Reaching understandings of participants’ sense of self and of the meanings they give to their online participation requires spending time with the participants to observe what they do online as well as what they say they do.
– Lori Kendall (1999, p. 62)
The survey provided general information on the kinds of digital practices Moroccan-Dutch youth engage in. The interviews served the purpose of mapping out how informants think about various platforms by eliciting their personal experiences, perceptions and thoughts. This section details how I was able to get a sense of how informants perform their identities online across these spaces. I was interested in observing online practices and capturing digital data. Virtual ethnography is a methodology that allows the researcher to be attentive to how a social media platform as a field site acts both as a “culture” and a “cultural artifact,” which is “vari- ously constructed by users with quite different interpretations of what it means for them” (Hine, 2013, p. 138). In my virtual ethnography of the four field sites of instant messaging, discussion forums, SNSs and YouTube, I combined participant observation with qualitative “digital methods” for data gathering (Rogers, 2013). Digital methods, “a methodological outlook and mind-set for social research with the web,” aims to capture “medium- specific” dynamics on platforms in a way that “follows the medium.” Instead of drawing from pre-Internet era methods, “natively digital objects” are studied as meaningful objects. This way it becomes possible “to diagnose
MethoDological traJectorY 89
cultural change and societal conditions by means of the internet” (Rogers, 2013, pp. 4, 19, 21).
Capturing digital practices is a troublesome enterprise as researchers still “barely know how to track their ‘texts’ given the three-fold problems of overwhelming volume of material, temporary existence and its ‘virtuality’” or its “hypertextual” character. These are the reasons why, in the field of new media studies, “few textual studies of content favored by children been undertaken” (Livingstone, 2003, p. 150). Aiming to address this void, I asked informants permission to observe their construction of digital identities across the four field sites. Informants were also invited to share their digital practices with me. For the purpose of the virtual ethnography, I gathered contact details of those interested in follow-up research during the in-depth interviews. Some informants gave their e-mail addresses, others their mo- bile phone numbers or SNS profile page nicknames. In this section I reflect on gathering ethnographic data in the different field sites, and I especially contrast the difficulties I experienced on publicly accessible and closed platforms (Leurs, 2013). I situate my approach in Internet research ethics. Publicly accessible digital field sites
Being publicly accessible, the digital materials informants engage with on online discussion forums and video-sharing sites were gathered by asking informants about their favorite topics and rubrics as well as their favorite videos. I would subsequently browse these spaces to look up conversations and videos. My personal observations were recorded by writing field notes and by saving, printing and archiving discussions and saving videos. By detailing personal research experiences on online discussion forums I ground Internet research ethics further.
After I posted a job vacancy for a research assistant under the nick- name Wired Up on Yasmina.nl, an online message board popular among Moroccan-Dutch girls, several people responded to the topic with questions and inquiries. However, there were also users who questioned my intentions. A mere 7 minutes after I posted the job advertisement, I was shocked when I read one user had written, “do not respond, this is a lover boy who is recruit-
ing” (Wired Up, 2010a). In the Netherlands and Belgium the term “lover boy”
refers to pimps who coerce girls into prostitution or other forms of illegal forms of sexual exploitation. I had a similar experience when I initiated a discussion under the same nickname on the online message board Maroc. nl about different language influences I encountered while studying instant messaging. While some Maroc.nl participants enthusiastically assisted me
in translating words and phrases I did not understand, others questioned my intentions. One user, for example, asked, “are you hustling a Moroccan
girl somewhere? ” (Wired Up, 2010b).
Before me, there had been other students, researchers and journalists taking public message boards as a starting point to learn more about Moroccan-Dutch youth. User HaasHaas shared his unease and frustra- tions with again seeing outsiders coming to the message board to study the Moroccan-Dutch community.
