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Dieser Artikel untersucht, wie digitale Methoden, z. B. die Analyse von Facebook page like networks, bei schwer zugänglichen
Forschungsfeldern ethnographische Methoden ergänzen können. Mit Ansätzen aus
Geographie, Ethnologie und Medienwissenschaften diskutieren wir zwei
Fallstudien mit schwierigem Zugang zum Feld: Ein biolandwirtschaftlicher
Betrieb in Pakistan und eine NGO, die Wissen über psychoaktive Drogen
zirkuliert. Methodisch argumentieren wir, dass Netzwerk-Visualisierungen von
sozialen Medien eine sinnvolle Erweiterung des Methodenspektrums darstellen,
sie jedoch ethnographische Kontextualisierung benötigen. Auf konzeptioneller
Ebene verstehen wir diese Netzwerke als komplexe Wissenssysteme, in denen
großen Strukturen durch kleine Bewegungen entstehen.
This article explores how digital methods, such as the analysis of Facebook page like networks, can complement ethnographic
fieldwork, especially in cases of difficult access to a field. Drawing from
anthropology, geography, and media studies, we present two case studies where
ethnographic access is challenging: one organic farm in Pakistan, and an NGO
that circulates knowledge on psychoactive drugs. On a pragmatic level, we argue
that network visualizations based on social media are insightful for difficult
fields, but, like ›satellite images‹, they need ethnographic contextualization.
On the conceptual level, we understand these networks as complex knowledge
networks, where large-scale structures emerge through small-scale action.
In the digital age, where many people use social media for networking and as a
knowledge source that increasingly replaces traditional news media,
In this article, we will explore digital methods and social media analysis, in
particular the Facebook page like network, in combination with
ethnographic fieldwork. Our perspective is interdisciplinary: we combine approaches
from anthropology,page like networks as complex
knowledge networks from a vantage point of complexity theory
We explore here how both the research object of knowledge flows and the issue of difficult fields with limited access can inspire interdisciplinary discussions about digital methodologies, and how they can tie in with ethnographic methods.
We will start this venture with a conceptual section, where we discuss the role of
Facebook for ethnographic research, the Facebook like and the like network, and how
such a Facebook page like network can be considered a
knowledge network and complex system. We then move on to present our case studies and
their respective Facebook page like networks. The case studies
are different in terms of their content, but united by the fact that they represent
fields of difficult access.
The first case study discusses the Facebook presence of the non-governmental
organization (NGO) Erowid Center, an
online portal for knowledge about licit and illicit psychoactive drugs. On Facebook,
Erowid is connected to other organizations and pages with similar interests and
agendas, and the administrators post information about beneficial effects of drugs as
well as warnings about risky practices. While information
about illegal drugs is not as such illegal, the field of self-experimentation with
psychoactives is a legal grey area, and knowledge and involvement in this scene are
sensitive issues. Ethnographic face-to-face access to informants can be difficult,
and people might not speak openly.
The second case study will discuss Isloo Fresh, a provider of organic farming products in Pakistan, who uses Facebook for marketing. As a conflict-ridden area, Pakistan’s political stability fluctuates. Access to and safety of certain areas can change rapidly with changing power balance, impeding research. Access to informants and particular areas can be limited and unsafe. Knowledge networks on Facebook provide a good overview for researchers, farmers and consumers in Pakistan alike.
A discussion about the conceptual and pragmatic implications of using Facebook page like networks in this context follows the empirical
section.
Anthropologists are increasingly intrigued by Facebook, and many different
anthropological research projects have focused on the social media platform during
the last decades.embedded Internet,the colonisation of the space between traditional broadcast and private
dyadic communication, providing people with a scale of group size and degrees of
privacy
. This characteristic of a fluid scale, that e.g. also Facebook provides with
individual friendships, closed groups, open groups, and pages, makes it especially
interesting to combine methodologies that can access the different scales, while
acknowledging the embedded character of online spaces. Ethnography is especially well
fitted to explore in depth small-scale sociality, while a visualization of the
digital page like network as we will describe here can be used to explore the large-
and medium-scale, depending on how far one zooms in or out. Ethnography is also well
suited to take a Facebook page like network visualization as a starting point, and
explore the other spaces to which it is connected, thus taking the embedded character
of online spaces into account.
