observe or participate in these offline interactions in order to fully understand the community as was done by Sherry Turkle. This finding has been supported by Sara Ross in her work on legal anthropology in urban settings such as Toronto, Canada. However, many cyber-ethnographers including Hine and Walstrom believe that participant observation in the offline setting can be biased by asymmetry between the researcher and the member. This is because community members rely on computer mediated communication they may be at a disadvantage to a researcher who understands their online interactions, but also employ face-to-face communication. As it is often the case that researchers are interested in understanding the interactions in the online context and that comparing online and offline identity is not important, credible ethnographic studies can be done in online-only contexts. Limitations One of the main disadvantages of online ethnography is the need for the ethnographer to possess certain technology-based skills. Some studies might only require elementary computer skills, but others may require advanced knowledge of technologies and tools such as web-based applications, analytical tools, and computer programming. The development of such technologies tends to grow faster than the methodology literature thus "there is little consensus on how [to] best collect and analyze new media data". The temporal nature of online data can also be an issue. Cyber-ethnographers might ask, "What is data of the present?" Robinson (2011) states that in cases such as YouTube videos and subsequent comments, "the present cyber-reality may be interpreted as a continual accumulation of all past input by members or participants". Cyber-ethnographers also need to think of their own identities and how "[it] might become part of a feedback loop with those he/she is studying" and whether or not it eschews the data collected and the integrity of the study. Thus, there is a need for cyber-ethnographers to be particularly flexible and reflexive in their practice of ethnography. Another limitation of cyber-ethnography is that it complicates matters of privacy. Although researchers have always had to take people who were not originally part of an ethnographic study into consideration, cyber-ethnography allows researchers to actually see “identifiable records of these connections and interactions.” As a result, researchers may have to take extra precaution in asking informants’ for their permission to participate in their research, as well as in concealing the identities of said informants. Ethics To the extent that cyber-ethnography is similar to ethnography