Download 1 Netnography: Understanding Networked Communication Society

Netnography: Understanding Networked Communication Society
By
ROBERT V. KOZINETS
York University, Toronto, Canada
Chapter for The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods
Edited by Anabel Quan-Haase and Luke Sloan
First Draft Only
1
“From a theoretical point of view, Netnography is regarded as one of the most
important research tools (Bartl & Stockinger, 2014). It enables researchers to access the
community members’ knowledge online which in turn helps to provide in-depth insights
about the consumers. Robert V Kozinets,(2002) the man behind Netnography has coined
this term to provide a rich insight into consumers’ interaction online. The author
highlights online environment that provides rigor and ethics in the field of Market
Research. This is done through the discussion of an online coffee newsgroup where its
implications also are discussed” (Chao 2015).
This quote is from an online article in an online journal called The Scholedge
International Journal of Business Policy & Governance. I had not heard of this journal
previously, but was alerted to it by my Google Alerts account. The article’s author is Biming
Chao from the School of Sociology & Population Studies, Renmin university of China, CHINA.
This is one of the first English articles from a Chinese university that used the term netnography.
As you can see, the author mentions me, “Robert V Kozinets,(2002) the man behind
Netnography” as if I was a living article, an animated research contribution. It is not purely for
vanity that I mention this, and that I choose editorially to begin the chapter in manner, quoting
someone who quotes me and mentions me by name. As we will discover later in this chapter, the
elevation of personal branding is a central element of the netnographic research process.
Did the author of this article intend to feature me as a living article? Did Biming Chao
expect that this citation would begin a book chapter written by me? Academia has always been
dynamic, with researchers conversing with one another through their documents. Netnography
2
seeks to intensity those conversations, amplify them, make them increasingly accessible online
public spaces as a collective project, an ideology-examining enterprise, a human project of self
and social betterment.
Why start with people? Because, in a netnography, social media research is human
research. Netnography is cultural research, research driven towards human understanding.
Performing a netnography means maintaining an anthropological preoccupation with the human,
socially grounded, epistemologically self-critical, axiologically attuned with notions of social
betterment and Koro-Ljundberg’s (2015) renewed sense of sense of participant-driven research.
Appropriate performance thus means that the netnography enacts, Miller and Horst’s critical
contention that ‘the key to digital anthropology, and perhaps to the future of anthropology itself,
is, in part, the study of how things become rapidly mundane’ (2012, p. 29). Technology is very
much a physical manifestation. Server farms take up enormous amounts of space and deplete
massive amount of precious energy and other resources. The study of communications is the
study of resources and priorities. In this study, somehow, virtual communications seem
insubstantial, without form. Social media has been treated for a long time as if it were immaterial
and virtual. Netnography recognizes that contemporary human relations with information and
communications rapidly become mundane, and seem often to become immaterial, in two senses.
First, that they rapidly seem much less relevant than they did when they were new. Second, that
they seem to be non-physical somehow, our communications bouncing around so rapidly from
screen to screen that we confuse them with our own collective thoughts. Bouncing around from
thought to thought will be the format for this wide-ranging chapter, which now proceeds to
define netnography, then to illustrate it through examples of work current when this chapter was
3
written, and then to briefly speculate about the future of netnography as a method for researching
communication media, including of course the type of media currently called social.
DEFINING NETNOGRAPHY
The nature of contemporary netnography is that of “a specific set of related data
collection, analysis, ethical and representational research practices,” where a significant amount
of the data is collected through a very humanist participant-observational research stance
(Kozinets 2015, p. 79). This is ethnographic research, conducted within and upon the new
tempero-spatial cultural coordinates mediated by contemporary networked communications,
such as the Internet and the variety of devices and forms that humans use to access it. Many
research methods focus on the Internet, the devices, the technologies with which it is associated.
Not netnography. Humanism, attention to the details and contexts of human stories and human
understandings, of people using technologies, is the hallmark of genuine netnography, just as
attention to human detail distinguished all ethnographies from all non-ethnographies.