We argue that the analysis of data emerging from particular affordances of new media
assemblages can complement ethnographic research, what Rogerslike, including the kind of data that
we look at in this article: the likes between Facebook
pages.
Facebook supports different kinds of profiles or entities, with different
possibilities and limitations for privacy, visibility, and acting. Personal profiles
are among those, but also groups and pages. The Facebook page
is at the center of our attention here. Such pages are public, and are used to
represent businesses, organisations, artists, brands, or causes.liked by individual profiles (followers), the page administrators can post
on the page’s own wall, allow other users to comment, like, and write posts, and they
can also like other pages and be liked by pages. By clicking the like-button – a stylized thumbs-up icon, Facebook
users can react to a post, or a page. Recently, Facebook has changed the like-button,
and introduced more ways to react to posts, such as ›love‹, or ›sad‹.liking remains the only possible reaction.
Studies from the angle of marketing and advertising have analyzed likes,likes have been controversially discussed from a legal
perspective concerning their status as free speech, and whether they deserve
protection as such.
In spite of all these limitations, likes do establish
connections and networks that can be valuable for research. We agree with new media
scholar Riederrevolve around elements that have cultural significance – liking a page of
a political party is more than ‘clicking’
. We propose that examining a page like network offers information about a page as it is
embedded in dynamic connections with other pages. The like network surrounding one
page shows a dynamic environment of relations. It shows clusters of more and less
tightly connected pages, and invites interpretation.page like network can give an interesting overview of a
landscape of pages – and thus of organizations, communities, and causes – and of how
they are connected. It is a distant view that the reader receives from such a
network, and it has a large horizon that is difficult to achieve with ethnographic
research on the ground. However, it is also shallow and two-dimensional, in need of
contextualisation to gain depth. It is important to note that a like network in its
visual form is merely a snapshot based on deliberate algorithms whereas the like
network in its digital form is ever-emergent and dynamic. Considering its
limitations, a Facebook page like network is an interesting
research tool for ethnographers.
Working with data from the Internet always poses challenges for researchers in terms
of research ethics and the protection of privacy. Very large data sets often carry an
illusion of anonymity, which however can be deceiving, as the case of the AOL search
data leak in 2006 showed.pages and the connections
between them. Whether the distinction of online spaces in public versus private makes
sense in terms of research ethics is debatable. Many scholars point out the ethical
difficulties in precisely the blurred boundaries between public and private.
Facebook pages are open and public on Facebook, and used to connect to other pages and to publish information, as opposed to e.g. closed groups, which are distinctly non-public. The downloaded data also only identifies pages and the connections between them, and no personal profiles or data of individuals. Thus, we expose no individual through our research. We assume that the attention that the Facebook pages might receive through our research are in accordance with their values as a page, which is a format distinctly for publication and circulation.
For building a page like network, we first used the application Netvizzseed page, we proceeded in two steps: first, we
downloaded the direct links connecting the seed page to other pages (one level
depth), and in a second step we used those first level connections as seed pages, and
downloaded also their networks. This gives us a network of two levels depth centered
around a seed page, where the nodes of the network are pages,
and the links between them are established through likes. As a
like is created by one page towards another one, the network is directed, i.e. the
links between the nodes have a direction. As an output, Netvizz creates a .gdf file, which is a simple network file that can be read by
the open source network visualisation program Gephi. In Gephi, node attributes, like
the number of connections a page has, or its category,
We understand the like networks as whole is greater than the sum of its parts
knowledge is produced and circulated on
Facebook. Knowledge is no static entity, but rather travels through a myriad of
different institutions before being ›adapted‹ to the realities of the place of
concern.networks of pages, knowledge is generated and
circulated. The complexity of the knowledge allows for the creation of new knowledges
and the emergence of central themes immanent to the respective network.
