also a popular community among Brazilian migrants. The explicit
reference to Brussels Á the region where most Brazilians in Belgium
live Á in the name of the community was an important reason for
many of the members to join. Like the Brasileiros na Be´lgica
community, the founder of this community created the community
for the exchange of ideas and experiences. In addition, he explicitly
invited people to announce parties or other Brazilian events in order to
allow people to meet offline.
The third community, Brasileiros em Leuven, was smaller than the
other two. At the time of the fieldwork, 212 members had joined
this community (233 in July 2011). Unlike the other two Orkut
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communities, the Brasileiros em Leuven community resulted from an
already existing offline group of Brazilians residing in the Belgian city
of Leuven. In 2002, a group of Brazilians had founded a non-profit
organization, which aimed, among other things, to provide useful
information to Brazilians living in Belgium. The founder of Brasileiros
em Leuven originally used the online community to promote the
activities of the offline organization. At the time of the research,
however, the number of activities of the non-profit organization was
very low. Still, many members continued to use the Orkut community
to be informed about events they could attend. But a lot of them also
started to look for other information or help, trying to resolve various
problems they encountered in Belgium.
For most Brazilian migrants I met, computer-mediated communication
via Orkut was already embedded in their daily life practices
before they migrated to Belgium. In Brazil, they mainly used the site to
connect with friends and relatives. After migrating to Belgium, many
also found the internet to be a valuable tool for helping them in
maintaining social, political and cultural connections to their home
country. SNSs such as Orkut facilitate the maintenance of continuous
personal (transnational) contacts through the blending of many
interconnecting activities, such as email, diaries, photo albums, video
and messaging. Orkut members can create personal profiles, keep
these updated, and network with familiar and new contacts through
the scrapbook. Orkut also offers the opportunity to send private
messages to other Orkut members and to chat with friends who are
online.
All Orkut members can also create communities in which other
Orkut members can participate. Within Orkut communities, members
can create polls, vote in polls that interest them, or start a topic in the
forum. This last application in particular is quite popular since it
allows members to post upcoming events or discuss certain topics with
one another over a period of time. In many cities all over the world
with a significant number of Brazilian migrants, Orkut members
have formed online migrant communities, creating opportunities for
online togetherness. The functions of these communities vary from
providing a forum for the exchange of ideas, to providing solidarity
among Brazilian migrants, pursuing purposive objectives related to
their homeland identity, and helping them to become embedded in
their place of residence.
In the Orkut communities I studied, I found that the key functions
of these communities were different in each stage of the migration
process. Also, the degree of users’ involvement varied, ranging from
consumption or lurking Á a loose online togetherness Á to a strong
social life online Á an intense online togetherness.3
For those who are
planning to migrate or who have recently migrated, the Orkut
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communities often play a significant role as bridges between Brazil
and Belgium. The communities often provide a variety of social
capital, both online and offline, which assists in the migration
transition. Many of the forum topics in the migrant communities
are questions from recently arrived Brazilians who ask for information
or assistance with the challenges they are confronted with during their
settlement in the city and their day-to-day life. Soˆnia, a woman who
participates in two of the three Orkut communities I studied, told me
during an interview:
People find me in the community and ask me for information about
Belgium because they are arriving here and don’t have a lot of
information. What also happens: someone wants to resolve some
problems over here in Belgium, but doesn’t know where to go. So
they ask. I think it is also to try to get some help, help from the other
Brazilians who are already living here. So one helps one another.
