Course:MDIA300/Digital Ethnography

Digital Ethnography

Definition

Digital ethnography focuses on exploring the meanings individuals ascribe to their lived experiences through examining their everyday virtual realities and their interpretation of their online lived experiences.

Ethnography aims “to interrogate the knowledge shared by others, highlighting the value of learning from different ways of knowing and understanding, as opposed to capturing meanings in narrow ways or making broad generalizations of experiences”.

The Internet’s global network enables connection and communication between communities that were “difficult or impossible to engage with before”, encouraging sharing knowledge between them. Additionally, digital media cultivates new methods of communication and selfhood, reorganizes social interaction, and establishes new collective interests and media audiences. With these new opportunities for connection, and the invention of new forums for virtual presence, new kinds of relationships and subcultures emerge, presenting new subjects for ethnographic investigation. Digital ethnography is the study of these virtual forums of social interaction and culture development.

Digital Ethnography vs. Ethnography

Goal

Digital ethnography is a subsection of ethnography that focuses explicitly on studying “virtual worlds on digital platforms [as examples] of cultural realities existing in the online sphere”.

Practice

To effectively study the significance of digital media, we must “involve various frames of analysis”, pay attention to history, and consider its local contexts and lived experiences. In practice, digital ethnographers “[process] the collection of texts and graphics made available on digital mediums, and [engage] in making sense of the meanings portrayed through texts or graphics”.

Digital ethnographic studies use similar approaches as traditional ethnography. Every ethnographic study requires a defined field site. While identifying field sites in digital realms presents additional layers of complexity, successful studies ultimately have a clearly dictated focus. Considerations of public and private are also crucial, though again they are increasingly nuanced given the near-indistinguishable boundaries between online public and private. Finally, digital ethnographers also need to consider the degree to which they are obtrusive, and how they will play a role in their own study.

Traditional Ethnographic Processes in Digital Realms

Though the practice of digital ethnography is heavily influenced by traditional ethnographic processes, the novel aspects of online field sites present certain complications that digital ethnographers must work around:

Approaching digital ethnography through the lens of physical ethnography will result in bringing “the most disparate things together”. It is crucial to delimit the field site of digital ethnographic studies, yet the inherently networked construction of online forums makes this extremely difficult.

Academics studying digital spaces must also address the ongoing debate of participant observation and its place in anthropological studies. The changing landscapes of these studies' focuses demand adapting ethnographic practices to fit new field sites. Much of the internet relies on user-generated content, thus pressuring academics to actively participate in their chosen online field site. Consequently, digital ethnographers make important decisions on how to approach their study: will they participate, or will they ‘lurk’? Ultimately, “the issue of participation [becomes] a central concern of digital ethnography instead of [the] purely methodological decision” it has been in ethnographic practices until now.

Digital ethnography also demands reconsidering representation of digital media. The questions of intellectual property and privacy concerns are largely addressed through the creation of digital aliases. Regardless of how one presents themselves online, the fabrication of digital media is linked to the account that originally posted it. Of course, the potentially anonymous nature of these online representations of real human beings becomes an area of study in itself.

Development of Digital Ethnography

The Internet’s Nativity in the ‘90s

Online culture began to develop in earnest during the late 1990s, as younger audiences commenced a cultural shift that characterized the internet through “increased user-generated content, easy-to-create websites, and participatory engagement in new formats such as blogs, virtual worlds, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), and nascent forms of social media”. Unfortunately, sociological research and academic theorization failed to adequately recognize the importance of these revolutionary digital developments.

Virtual Worlds in the 2000s

With the turn of the century, certain ethnographers began to realize the importance of these new methods of social interaction. Their research focused particularly on online multi-player games that facilitated complex inter-player interactions.

Tom Boellstorff conducted a multi-year ethnographic study within the virtual world of Second Life noting the ways in which the virtual forums parallel our physical reality. Similarly, Bonnie Nardi comprised an anthropological account of World of Warcraft describing her experiences as she maneuvered the social connections–”guilds”– the platform orchestrates.

Despite these advancements, hybrid and virtual ethnography remained a niche within the field, perhaps due to their reliance on studying subjects created for younger audiences, for entertainment.

Documenting Daily Life in the 2010s

As social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter began to go global, they garnered academic attention for their roles as mechanisms for data collection.

Furthermore, users began interacting with these platforms in different ways, imagining their personas and audiences and creating an entirely new form of online interaction that began to retroactively influence our physical lives. These transforming relationships with digital media saw the introduction of a hybrid approach to ethnographic inquiry.

Digital Relationships in a Post-COVID Era

When the world moved online as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting lockdowns, digital culture transformed once more. The 2020s’ digital culture is defined by “decentralization, immersive virtual and augmented reality, block-chain technology, and artificial intelligence”.

As digital and online worlds collide, ethnographic field sites develop. These ever-shifting field sites demand ethnographic study develop in tandem, introducing “buzzword ethnography” wherein “various forms or styles of ethnography are proposed for niche use cases”.

Impact

The influence and purpose of digital ethnography is as malleable as the field sites it observes. Nevertheless, as our social interactions transition into online interfaces, this academic field becomes increasingly more important in order to properly understand the impact of digital technology and media on our lives and communities.