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.[1][2] 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.[8]