Those who are already here help out those who are arriving. (Soˆnia,
personal interview, 13/07/2010)
Among the Brazilians who have already lived in Belgium for some
time, the Orkut communities also serve as a way to keep in touch. On
the forum, many posts can be found that announce upcoming events
and the location of (new) Brazilian meeting places. Many other topics
in the forum are commercially oriented, trying to sell products or
services. Most of these are posted by already established Brazilians
who have set up small businesses, like Rone, a 36-year-old Brazilian
who mainly uses Orkut to promote his language courses:
I know them [recently arrived Brazilians] because I advertise my
Dutch introduction classes. They are open to Brazilians who have
recently arrived. And to their partners as well, who are married to
Brazilians but never wanted to learn Portuguese. Sometimes they do
want to learn Portuguese now. So I earn money with these people. I
advertise on Orkut. So they know me, they contact me. (Rone,
personal interview, 30/12/2010)
Orkut is also a means by which Brazilians reaffirm themselves as
Brazilians and construct a shared imagination. Besides references to
Brazil in the uploaded pictures or videos in the profiles of the
members, much of the content of the online discussions concerns
expressions of nostalgia for Brazil and the performance of ‘being
Brazilian’, as defined by the self-ascription of the participants. This is
illustrated by many discussions on the cultural differences between
Belgians and Brazilians, where community members discuss ‘typical
Brazilian behaviour’ and compare this with situations with which they
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are confronted within Belgian society. The Orkut communities are thus
also instrumental to Brazilian migrants’ ability to reinforce and
recreate their identity in order to retain psychological links to the
cultural identity of their homeland. Moreover, community members
also use Orkut to disseminate and discuss information about Brazilian
politics and/or news and events. As such, Orkut has become a social
basis for cultivating national subjectivity and discourse across borders.
Nevertheless, not all of the potential effects of the Orkut migrant
communities on the lives of participants are necessarily positive.
Participation in such communities can, for example, result in increased
expectations of exchanging other forms of support. Rone, who first
told me about the opportunities Orkut gave him to promote his
language classes to newly arrived Brazilians, said later during the
interview:
I often receive emails from people I have never heard of. ‘Hi Rone,
you don’t know me, but I know this and this of you. Give me your
opinion, how hard is it to find a job in Europe?’ I even have an email
over here, that I saved. This girl said: ‘I graduated in biology. I
would love to go to Europe to study English and to work as a tourist
guide. What is the job market like for tourist guides for someone
who studied biology? Because I read on Orkut that you are a tourist
guide.’ (Rone, personal interview, 30/12/2010)
Many other members of the communities I studied also told me that
they were often contacted by other Brazilians with requests for help.
Even though most respondents acknowledged that they themselves
benefited from the many forms of economic or emotional social
support that can be found in the Orkut communities, some of them
also associated their presence online with an increased obligation to
help other Brazilians. Others complained about the gossiping that
took place online, or even distanced themselves from the other
participants in the communities.
Moving ethnography online: methodological and ethical challenges
In my research, I had initially underestimated the importance of online
togetherness for Brazilians in Belgium. The original research proposal
did not even mention the internet as a possible research site. However,
within the variety of Brazilian websites, magazines and satellite
channels I encountered in the course of the research, Orkut was often
mentioned as the most important medium to keep in touch with other
Brazilians inside and outside Brazil. Therefore, it quickly became one
of the central fieldwork locations. However, I chose not to restrict my
methodology to online research. Instead, I adopted a dialectical
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research praxis, trying to understand how different research sites were
interrelated. The research related to Orkut consisted of an analysis of
at least six months of web-based discussion among members of each
community, personal interviews with the community founders, online
participant observation, and personal and email interviews with
members of all three Orkut communities, as well as with Brazilian
migrants who did not participate in any of these communities (fortyone
in total). I tried to meet as many Orkut community members as
possible in person. This gave me the chance to verify information
gathered online. It was also an opportunity to fill gaps in online data
collection and to extend my focus from migrants’ participation in
Orkut communities to my other fields of interest.
However, choosing to include online research in the study required a
number of methodological adaptations. In this section, I will focus on
two critical differences I was confronted with between the face-to-face
and online ethnography, namely gaining access to the fieldwork
location and the question of obtaining informed consent. First, an
obvious difference from physical ethnography was the way I had to
find an entre´e into the Orkut communities I wanted to study.
Although the problem of how to present oneself also exists within
traditional ethnography, in gaining access to the online research
setting, I could not rely on my physical presence and interactional style
(Mann and Stewart 2000; Garcia et al. 2009, pp. 68Á73). In my
research, I gained access to the online communities through offline
research. In the course of my fieldwork in Belgium, many of my
informants added me to their list of friends on Orkut, informed me
about the existence of online migrant communities, and invited me to
become a member. This strongly facilitated my entre´e.
Soon after joining the Orkut communities, I introduced myself as a
researcher to the moderators and asked to meet them in person. After
explaining the intentions of the research, I requested and obtained
their permission to conduct participant observation and to contact
members for research purposes. The reactions of the moderators to my
request were very positive.