Networks can represent systems of local interactions, and help to understand how they
contribute to the creation of global phenomena. The challenges of integrating
emerging global phenomena and local interactions have been discussed by complexity
theorists in the natural and the social sciences, and with interdisciplinary
approaches.organized complexity,involve dealing simultaneously with a sizable number of factors which are
interrelated into an organic whole
.[c]omplexity [...] needs to
be anthropologized, but at the same time it may offer insights to anthropology
.emerges from small-scale behavior. For the page like
networks visualized here, this means that large-scale categories and
structures are not imposed from above, or implemented by the researchers, but that
they result from the complex small-scale interactions. Large-scale structures (such
as network clusters) emerge from small-scale behavior (liking), which in turn is
shaped through the existence of clusters (e.g. through the biased access to knowledge
on Facebook).
Both case studies exemplify field sites where global, online knowledge flows are important, while severe limitations for the ethnographer exist on the ground. In the case of the drug-education NGO Erowid, the field is a legal grey area, where talking openly is difficult and interlocutors and their communities are particularly vulnerable. In the case of organic farming in Pakistan, the issues of difficult geographical access to field sites and challenging political contexts pose limitations.
Erowid is an online portal and an
NGO that aims to distribute information about psychoactive drugs, promote harm
reduction, and unbiased drug research concerning potential medical benefits. Erowid
was started in 1996 by a US-based couple working under the pseudonyms of Earth and Fire. The website’s
self-description reads as follows:
Erowid is a member-supported organization providing
access to reliable, non-judgmental information about psychoactive plants, chemicals,
and related issues. We work with academic, medical, and experiential experts to
develop and publish new resources, as well as to improve and increase access to
already existing resources. We also strive to ensure that these resources are
maintained and preserved as a historical record for the future
.
Erowid is built on a community of drug users sharing their
experiences. The website’s experience vault features some 20.000 trip reports, containing both positive and negative experiences with drugs.
These trip reports contain biomedical facts, such as the heart rate, age and gender
of users, measurements of drug dosage, the time of consumption, the road of
ingestion, as well as the subjective, narrated drug experience. The reports are
written by drug users, and selected and edited by Erowid’s administrators.The
knowledge produced by Erowid is acknowledged also by academic scholars, who refer to
Erowid as a drug library,
We downloaded the Facebook page like network of Erowid Center
in spring 2015 in two steps, using the application Netvizz. The first level network
was downloaded first, meaning all the nodes that are directly connected to Erowid
through likes. In a second step, the list of these nodes was entered manually in
Netvizz, downloading also their respective page like networks,
which were added to the original network in Gephi.
After a process of filtering out the less connected nodes, adapting the node size to
the number of connections (
A qualitative, narrative exploration of the networkgreen peripheral cluster on the left contains
nodes relating to festivals, dancing, and electronic music. This is a field that our
ethnographers were intimately familiar with, as several of them conducted fieldwork
on festivals in Germany and the Netherlands, and knew about this scene.The light blue cluster on top circles around
spiritually inspired art and music. Our team is familiar with this visual and
artistic style, as it is used as a kind of branding by many
organizations and communities in the context of psychedelic culture, but no research
has been carried out in our team on this topic specifically. Potentially, new
research questions could be developed on this ground, resonating with research on the
relation between psychoactive drugs and creativity.The yellow cluster on the right relates to social and ecological
activism in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region that our team knows to be a hub of
psychedelic culture. The tight connection to social and ecological issues was however
surprising to the ethnographers, but confirmed their impression that psychedelic
culture is not based on social isolation as some studies argue is the ground for drug
consumption.The dark blue cluster at the bottom contains institutions and
organisations dealing with drug policies: from a legal point of view, in monitoring
or advocating a policy change.
The central clusters circle around research, information, and activism. The pink cluster, center top, contains a variety of different
nodes on psychedelics, spirituality, research, alternative research institutes, and
information dissemination. One of our team’s researcher’s work focuses on the use of
psychedelics in medical research and work environments,The red central cluster has two parts: The upper one is
rather heterogeneous, with every node being clearly related to psychedelics
information. The lower part of the red cluster turns more towards psychedelics and
policy, and drug policy more generally, including nodes of initiatives demanding
policy changes. Erowid Center is located exactly at the border between the two red
clusters, between psychedelic information and policy.