At the risk of going off on a critical tangent, let us pause to examine a couple of negative
case examples before we praise the fine work being done by hundreds of netnographers across a
range of social science fields including education, geography, nursing, psychology, library
sciences, sociology, addiction research, sexuality, gender, linguistics, communications,
sociology, and anthropology. It is critical for researchers today to define what type of online
ethnography they are conducting. Because many poorly conceived theories of what constitutes
online ethnography are arising from people like Rogers (2009) and Caliandro (2014). These
researchers hold the mistaken belief one can do purely observational studies using computer
4
data, never speak to a person, never communicate interactively in the research with a human
voice, and then call this ethnography: “digital” ethnography, to be precise. How, exactly, is this
ethnography? Ethnography without interaction is a bit like bread without yeast. Perhaps a better
question to ask is why: Why would so many seek to call their software analytics on downloaded
data “ethnography”.
The answer is that ethnography, like anthropology, has become cool. Any glance at
popular business magazines reveals that these two terms—ethnography and anthropology—have
become even more attractive of late. And so the explanation for why many people lately,
particularly in business, in business schools, in the research business, in consulting and research
and advertising, want to say they are doing “ethnography”, and then throw a digital in front of it,
or else try something else, such as a “Webnography” (Puri 2009). Anjali Puri is the Director of
Product Development and Management at The Nielsen Company, one of the foremost market
research companies in the world. In an article without citations, and apparently working in some
sort of a corporate void that has no access to the Internet or to any academic research that might
impact their procedures or thinking (or compete with their revenue stream), The Neilsen
Company’s Anjali Puri develops “Webnography” as “an approach that uses conversations on
web forums as a source of consumer insight” (Puri 2009, p. 273), although definitionally and
methodologically speaking this is as much as it offers.
But running a few Google Trends searches does not quality you to call what you are
doing ethnography, any more than classifying netnography as a “Focus Group 2.0” (Caliandro
2014, p. 666) will convince anyone that running a few automated searches qualifies as serious
anthropology. Digital ethnography, according to Caliandro “is an ethnography grounded by
digital methods rather than one based on the internet itself” (2014, 667; italics in original).
5
Apparently, “digital” methods (and I remain unclear on how a method can be “digital”; does this
mean some methods are “analog”?) are somehow “proper” if they have no offline equivalent and
thus “take the nature and affordances of the digital environment seriously” (ibid). Accepting this
statement means accepting the ridiculous assumption that performing participative ethnography
with physical human beings somehow becomes less serious, and more frivolous, if the same
method is taken to a “digital environment”. This is Caliandro’s sense of “online groundedness”
(ibid), which manifests itself in methods that include network analysis, semantic analysis, and
discourse analysis, but do not apparently involve any direct contact with human beings as
thinking and feeling human others, any form of participative engagement other than engagement
with a software program, or any involvement in the wider project of understanding how
technology affect the individual and collective state of being of various human peoples. I have no
issues with these approaches being called digital methods, social media analytics, or digital
social media research—all of these are accurate. But they are not ethnographic methods, nor are
they anthropology.
If we want a more accurate and inspiring sense of the meaning and direction of digital
anthropology, we should turn to Miller and Horst (2012). Miller and Horst emphasize the role of
materiality in digital anthropology, arguing that studying what it means to be human also means
studying how human beings socialize ‘within a material world of cultural artefacts that include
the order, agency, and relationships between things themselves and not just their relationships to
persons’ (2012, 24-25). “We thus have three forms of materiality to contend with in any
anthropology of the digital: the materiality of technology and the digital infrastructure itself, the
materiality of digital content itself, and the materiality of the digital as an actual context” both
6
for human senses and bodies and increasingly for and upon human culture and society (Kozinets
2015, 81).
What does this have to do with netnography? Netnography is a part of this enterprise, a
very specific part. In general, and perhaps most importantly, netnography associates itself very
closely with the idea that human beings should study other human beings, as much as possible,
as other human beings, despite the temptations of technology and mass data to want to reduce
and dehumanize our humanity into numbers and other decontextualized and decontextualizing
descriptors. Quantification is a powerful disguise for exploitation. We must remember, when
tempted to quantify fast amounts of online “content” or “data” that during the Holocaust
“Accounting numbers were substituted for qualitative attributes of individuals thereby denying
them their humanity and individuality and making them invisible to Germans not directly
involved in the attempted annihilation of all European Jews” (Funnel 1998, 435). Beyond
eschewing dehumanizing decontextualization, netnography also embraces and adapts
anthropology’s nostalgic and somewhat quaint fascination with questions of history, tradition,
human nature, primitivism and what it means to be human in a world of near constant change.