Among researchers, a debate has revolved around the question of
whether or not researchers must do this: i.e. ask for permission to
conduct online ethnographic fieldwork and to use comments that
are posted online. Some researchers have argued that all cyberspace
postings are in the public domain and thus imply permission for their
use by others (e.g. Finn and Lavitt 1994; Thomsen, Straubhaar and
Bolyard 1998; Schaap 2002; Magnet 2007). Many of these researchers
have explicitly chosen to conduct physically ‘invisible’ research,
maintaining a covert position in their research site. A major advantage
of this approach is its entirely unobtrusive character and the chance
this provides to research naturally occurring behaviours.
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There seems to be, however, a continuum of private to increasingly
public online communities, but with continuation of earlier methods.
Many early scholars studied reasonably private online communities
such as listservs that were password protected or discussion forums
or Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) with chosen usernames often
de-linked from personal or distinct offline identities. Today, the
distinction between public and private domains in the online world
is more and more blurred as multiple forms of online togetherness coexist
in cyberspace. Some of these sites are still private, but many
others, including SNSs, are much more public, with profiles that often
explicitly connect online and offline identity. The various types of
current online communities involve dramatically different ethical
implications for research and pose different challenges and opportunities
for the ethnographer. In the case of SNSs especially, I urge
online researchers to communicate who they are and to ask for
permission to use online data for their research.
Another line of argument that is often used against announcing
one’s presence to ask for consent focuses on the fact that ‘the lurker’ is
a socially acceptable and sometimes even routinely used position in the
setting (Schaap 2002). Although lurking was also a common
behaviour in Orkut, I argue that the subject position of an
ethnographer does not map that of a common member of a social
network site. Most obvious is the difference in intentions and
consequences of lurking: ‘The instrumental stance and consequences
of ethnographic lurking are problematic to participants, in a way that
other forms of ‘‘lurking’’ may not be’ (Beaulieu 2004, p. 147).
Moreover, overtly participating in the online setting allowed me to
check my interpretations and gain the informed consent of research
participants, another cornerstone of ethical research. However, given
the number of participants in the online communities, obtaining
consent was more problematic than in my offline fieldwork. Also, I
was already a member of Orkut before I started my PhD project.
Therefore, at the moment my research started, I introduced myself in
my new role as a researcher, presenting the research topic and
announcing my online presence. After this introduction, I did not
continue to regularly post messages on forums introducing myself as a
researcher, in order to maintain the naturalness of the conversation.
Instead, I chose to make sure that the fact that I was conducting
ethnographic research was appearing permanently in my user profile.
Nevertheless, despite this overt presence as a researcher, many
participants may not have been aware of my study. For this reason,
before using quotes in publications, I asked for the permission of
research participants. Whenever possible, I tried to meet the community
members whose quotes I wanted to use, in order to gain their
trust, and to ask for permission to share their fragments for the study.
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Research participants who were geographically dispersed were provided
with an information sheet sent via Orkut-mail. All participants
were also informed that they could withdraw their participation from
the study at any given point and that they would be properly masked in
order to protect their privacy.
This representation of participants’ data in publications is another
important privacy aspect. Because names and textual fragments
obtained online are easier to retrieve, the masking of contributors to
online websites is often more complex than guaranteeing anonymity
to offline research participants. The blurring of the private/public
distinction adds another dimension to the matter of anonymity. Not
all internet users necessarily want to remain anonymous. Instead, they
may have chosen to deliberately publish in the public domain and
should perhaps be treated as authors (Bassett and O’Riordan 2002). I
chose to give the actual name of the online community I study, but to
alter online pseudonyms, names, and other means of identifying the
participant. Even though this denies credit where it is due, I considered
the omission of potentially damaging information more important.
Conclusion: migration research in a globalized world
Contemporary life is marked by an increasing virtual and geographic
mobility (Garcia et al. 2009, p. 53). Rapid technological development
and a revolution in communication are interconnecting individuals
and groups, making it increasingly easy for migrants to maintain close
links with their regions of origin and with other migrants around
the world. For many migrants, it is not only possible to return home
more often for physical visits, it is also possible to maintain continuous
contact by virtual visits (Hiller and Franz 2004, p. 735). Therefore, I
suggest that it is of little use to think of the ‘virtual’ world as a
different social space from the ‘real’ world. Rather, I state that ‘online’
activities are part of how people live today and are thus strongly
interrelated with ‘offline’ aspects of social life.