The ethnographers in our team, who work in ethnographic fields related to festivals,
electronic music, spirituality, and medical drug research were familiar with many of
these clusters, nodes, and connections. Being able to explore the network like a map
proved to be a valuable tool for contextualizing the field. One can zoom in on
clusters and ask what the nodes in a cluster share; one can focus on edges, and ask
which nodes and clusters are connected and which are separated, which are close, and
which are distant, and what is in between; one can focus on the center or on the
periphery and the nodes that are shared with several clusters or those that are
unique to one cluster, on the well connected, important nodes, or on the mass of
smaller nodes. Exploring this network caused us to discuss possible future research
questions concerning the role of visual psychedelic art, or on the connections
between psychedelic culture, ecological, and social movements. The page like network, read like a map and used as an exploratory research tool
provides unparalleled overview and contextualisation of a field that is otherwise
difficult to access from such a distant perspective.
Isloo Fresh is a home delivery service in Islamabad, Pakistan, for fresh vegetables, dairy products and meat. It was founded in 2013 by three vendors who sell their products on the weekly farmers’ market in Islamabad to provide consumers with fresh produce on a daily basis. The Facebook page serves as the primary website to reach out to their customers. The self-description reads as follows:
Isloo Fresh started when Faisal, Ali, and, Qasim, sat down around a coffee table and
spoke about eating healthy in Islamabad. Faisal has a dairy farm, Ali makes cheese,
and, Qasim is an organic farmer. All of that happens right here in Islamabad, and,
you are welcome to visit. They encourage you to face your farmer and find out where
your food comes from! The three musketeers decided to join forces and provide their
healthy foods through one delivery service – Isloo Fresh
.
The demand for local, fresh organic produce in Pakistani cities is quite recent.
Frequent food scandals, growing awareness over food-related diseases and flaws in the
agro-food systems have urged consumers of the urban elite to seek alternate sources
for grocery shopping. Farmers’ markets that represent many parallels to the growing
number of farmers’ markets worldwide have sprung up in different cities since 2013.
As the market in Islamabad only takes place once or twice a week, three producers set
up Isloo Fresh as a daily delivery service. Facebook has been an important medium
since the start. The Isloo Fresh page counts 8294 (26th June 2019) likes and
regularly informs its customers about the available products and their prices, posts
pictures of the farm life and informs about the practices and associated benefits of
organic agriculture in general. Besides Facebook, telephone is the only other medium
used for technology-mediated interaction. Though the page represents three farms,
Qasim is the sole administrator. Other than informing customers about Isloo Fresh’s
produce, Qasim also uses the page to connect to like-minded projects, farmers’
markets and lifestyle ideas. The Isloo Fresh page circulates knowledge in two ways.
On one hand, it informs customers about the available products and organic farming
practices. On the other hand, it acts as a tool for Qasim to connect to and receive
information from like-minded pages on Facebook.
We downloaded the like network for Isloo Fresh’s Facebook page in January 2016, using
the Netvizz application, and then following the same protocol as for Erowid’s page like network specified above (chapter 4.2). Due to technical
problems, the network of the node that was then called »Country Boy’s Dream
Spaces«page
like network, so there was only data of the one depth dimension. The same
steps of processing in Gephi were executed for this network, as for the Erowid
network above: the less connected nodes were filtered out, the node size was adapted
to the number of connections (degree), and the node colour was set to represent the
modularity class. The colours do not carry any semantic information. The ForceAtlas2
layout was used to spatially arrange the nodes. This resulted in a clearly clustered
network visualisation.
The analysis of Isloo Fresh’s Facebook page like network
(Figure 2) reveals eight different clusters of which some are tightly clustered
while others are clearly peripheral. Two of the clusters are distinctly geographical
and based in Pakistan, while the rest is topically organized. It is notable though
that the majority of the pages within the topical clusters are geographically based
in the US.
The two small Pakistan-based clusters contain nodes from agriculture-related pages in
Pakistan on the one hand and media-related pages in Pakistan on the other. Both
clusters are very small; however, especially the media cluster is centrally located.
Both clusters are tightly interconnected. However, their only connection to the rest
of the network is the Isloo Fresh node, which is part of the central orange cluster.
This central orange cluster consists of nodes relating to
local production and local food markets. It is relatively small but centrally located
and tightly interconnected and serves as a bridge between the green homestead farming
cluster on the left and a rather lifestyle, commercially oriented blue cluster on the
right. Isloo Fresh is located at the fringe of the orange and green cluster. The large green cluster, homestead farming, consists of nodes
that represent individual farms but also overarching interests. Though some of the
nodes in the cluster relate to political views against the power of large
agribusinesses, the majority of nodes appear to relate to practical farming advice.