Netnography focuses in ever finer-grained detail on the question: “How exactly is technology
changing the human experience?”1
This is an extremely important aspect of netnography: the axiology of technology studies,
technology studies with a keen critical edge but also a journalist’s fairness and zeal, an artist and
entertainer’s freedom to notice and critique, but a scientist’s love of principles, deep research,
1
Is netnography part of a Far Left “Neo-Hippy” Movement? Aligned with anthropology, it may be one place to construct a coherent
critique of capitalism. The answer to whether Kozinets and his netnography align themselves with an updated version of the historical hippies is
almost beyond dispute at this point in netnography’s development. However, there is one aspect to this all this alleged “hippieness” which is
rather paradoxical, like the go-go capitalist hippies once they hit middle age. As Kozinets (2012) points out, Netnography is meant to be
marketed. It started in the field of marketing, and it is now not only a research brand, but also a tool for you, Dear Reader, to brand yourself.
Netnography today is a commercial product still waiting to be fully capitalized and exploited by industry. Only if it can be trademarked, bought
and sold like a “Webnography” (Puri 2009) special sauce on the marketplace will netnography live long and then help you, Oh Gentle Reader,
prosper beyond your wildest dreams of avarice. Or critique the capitalist industrial-military-media complex.
7
interpretation rituals and practices. Tools and power words are the stock in trade. Moments of
absolute co-creation await between you-as-the network and the network-as-you, manifesting as
your personal academic brand: you. In a culture of unchecked narcissism, it’s all about you. And
netnography is too.
In sum, the key to remember about the difference between netnography and online
ethnography is this. Online ethnography is a broad category that encompasses a wide range of
different research practices. There are many, many, kinds of online ethnography, including
claims that the observational downloading which some researchers are doing is ethnographic,
even though it is unrecognizable as participant observation, which is usually held up as the
hallmark of ethnography. Netnography is a specific kind of online ethnography. It requires
participation through researcher engagement and conversation, which often should be in person.
A netnography could not be done which was entirely composed of in-person interviews,
however.
An online ethnography with particular reasons for doing what it is doing is a
netnography. An online ethnography with a particular methodology, and specific research
practices, arts and sciences combined, these elements locate it as a netnography. All individual
netnographies are unique. However, each individual netnography is a netnography because it
draws upon the same specified set of research practices, beliefs, motivations, framings, concerns,
and traditions.
EXAMPLES OF NETNOGRAPHY
8
Although books such as Hine’s (2000) Virtual Ethnography, Boellerstorff et al.’s (2012)
Ethnography and Virtual Worlds, Horst and Miller’s (2012) Digital Anthropology or Underberg
and Zorn’s (2013) Digital Ethnography “may offer theoretical overviews, general advice,
examples and case studies, they tend to be focused on particular field sites (e.g., virtual worlds,
such as Second Life), or particular approaches (e.g., eliciting and collecting online storytelling
narratives). They are examples of different forms or sites of netnography, sometimes, in some
ways” (Kozinets 2015, p. 22 n2). Netnography now embraces and specifies practices that clearly
differentiate the method from other approaches to online research. In netnography, taking the
time to introspect is part of the method. In netnography, creating a personal academic branding
strategy is part of the method. In netnography, visualizing data in creative new ways, pushing the
boundaries of representation, is part of the method. Research web –pages and related social
media outreach, usually on Facebook and Twitter, often on LinkedIn, are part of the method. I
don’t think any of these things could be said confidently for online ethnography or digital
ethnography as a general, and rather generic, brand.
Netnography is a Brand You Can Trust. Netnography remains pragmatic. It locks into the
battlegrounds of reality and observation, where the more mystical quantum physicists, but
ultimately all of them, embraced consciousness-related explanations of the most delicately
measured phenomenon, such as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, other observer effects, and
the Copenhagen interpretation of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment. If it is true, as they
believe, and I believe alongside them many days, that an observing mind creates reality, then
netnography seeks to understand how this mind creates and is recreated by technology, digital,
mobile, informational, communicational, transactional, cultural exchanging, eye-and-brainfilling. These are a panoply of never before seen enchantments. On a human level, netnographers
9
feel the same heartfelt commitment to technology development as does everyone else, perhaps
even more than everyone else, since the field tend to attract those with an edge of technophilia.
