ABSTRACT
This book is primarily ethnographic in approach; the material I present within it is the result of my prolonged contact with a community. Further, the characteristics of this community, the Indigo Children as well as those who claim to speak on their behalf, have impacted on the methods of this research. First, the community is best described as ideologically, rather than geographically, bounded. The Indigo Child concept is international, but its adherents often find that they are alone in their beliefs and interests within their immediate and surrounding society. Second, the consequence of this isolation is that the community interacts primarily through computer mediated communication (CMC) or social networking. As a result, I have found that the materials produced by this ideological community are themselves unbounded by location, as well as existing in a variety of textual and graphical forms. These forms include books, web pages, forum boards, web logs or diaries (“blogs”), videos, posts, and community groups on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Third, individuals encountering this online material can either interact with it by sharing or commenting on it or they can passively observe as an ambient audience and therefore remain invisible. Fourth, the intensity of interaction can vary: some individuals are active in posting, commenting, and sharing, while others more casually experience the community and its materials. There has been debate among Internet scholars as to the usefulness of the Digital Natives/Digital Immigrants typology of Marc Prensky (2001), but it is undeniable that contemporary humans participate in online communities to varying degrees.