This is noteworthy as it supports the second author’s interaction with Qasim, who
claims to use Facebook and social media in general as a knowledge source. The
homestead farming cluster connects seamlessly with a turquoise
cluster centering around (anti-corporation, anti-capitalism) activism for
socio-ecological causes. Nodes of this cluster for example relate to concerns over
pesticides, Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and food safety. This cluster also
accommodates a sub-cluster of international (research) organizations and NGOs.
The blue cluster on the right consists of nodes that relate to
organic as a lifestyle and are generally more entrepreneurial and commercially
oriented. For example, the US supermarket chain »Wholefoods« is represented here as
well as different brands of so-called superfoods. The blue cluster connects to the peripheral purple cluster, bottom right, that centers around
food and food-related policy. This cluster comprises nodes of individual healthy food
initiatives as well as more generally food policy-oriented nodes. The least connected
cluster is the pink cluster on the top, which mainly comprises
US-based media and broadcasting stations. This cluster is almost exclusively
connected to the blue cluster.
The visualization of the Isloo Fresh page like network helps
identify issues that correspond with Qasim’s perspective on organic agriculture and
local farmers’ markets. It also illustrates that farmers’ markets and the delivery
service are relatively recent phenomena in Pakistan as there are very few nodes from
Pakistan. Qasim’s knowledge network mostly comprises pages that are geographically
located in the US. Qasim often mentioned in interviews that he was inspired by US
farmers’ markets, both through his stays abroad as well as through social media. The
visualisation confirms this and also traces the knowledge on these issues accessible
via Facebook.
The analysis of this visualisation also hints at other assumptions presented by
critical research on organic food production and consumption. The blue cluster
focusing on lifestyle and brands shows an interesting mix of rather
anti-establishment initiatives, but also established supermarkets and brands. This
corresponds with some of the concerns raised by Agro-food system scholars. For
example, Friedmann
The interconnectedness of certain clusters as well as the disconnectedness of others also make for interesting insights. The almost exclusive link between the blue lifestyle cluster and the pink media cluster seems to depict the growing interest in food and health-related issues. The extent of the green homestead cluster probably owes to the centrality of the closely linked central orange cluster. The single nodes are less closely linked than other clusters, suggesting that these nodes are less interconnected than other clusters where tight sub-clusters form.
The Isloo Fresh page like network helps visualize how
knowledge circulates online. With only little information on organic agriculture
present in Pakistan and with Facebook only slowly becoming an important medium for
information, Qasim has to turn to – to him familiar – pages of US-based initiatives.
The emergent and dynamic knowledge flows, hardly visible and traceable with
conventional ethnographic methods, become more obvious with the help of the page like network’s visualisation.
Erowid and many of the nodes in its Facebook page like network
work in the fields of harm reduction and drug education. For example, the
self-description on Facebook of »DanceSafe«, one of the bigger nodes connecting the
festival cluster to the center, reads: DanceSafe is a 501(c)3 public health nonprofit
that promotes health and safety within the electronic music and nightlife
communities
.
The Facebook self-description
of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
(MAPS), a big node in the upper red
cluster, reads: The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is a
501(c)(3) non-profit research and educational organization that develops medical,
legal, and cultural contexts for people to benefit from the careful uses of
psychedelics and marijuana
.
The self-description of the biggest node in the lower part of the
network, the Drug Policy Alliance, reads: In our vision of tomorrow, people are not
punished simply for what they put into their bodies but only for harm done to others.
Our work spans issues from medical marijuana to youth drug education
.
Online knowledge about drugs,
especially in the context of harm reduction and health benefits, is created and
circulated by organizations such as »DanceSafe«, »MAPS«, the »Drug Policy Alliance«
, and by Erowid and many other organizations in Erowid’s Facebook network. This is
all the more important as knowledge about substances in legal grey zones is scarce,
and the Internet is an important source of knowledge in this contextpage like network makes
it possible to account for large scale and small-scale knowledge flows
simultaneously.