On the other hand, however, they must learn to critique it, to see it for the inevitable social
construction of technologically determined inevitability which it is. Technology development
seems so natural that it is as invisible as is water to a fish—in the old but never less effective
anthropological metaphor.
Looking backward at old thinking can make one look silly. Certainly that is the case now
for the early exploratory definitional scribblings on netnography. Foolishly, perhaps, Kozinets
(2002) defined netnography as ‘a new qualitative research methodology that adapts ethnographic
research techniques to study the cultures and communities that are emerging through computermediated communications’ (62). This definition no longer makes complete sense. After two
decades, it is strange for this article to still be calling netnography “new”—although some still
do. For example, Laura Orsolini, MD, along with three other MDs, published an article in the
journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, in which they examined the
behavior of “psychonauts”, modern shamans in pursuit of psychedelic experiences, in online
drug forums. In a fascinating investigation with significant value to theory and practice, they
describe netnography as “a new qualitative research methodology that applies an ethnographic
approach to the study of cultures and online communities” (Orsolini et al. 2015, p. 297).
Certainly, Orsolini et al,. (2015) are right in that the method is indeed new to the field of
psychology, even to cyberpsychology. However, it is not new to the world.
More contestably, perhaps, we might wonder if it makes sense to talk about “cultures and
communities” that manifest through communications and exchanges mediated by information
technologies. In addition, it may not make sense to think of single sites or communities, or of
10
communal and cultural identification to somehow follow posting or commenting, or otherwise
interacting with others, through a particular web-site. Am I am member of the Red Bull “online
brand community” simply because I liked their Facebook page in order to receive a coupon, or
wrote a posting during the heat of the moment of Felix Baumgartner’s edge-of-space, freefall,
Stratos jump? Although corporate advertising agencies and brand managers would love to think
so, I think not.
“Symbolic netnography follows the focus and precepts of earlier methodological writings
on netnography (e.g., Kozinets, 1998, 2002a, 2010) which were written while the Internet and
social media were in an earlier stage and the theoretical implications of developments such as the
critiques of community and the rise of networked individualism had yet to be integrated.
Conceptions of culture and community with hard definable boundaries are now replaced with
more liquid notions of online social experience and interaction, but the basic precepts and foci
remain completely intact. There is still, after all, much work to be done to investigate and
understand the various ways in which identity groups and identity projects play out in online
social interactions and experiences” (Kozinets 2015, p. 246).
Ashleigh Logan’s (2015) article in Celebrity Studies is a favorite among the most
recently published netnographies, even though its brevity leaves me hungry for the fully-realized
follow-up. Her article is a netnography with key allegiances to the symbolic netnography. Just as
it is with Logan (2015), most currently published netnographies are symbolic netnographies.
“Symbolic netnographers seek out and find interesting sites, cultures, groups and people and
translate their meaning systems as values, practices and online social rituals. Discourse is a key
construct. . . . Symbolic netnographies represent the online social experience and interaction of
particular people’s groups, nations, languages, cultures and identity formations in the traditional
11
textual form of an article, chapter, dissertation or perhaps book. They draw upon particular sites
in order to create narratives of sharing, exploration, cooperation, conflict, exchange,
empowerment, disparity and much more. Their output is meant to be read. They have a direct
lineage and interconnection with traditional use of ethnography and related qualitative research
techniques. . . .” (Kozinets 2015, pp. 246-249).
The emphasis in Symbolic Netnography is on researcher participation in the field, and
Logan’s work leaves little doubt she was actively engaged with her online Others: “From
February 2014 to October 2014 I observed, interacted and engaged with these bloggers and their
followers as a participant observer. Observations, interactions and reflections were recorded in
field notes. Data were captured visually via screenshots and the copy and paste method” (Logan
2015, pp. 378-379). However, perhaps because of the short length of the article, we get little of
the sense of the researcher (or personal academic brand of the researcher) as ethnographic
instrument, of Ashleigh as Kate fan. How did Asheligh, for instance “replikate” the look of
Kate? Could she, in future, share some postings of herself in Kate Middleton fashion, discuss the
responses, share her self-reflections from reflexive fieldnotes, and then reflect upon those
reflexive reflections in deep data analysis that begins to penetrate not only into the sociology,
cultural codes, and data science of the experience, but also its phenomenology.