Ow god, those snobs are turning to us again as if we are a living laboratory. Go research yourself one time or so something like ooh we from the university are going to put something under a microscope because we do not have anything better to do. Pff. (Wired Up, 2010b)
The frustrations HaasHaas voiced may be attributed to the dominant scholarly and journalistic focus on problems within the Moroccan-Dutch community. Studies focusing on a particular problematic segment of any community may be taken to paint a negative picture of the community as a whole. Difficulties of overcoming suspicion and gaining access to the community result from earlier scholars’ focus on issues such as juvenile delinquency, mental health problems, radicalization and Islam (see the introductory chapter). Understandably, such studies may lead Moroccan- Dutch individuals to regard scholars with due suspicion (Bel Ghazi, 1986, p. 10). Other users continued to make efforts to make me feel welcome, typing for instance, “HaasHaas, be ashamed of yourself. Let this man carry
out his work.”
My experiences resonate with fundamental debates over Internet research ethics. Research ethics demand that scholars conduct research while respecting human dignity, autonomy, anonymity and safety. Internet research, in particular, raises dialectic questions concerning ways of guar- anteeing informants’ anonymity versus crediting authorship, corporate and individual ownership of data, blurring of boundaries between publicity and privateness, asking or assuming informed consent, considerations of vulner- ability and contextual harm of research subjects and mechanisms for secur- ing digital trust (Hine, 2013, 2015; Kozinets, 2010; AOIR, 2012). Throughout the study, when referencing publicly accessible digital materials of people proven to be adults, I credit the author with the nickname she/he uses. In my conversation with YouTube user eMoroccan, for instance, he made it clear that he wanted me to refer to his nickname when I included his material and statements in my writing. However, by crediting his authorship, his
MethoDological traJectorY 91
nickname can be traced back to his online presence that, in turn, might provide easy ways to locate further personal details. Such issues complicate traditional research standards aimed at ensuring anonymity. Nonetheless, although widely accessible and easily retrievable, people participating in online discussion forums may perceive or consider the content they have contributed as private or sensitive information. HaasHaas’s remarks sug- gest that he participates in what he feels is his own online community, complicating the complex blurring of online boundaries between public and private. Although strictly publicly accessible, the messages posted on discussion boards I frequented have a specific intended audience.
I took HaasHaas’s remark seriously, because it reveals how some people may experience unequal power relations when privileged outsiders such as researchers, students and journalists write about their community in particular ways and exclude the vast majority of everyday voices. I therefore took this criticism to heart and always made sure to explain my intentions when observing everyday digital practices. In addition, I reflected on my positionality at the beginning of all conversations, both online and offline. Furthermore, as reading public forum discussions sometimes gave me the feeling of eavesdropping on a personal conversa- tion, I chose to refrain from being a passive lurker, but participated and actively made my presence known. However, HaasHaas reminded me that – unlike other face-to-face methods I used, such as survey taking and interviews – by conducting virtual ethnographies, information is used that is not always confidentially given specifically to the researcher by an informant (Kozinets, 2010, p. 143). Scholars have recognized the changing reputation mechanisms and credibility assessments young people make while using digital media (Metzger & Flanagin, 2008). I sought to foster digital trust by clearly positioning myself as a researcher and by providing hyperlinks to the Wired Up research project and my personal website. However, I should add that most of the people I interacted with online already knew me from face-to-face encounters, as I largely limited my online participant observation and data gathering of online forums and YouTube to those topics, threads and videos that my informants specifically spoke about with me or shared with me.
Accessing closed digital field sites
HaasHaas was also critical of how I had gathered data in the private space of instant messaging. In response to my questions about Moroccan-Dutch words on the discussion forum Maroc.nl he posted the following:
How did you actually collect those conversations? Do those young people know about it? Or did you just look at the chat history on MSN? Are you allowed to do that? Or is it because young people made use of a computer that is owned by a school or the government, enabling you to research it?
(Wired Up, 2010b)
In this subsection I reflect on data gathering on digital field sites that are not directly accessible to researchers. Starting off with face-to-face contact proved invaluable in addressing the issue of digital trust in the private digital spaces of instant messaging and social networking sites. These two Internet applications are largely closed off from the eyes of onlookers. The majority of the interviewees have set their profile page settings to private so that other social networking site users outside their list of friends cannot view their personal profile pages. By sending out friend requests to those informants that provided their social networking site contact details, and asking them permission to study their self-profiling practices, a number of personal profile pages were opened up to me. Fourteen-year-old Ayoub, thirteen-year-old Anas, thirteen-year-old Midia, thirteen-year-old Mo- hammed, fifteen-year-old Oussema and fifteen-year-old Yethi provided me access to their personal profile pages. Furthermore I have carried out contextual face-to-face and e-mail interviews with eight group page found- ers and moderators.
