Blue bubbles: Actual Harbin residents and visitors are already familiar with some virtual Harbin residents and visitors, All constitute each other

Harbin ethnography:



... In its own terms, virtual Harbin, involves, in addition to Techne, both generativity of communication processes, and new forms of the Harbin experience.

Methodologically, actual Harbin residents and visitors are already familiar with some virtual Harbin residents and visitors, not in a virtual Harbin in Open Simulator or Second Life, but, for example, on the Harbin Hot Springs Ride Board email list (e.g. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/harbinrideboard), various Harbin email (and mailing) lists, the Harbin tribe at Tribe.com social networking site, various Harbin web pages on Facebook, and a variety of some other web and social networking sites. The ways in which folks at actual Harbin engage these social networks, produce information there, make virtual Harbin worlds, and interact with each other vis-a-vis these networks, opens possibilities for new ethnographic methodologies, especially vis-a-vis the actual Harbin pools. The directionality of such articulations, comparisons and contrasts begins, here, with actual Harbin as place, and moves toward a group-made, virtual Harbin in Open Simulator, as methodological approach. Even ideas in Harbin residents' bodyminds of friends, and their ways of thinking, reflecting this directionality of actual (including the physical) to virtual (including interactive representations), inform a range of research questions and methodologies vis-a-vis this actual / virtual Harbin ethnography. The context this Harbin ethnography assumes is the internet galaxy (Castells 2001), starting with actual Harbin as place vis-a-vis its pools and pool area, and especially Harbin residents and visitors. The communication that emerges in multiple ways among all of these 'Harbins,' as a word with significance, in its own terms, is what these methodologies help explore. All constitute each other in an ongoing whole now here be one of one-ness. What's going on here, and how are we going to ask this?

My choice to focus on both actual and virtual Harbins …







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(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/10/blue-bubbles-actual-harbin-residents.html - October 28, 2010)