On to another example of researcher participation. Ercilia Garcıa-Alvarez, Jordi LopezSintas, and Alexandra Samper-Martınez, in their 2015 article about social network gamers
playing Restaurant City, a game hosted on Facebook, provide an excellent and detailed
description of their netnography. In it, they develop the method of netnography in ways that
presciently anticipate the alterations and transformations of the netnography approach.
12
“The fieldwork, conducted over 3 years, was undertaken in three stages. In the
first stage, very soon after RC [Facebook’s Restaurant City game] was launched in 2009,
the researchers enrolled as participants via Facebook, thereby becoming part of the
gaming community who managed restaurants in a ‘‘street’’ with (at the high point of the
game) 38 neighbors. In this initial phase, the researchers spent 1½ year familiarizing
themselves with the social and technical aspects of the game: they created an ‘‘American
rocker style’’ restaurant themed by the style of furniture (e.g., chairs with electric guitar
backs), decoration (e.g., a custom motorcycle parked in front of the restaurant), employee
apparel (black T-shirt and jeans), and the kind of food served (burgers, cookies, etc.). The
second stage, which shaped the field book (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995), consisted of
data collection based on four approaches: (1) exhaustive screen captures of all the
interaction microprocesses taking place during the game, (2) written recordings of
interactions between the netnographers and players, (3) interpretive written recordings of
all sessions reflecting netnographer gaming experiences, and (4) recording of off-line
interactions. Taking advantage of the possibilities offered by the Facebook platform, an
asynchronous online focus group was organized with the most experienced RC neighbors
(Atkinson & Hammersley, 1994; Morgan, 1996). The researchers’ identities were
revealed, the purpose of the research was explained, and anonymity was guaranteed.
These neighbors were sent a mail through Facebook and were invited to a private
‘‘event’’ (a social networking site application) to take place over 2 weeks. The protocol
included a combination of open exploratory questions and more in-depth questions
covering aspects such as motivations to start and to continue playing RC, routines, and
the impact of online and off-line interactions. This procedure allowed the researchers to
13
analyze individual perspectives and reactions, with the researchers playing a role in
discussions that was active (Morgan, 1996) yet nondisruptive of participant dynamics
(Agar & MacDonald, 1995). The researchers repeatedly returned to the field for a further
2 years (Kozinets, 2010), playing the game, chatting with neighbors, and observing and
recording changes in the dynamics of the game. In 2012, announcement of the game’s
withdrawal led to the third stage of the research, in which we recorded the reactions,
problems, and attitudes of our neighbors and of other RC players as reflected in the
official fan page, blog, and forum. We collected information from these sites by
interacting with participants, taking care to reveal the identity of the researcher and the
research objectives. In parallel, supporting documentation was collected consisting of
news reports and specialist press articles regarding the game and the companies involved
in its development and management” (Garcıa-Alvarez, Lopez-Sintas, and SamperMartınez 2015, pp. 5-6).
The method is beautifully described. As we clearly see, the researchers did not limit
themselves to ridiculous thinking about online and offline, technological and physical, native and
virtual “realities” or differences, differences which are as relevant as trying to distinguish
between a speaker and what is spoken. Instead, the authors considered their research to be one
“configured by the online and off-line interactions of players (Isabella, 2007) in a gradual
hybridization (Ruhleder, 2000) that rendered meaningless the distinction between an online
world and another off-line world (Garcia, Standlee, & Bechkoff, 2009)” (pp. 4-5). What we have
in this article is a three year long netnography that follows an online game field site from very
close to its beginning to its demise. The netnographers exhibit full participation in the site/game.
14
Visual information on the screen is captured, fieldnotes are written, “off-line interactions” are
recorded, informed consent is earned, full disclosure is present, a research web page of sorts is
utilized, participants are recruited and interviewed, ethical standards are followed. This is the
very model of symbolic netnography, with full researcher engagement.
