Customer Reviews

Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space (Ethnographic Alternatives)

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Too many books on cyberspace are predictable. Once you know the theory (marxism, uses & gratification, etc.), you pretty much know the rest without reading it. Such is not the case with this refreshing book. Cyberspace is still a relatively new phenome non and it is a serious mistake to take our old theories and methods and force them into a mold that doesn't fit. That sort of work produces overdetermined results that are boring. Markham's book is NOT boring. It is a fun and thought-provoking account that will serve as a terrific starting place for serious inquiry about on-line experience. It would be useful and interesting for academics and nonacademics alike. If you are interested in thinking seriously about what happens to our "selves" when we go on-line, and you want a book that is well-written and engaging, you will like this book.

I normally don't write these reviews but the reader from Cleveland is so out of line that I just had to offer my two cents worth. This book is an ethnography, so if you are open to such research you will enjoy this book..

I first read this book in 1999 and enjoyed the narrative style and the accounts of various Internet users. After re-reading this book, I realized that Annette Markham has completely captured my attention theoretically. The prose is quite easy to read, which makes this book easy to skim. But a slower and more focused read gives quite a different picture, which I missed in my first reading. There is quite a lot of theoretical work which occurs under the surface of the narrative account.

I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to study the Internet from an ethnographic perspective. It provides sound methodological advice and addresses some important issues for anyone conducting qualitative research. But it doesn't address these issues in a direct textbook fashion, which is why it requires close reading. I recommend that this book be read slowly and deliberately, in order to catch the underlying theory which informs this work.

If you never expected a book that bills itself as an "ethnography" would be an enjoyable read, let alone a page-turner, prepare yourself for a pleasant surprise. Markham's experiences online are lively, funny and weird -- sometimes all at once, and her insights into the meaning of self in the last years of the twentieth century are alone worth the price of the book. "Going Online" is a real testament that academic writing, in the right hands, can be positively invigorating.

A triumph of flimsy style over hollow substance. There is nothing of value in Markham's book except for the fact that it is just one more addition to the increasing ahistoricism of new autoethnographic work in communication studies. The author contradicts herself with abandon and seems to be tranquilly unaware of the history of social studies of technology. The repositioning of self, testfied to so glibly in the text, is not explained with reference to anything other than the author's own experience.How and why the self is positioned as such under modern capitalism and new technology is not a question that the book bothers to address. Surely theory-building in an academic discipline amounts to more than exploitative recounting of one's own online experience. What of context? What of theory? What of accuracy? If Markham's book serves any purpose at all, it is to reduce academic research to tabloid-like investigative journalism. Some of us might be averse to such a move, but Markham clearly is not.