Researching the Internet

The turn of the millennium saw the publication of four important Internet ethnographies: Hakken's Cyborgs@cyberspace?(1999), Zurawski's Virtuelle Ethnizität(2000), Hine's Virtual ethnography (2000), and Miller and Slater's (2000) The Internet: an ethnographic approach. The authors of those pioneering studies grappled with difficult questions that still occupy Internet researchers today, such as interaction and identity in cyberspace, the virtual vs the actual, technological appropriation and obsolescence, the digital divide, and the prospects and limitations of on-line ethnography.