Because of the possible important role this online togetherness can
play, I argue that contemporary migration researchers should adapt to
the environment in which today’s interconnected migrants live and
include online research sites in the definition of their fieldwork sites.
For research that takes a particular social phenomenon such as
migration as its focal area of interest, an ethnographic study on the
internet can play an important supporting role. It can raise new
questions or hypotheses that orient the offline fieldwork, deepen the
understanding of offline events, or lead to unexpected insights into
the life of our research participants. The surge of new forums where
migrants discuss different aspects of their migration experiences, find
news and information, and work in solidarity on a variety of issues
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directs our attention to the fact that we have to think about the
changing multi-sitedness of ethnographic research.
Although the transformation of classic research practices is already
well under way, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork will have to
broaden its scope to include online and offline research sites, following
connections across different media. ‘Because information and communications
technologies have permeated so many areas of contemporary
social life and to such an extent, we have reached the point of
no return’ (Kozinets 2010, p. 2). A balanced combination of offline
and online ethnography, including data gathered in face-to-face as
well as online interaction, can provide a fuller, more comprehensive
account of the phenomena of interest and transnational processes.
Also in my research, the integration of qualitative data-gathering
methodologies both online and offline turned out to be an important
research strategy. Performing one without the other would
have resulted in a significant amount of information, but would
certainly have missed critical elements. Ethnography solely based on
online research could not be the sole source of data as it offers only a
partial picture of the migrants’ transnational activities; a pure offline
ethnography would not have provided me with detailed information on
the important associations between the online and offline world. The
use of complementary methodologies of data-gathering, online and
offline, has enabled me to collect comprehensive information on the
transnational practices of Brazilian migrants in various realms.
In this article, I make a case for the significance of the social network
site Orkut in the experience of Brazilian migrants to Belgium. Despite
my focus on social network sites in this article, these form only one
possible site of online togetherness. SNSs should therefore be placed
within the wider spectrum of mediations that affect people. Studying
only one medium of communication that certain migrants use may
blind us to the fact that people draw on different media in order to
communicate with each other. Therefore, I recommend that current
migration researchers Á depending on the question(s) they ask Á pay
explicit attention to technologically mediated communication in their
research, either through an online ethnographic study or in a different
way. Such a rethinking of the notion of ‘the field’ Á the place where the
ethnographic research ought to take place Á might open the way for
both a different kind of research knowledge and a different kind of
research subject.
Notes
1. For example: Hine (2000); Mann and Stewart (2000); Landzelius (2006); Bakardjieva
(2007), Diminescu and Pasquier (2010).
1806 Mieke Schrooten
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2. I use the term ‘community’ in this article because it is the name used on Orkut. Even so,
defining people’s social activities online as an ‘online community’ is not unproblematic, as
these so-called ‘communities’ often have low barriers to entry and to exit, and members can
easily ignore other members they don’t like (Brinkerhoff 2009), and not all of people’s online
activities live up to the value-laden name of ‘community’ (Bakardjieva 2007). Bakardjieva
(2007) proposes instead to use the term ‘virtual togetherness’, as a collective noun for the
many variations of people’s social activities online. Although I agree with her view about the
inappropriateness of the term ‘community’, I also argue that the term ‘virtual’ does not
contribute to a better understanding of people’s online activities, as it suggests a sharp
distinction between the ‘real’ world and the ‘virtual’ world. In contrast to this view, I argue
that the internet and its many communication modes have become increasingly and
undeniably central for its many users. Therefore, I propose to speak of ‘online togetherness’
rather than ‘virtual togetherness’.
3. Although some Orkut members in the Orkut communities I studied were non-migrants,
I will not elaborate on the role of the online migrant communities for non-migrants in this
article.
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MIEKE SCHROOTEN is a doctoral candidate in the Interculturalism,
Migration and Minorities Research Centre at the Katholieke
Universiteit Leuven (University of Leuven) and a lecturer in the
Department of Social Work at Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel,
Belgium.
ADDRESS: Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research
Centre, Parkstraat 45 bus 3615, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.
Email: mieke.schrooten@soc.kuleuven.be
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