Jacques Ibañez Bueno
University of Savoy (France)
G-SICA / IREGE laboratory

Between Aesthetics and Hypermedia Anthropology. One case of research about Internet Users

The new century offers the possibility to create and produce a sort of Direct TV. Not only by the TV professional but also by every users of Internet network and webcam. Everybody in a lot of regions of the world could produce images and sounds with a direct emission. In the case of the use of Messenger, the type of production is at the same time a sort of process of phone communication. Messenger software with individual webcam is considered like a video communication. This hybrid form of communication is not only interpersonal communication. One of the dimensions is aesthetical with the use of a small camera. In this case, there is an important question for the researcher: Aesthetics of the communication (Caune, 1997) or relational aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002)? We have decided to film Internet Users in a virtual situation. We consider visual and hypermedia anthropology could obtain exclusive information. We combine a virtual choice of the research (a majority of virtual contacts between researchers and users) and a visual choice: to produce a visual document in the tradition of visual anthropology (Pink, 2003). The visual and available research documents are a documentary film (26 minutes) and an anthropological hypermedia.