The networks show the entanglements of connections between nodes and clusters. The
practice of page like network as a knowledge
network. Its visualisation is a means to explore connections through which knowledge
is produced and circulated.
We also understand these networks of likes as a complex system through which ideas,
information and ideologies flow. The complexity of the system becomes obvious through
its constant mutability / changeability – of which however we can always only
visualize a momentary snapshot. Resonating with complexity theory, a page like network is no essentialist whole, but rather an open
ended assemblage, a type of momentary association which is characterized by the way
it gathers together into new shapes
.the baroque looks down and [...]
observes the mundane crawling and swarming of matter
.romantic notions of complexity argue, according
to Kwa.
For the knowledge flows in the network this means that there is no center of
knowledge, and no centrally organized knowledge flow. No one is responsible for the
knowledge that is produced and circulated, yet it is still shaped by the structure of
and contributes to the network. It cannot be pinpointed, which does not mean that it
is nowhere – there is still structure. Structured knowledge flows are a product of
emergence, a key characteristic of complex networks. Emergent phenomena are the
result of accumulated interactions on the small-scale that follow simple rules.
Understanding these page-like networks as complex systems also allows for a closer
look at how knowledge flows through them. Knowledge is never a static product, but
constantly shaped by the institutions it flows through before it is being adapted in a certain place.
Pragmatically speaking, some particularities of network visualizations and digital methods need to be taken into account in the context of an otherwise largely ethnographic research. We want to offer here a beginning of such considerations, while conceding that much more thought and attention is required in this growing interdisciplinary field.
Network visualizations offer a distant picture, where particularities get lost. They
provide an overview, a broad horizon, a digital satellite image of certain issues.
They offer various levels of zooming in and zooming out, with larger and smaller
structures appearing and disappearing. Nevertheless, they remain binary in the sense that a like connection either exists or it does not
exist, they lack qualitative context. For making sense of the network visualization
and filling in these gaps, ethnographic knowledge is indispensable. A page like network can be used at an advanced stage in research,
to embed such ethnographic knowledge, or at an early stage, to get an overview.
However, a kind of
Facebook page like network visualisations are no stand-alone
research results. Instead, we suggest considering them as a research tool that can be
explored. They unfold their greatest strength when triangulated with data of
different scales, collected at different distances. Zooming in and out of the
network, enriching it with and embedding it in deep ethnographic knowledge can lead a
researcher to new questions, confirm observations, contextualize findings, and point
to unknown phenomena.
From a geographical perspective, the Facebook page like
network can be compared to a satellite image: it provides a view that cannot
be seen from the ground. It uses a technology that is unavailable to the ethnographer
involved in close contact with a limited number of interlocutors. However, it
requires skill to be read and used wisely. Thus, what Turner says about the challenge
for human ecologists to use satellite images is also true for the use of digital
methods such as the Facebook page like networks by
ethnographers:
The task is to find ways to utilize the power of these techniques and technologies
without losing the dynamic, structured, multilayered, and subjective natures of
socioecological interaction as conceptualized by different types of human
ecologists
.
The digital age has profoundly changed communication, information and knowledge flows
in general. This has created challenges and opportunities for ethnographic fieldwork.
While some knowledge flows seem harder to grasp, the digital sphere also provides
access to sensitive topics and regions. Our two research examples, the Facebook page like networks of the online portal for knowledge about
licit and illicit psychoactive drugs, Erowid, and the online portal for home delivery
of organic products in Islamabad, Isloo Fresh, illustrate how a network visualisation
helps to contextualize research questions and provoke new thoughts and insights about
the respective topic.
We are convinced that an engagement with digital methods can complement ethnographic research projects. However, we do not consider digital methods as a panacea to understand complex questions regarding knowledge flows or digital social life. Rather, we suggest that an integration of digital methods is promising to bridge small- and large-scale phenomena, to understand complex knowledge networks and informant based semantics and to access the field from a different, open perspective. We are aware of the limitations of the method, which include technical issues and the need to combine it with deep ethnographic knowledge.
We also stress the fact that digital methods, exemplified by the analysis of Facebook
page like networks in our paper, hold interesting insights
about the dynamics and emergence of complex systems that are also interesting for
ethnographers interested in connecting the small and the large, the local and the
global, the specific and the universal.