Post Human Anthropology and the progression of cyber ethnography

Whitehead gives the details about an Ethnographic project he did, in which he and Jeff Fields created a MySpace project with visual art and music from a "band" they called Blood Jewel. This was the most unique account of ethnography that I have read and it was appropriate for introducing the Post Human anthropology that Whitehead writes about. Anthropology will certainly need to redefine the pre-internet ideas about culture, the "field", and ideas about the individual. Whitehead mentions on page 12 that the focus of their video, SpeedKilla, which portrays a mix of governmental violence from police, violence from Grand Theft Auto, and some from the individual shooter at Virginia Tech, was to convey a message about violence that is different from the frequent representation of individuals as the psychopaths. However, he wanted to show that these "fetish sexualities" laced with violence are not just "stemming solely from the psychopathy of individuals rather than the cultural milieu of the United Sates itself." Pg. 12

In my own ideas about the nature of ethnography, I had always assumed that the ethnography of today is something like Whitehead describes in his article, in which the ethnographer becomes the object of study as well, through their own experience, and understanding of a culture by sincerely becoming part of that culture. The "I am one of you" that Whitehead refers to is something very new to ethnography and it requires a sincere "becoming" of the people and interactions that the researcher studies. I think this is an approach that is necessary in order to look at the interactions between people online as well as offline because it forces the anthropologist to feel the motivations of others for themselves. Of course, this can only be true if the researcher actually is sincere about what they participate in and how they do it.

David Silver, in Looking Backwards, Looking Forward: 1990-2000, describes the progression from early cyber ethnography interest to the paradigm in the year 2000. Silver says that at the early stages of public internet, there were plenty of pessimists to criticize the web as the end of the real, in-the-flesh, meaningful human relationship. There were others that saw it as a tool for more rich discussion, which is what it has become. As the communication tools that are used on the web get more integrating and elaborate, the more our individual selves, and even our cultures, become more dynamic both offline and on, and more split into different realms, when before they was a physical realm, and everything was tied to that in a very bounded way.