Excellent netnographies have also been written and performed without personal
involvement of this sort. Orsolini et. al (2015) provide a good example of an observational
netnography that yields fascinating results. Rather than engage in psychedelic practices
themselves and share them online (something that might not be feasible, or at least may not be
advisable; however, see Page and Singer 2004), Orsolini et al. (2015, p. 297) conducted a
“nonparticipant netnographic qualitative study of a list of cyber drug communities (blogs, fora,
YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter pages)”. As they tell, us, inviting us to read critically between
the lines, they were able to complete their netnography in two months, with their university
Ethics Committee’s approval, scanning 102 pro-drug websites, and screening 13,770 forum
threads authored by 2,076 users. In a point I would be happy to debate with them, they further
state: “In line with best practice protocols for online research and in compliance with unobtrusive
and naturalistic features of netnographic research, no posts or other contributions to private or
public forum discussions were made” (p. 297). Nonetheless, their netnography is full of
fascinating insights into the shared online worlds of the psychonauts that leave me intrigued.
NETNOGRAPHIC DATA AND THE RESEARCHER BRAND
15
Netnographic data is also important to the definition of netnography. The elaborations of
types of netnographic data, relation to data, and even the social construction of the category of
data itself are far more developed than they have ever been before. Nonetheless, scholars such as
Logan broaden the method, customize it to the ever-liquid sociotechnical environment of
people—in her case the fans and followers of The Royal Kate Middleton—and expand
netnography.
“In a netnographic study, there are no restrictions about what type of online information
can be used as data (Kozinets 2002, 2009). The amount and type of data collected vary and is
largely dependent on the nature of the phenomenon of interest. Reaching data saturation, that is,
when no new ideas or themes emerge – is usually a good indication that enough data have been
collected. The social media element of my netnographic study lasted nine months. It contained
831 Facebook posts and 431 tweets and included both pictorial and textual data. These data were
analysed in the same way as traditional ethnographic data.” (Logan 2015, p. 379.).
Logan tells of her netnography participants creating self-made photo collages of
themselves in outfits and poses that Kate Middleton has worn and posed. These are shared using
popular platforms like Facebook and Twitter.2 In the shared photo collages, or attached to them,
there are usually textual posts with fashion information, often explanation of the brands, the type
of clothing, its price, and where varieties of it can be purchased, most commonly online, but also
in brick and mortar stores. Unlike traditional ethnographies of forums, where one celebrity
newgroups were the only choice, today we have these interactions occurring on the mass sites
like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, YouTube, and others, as well as on blogs
2
Why not Instagram, I must wonder. Pinterest? Snapchat? Movement between platforms
and sites is now fluid in netnography. Netnographers follow people and topics, practices and
meanings, as well as following sites.
16
and, quite likely, still some forums. What this means is that studies of online social groups do not
need to be site-specific. The movement between sites is liquid and simple. No loyalty is owed or
given to any particular platform. The presence of people, topics, and resources draws people to
communicate through particular communication channels. When a better one comes along, they
move. Thus, determining the motivations and orientation of these particular groups is important
to understanding their interactions and communications.
Here, Logan’s exact wording become important: “These photo collages were used by
participants not only to explain the ‘how to’ or the instruction of ‘replikating’, but also to boost
their popularity as ‘micro-celebrities’ who ‘piggyback’ off of Kate Middleton’s recognisability
as a fashion icon.” (Logan 2015, p. 379). This is interesting because it offers a motivation as well
as an online mechanism for the transfer of subcultural and cultural capital. How do these forms
of capital transfer through contemporary media communication? They do it through becoming
embraced by individuals as part of their nicro-celebrity brand and through them into groups as
they are capitalized in a technocapitalist fashion system/advertising system and data/intelligence
targeting sales economy society. As the community works, it capitalizes, creating demand for
clothing, oiling the wheels of the global fashion industry that works through mass adoration and
lemming-like emulation of alpha bitches (as in successful female dogs) like Kate Middleton.
Facebook posts were also used as data. In fact, Logan notices how branding and
marketing practices are adopted in the group. Netnographies attend to contexts of corporate
connection and control. Media were used in similar ways, to provide “short bursts of information
about the quality of ‘replikate’ and ‘copykate’ items,” (p. 379) to provide attention and
recognition from the others who would follow them and their advice.
17
Marking her study as a netnography, Logan works through netnographic terminology and
make it her own: “Alteration is essentially the familiarisation with the codes and norms of online
behaviour. For example, in the online Kate [Middleton] community it was important to
understand the ways in which different bloggers alternated between the terms ‘replikate’ and
‘copykate’. This was important for understanding the hierarchy of these bloggers within the
community, because the power of ‘micro-celebrity’ was higher for those who ‘replikate’.”