In instant massaging, too, users are able to maintain the boundaries of their digital space by deciding whom to include on their buddy list. Only those that are included on this list can see the display pictures and display names that individual users have chosen, while one-on-one conversations are personal and even more inaccessible. Here, I discuss how I gathered instant messaging transcripts at greater length to illustrate the intricacies of carrying out participatory forms of research in a private digital space. The data-gathering process reveals additional ways I sought to have informants study their digital practices with me.
Following the example set by Gloria Jacobs (2003) and Shayla Thiel-Stern (2007), informants were invited to save instant messaging conversations to the hard drives of their computers. All forty-three interviewees I spoke with used MSN. A smaller group of six informants eventually granted me access to their personal MSN communication network by saving and sharing conversation transcripts. These six participating young people were requested to ask their contacts permission to save the transcript in the beginning of their conversations for research purposes. Only conversations that were agreed upon by contacts to be saved and shared
MethoDological traJectorY 93
were included in my analysis. Asking permission was done, for instance, as follows:
El Hoceima is the bom, that’s the place where i come from so just tell everyone thats the city number ONE says: I participate in a research on
msn and I have to copy and paste conversations and send them to them would you allow me to use this conversation?
~..ღ. n O u я я.ღ.. ~ says: yea course sweety .... hahaha its bout nothing
anyway
Informants Fatiha, Naoul, Midia, Kamal, Khadija and Inzaf responded to my call to submit IM conversation transcripts. They were invited to save IM conversations to the hard drives of their computers between December 2009 and February 2010. This process of data gathering was skewed, as the group of six people sharing transcripts consisted of five girls and one boy. Interested informants were asked to save IM transcripts of conversations they held with five people of their choice. From their collection, I asked the young people to select five transcripts consisting of at least ten turns, which they deemed fit for me to read.
I stressed in my invitations that I did not mind with whom informants spoke or what their conversations were about. I welcomed everyone and all topics. In total, I received twenty-six transcripts, ranging in length from ten sentences to over three pages. Participants sent in IM logs of conversations with friends ranging from thirteen to twenty-two years old. All interviewees said the transcripts they sent in were talks with friends that they knew from outside the Internet, for instance, through school, work or from their neighborhood. In total, twenty of the talks were with women friends, and six with male friends. Interview narratives were used to provide a more gender-balanced supplementary interpretative context.
This approach has its obvious limitations and I recognize that partici- pants chose conversations to construct a self that they wanted me to see. First, although it became apparent from the survey and the interviews that MSN was widely used to engage in intimate or romantic conversa- tions I mostly received transcripts of friendly conversations between two boys or two girls. Secondly, those who shared transcripts with me estimated that 10% of their contacts live abroad. Informants explained how they assist their parents in initiating MSN webcam conversations with family members who live abroad. Interviewees shared their personal accounts with them, as some parents were unable to manage MSN on their
own. However, transcripts of such exchanges were not shared with me and transnational conversations could therefore not further considered in the analysis. Even though very rich, the transcripts provided thus only offered a partial view on their everyday private digital identity positioning.
In addition, the informants’ ability to self-select the material was integral to ensure that they were taken seriously as experts over their own messaging practices. In Chapter 3, I include excerpts from these instant-messaging transcripts. By doing so, together with using the pseudonyms and labels informants suggested themselves and by choosing to study those platforms that their Internet maps revealed to be most important, I aimed for inform- ants to become, to some degree, active participants in this text. In the next section I account for the dynamics of representation further by describing the analytical precautions I take while scrutinizing informants’ narratives through a lens that is attentive to the discursive distribution of power, a process in which I also take part.