(Logan 2015, p. 379). Here, we witness netnographic decoding of the language of the online
crowd, of the online place, a local dialect, sets of practices, goals, and technorituals that seems
very much like the contextualizing of an anthropologist.
Concordant with the acts and practices of an embodied anthropologist performing the
anthropologist’s role in a physical site accompanied by a person, people, or artifacts, the
participant-observer stance of netnography necessitates a type of private and public performance
which I term the Scientific Performance of the Anthropologist Online. While this Scientific
Performance of the Anthropologist Online is conducted over wires and optic cables dug into the
earth and hung on it from electrified poles, it originates in and manifests through the human
reality of the data scholar, the social scientist charged through her or his position to explain what
is going on in social media and their networks on the Internet and the other datanets, including
those which link up mobile applications, owned by social media companies such as Apple and
Facebook, continuously monitored by many agencies, both commercial and governmental. All of
these topics are important for us to study in order to understand the fully enmeshed nature and
power structure of this multifaceted and in fact very divergent and rich set of communications
possibilities we currently call media, including social—although they are all social.
18
Like ethnography, particularly post-crisis of representation ethnography, netnography is
interested in the interface between the researcher and the world. This technologically mediated
interface is the juncture of participation. Moreover, it is the crux point where the netnography is
initially created through the collection of data and ultimately presented through research
representation. It is the focus on this interface that draws netnography not only to research
representation, but also to researcher representation: how will the researcher represent herself in
her dealings with the social world which, in netnography, unlike traditional netnography, is
virtually limitless. The answer is, as already intimated, by a conscious and deliberate selfpresentation strategy drawing on the notion of the netnographic researcher as a personal
academic brand.
DIFFERENT TYPES OF NETNOGRAPHY
There are currently four different types of netnography (Kozinets 2015). First, there are
symbolic netnographies that seek to explore and explain meaning systems and practices relating
to particular groups. Next, there are autonetnographies, which are attuned to the inner,
phenomenological experience of the researcher while they are conducting the (usually symbolic)
netnography. Digital netnographies are another type. Digital netnographies incorporate any and
all methods of data analysis, including those using software for word and language recognition
and for the calculation and representation of social relationships, into the wider enterprise of
human understanding. Human understanding overrides all forms of mechanistic understanding,
giving context to data analysis, in digital netnography. Humanist netnographies are
netnographies focused on social and individual issues, seeking self and social betterment and
19
aiming for public accessibility, activism, and action. The intersections between the four types are
many—these are ideal types, not actual forms.
Netnographies can vary in many other ways as well. We can think of a spectrum of
netnographic representation, where netnographic variance can manifest its deviations in the
following ways:
1)
Small data to large data ratio: what data will be considered “Small”? Numbers
seem to be the smaller of the two choices: numbers or words. Numbers seem to
have far fewer interpretations to them than words, far less cultural charge. But
still, they have many interpretations, and often lots of cultural charge. Perhaps
it is arbitrary to compare words and numbers. Perhaps we might better compare
the insights we are able to receive from each of them.
2)
Lots of data to little data: netnographies are like extraction and exploration
mining rigs; netnographies can try to use a lot of tools to analyze word counts,
sentiment analyses, and natural language similarities to known routines.
However, this is not human understanding. Human understanding happens at a
human level. Cultural understandings are built up over several human
understandings. They are a collective phenomenon. The purpose of
netnography is to inspire cultural understanding.
3)
Purpose. Is your netnography to be commercial? For a company to help them
understand their target consumer and communicate and empathize with them
enough so that they buy more product? Or is your ethnography cultural? A
cultural academic portrayal of the languages and full symbolic meaningful
20
stories of a group of people, and most especially your story within that story,
your situated sense of yourself and your ideas in relation to other selves and
most especially their related ideas, in order to gain publication, put some good
lines on your curriculum vita, and move your career along?
Maintaining trust, authenticity, and a sense of meaning in such an environment is
the sacred task of netnography. Netnography enters a world in which, for most scientists,
beliefs and preconceptions are still a very big part of the ideology of scientific practice.
Netnography asks each of us to be aware of what we are assuming, thinking, and doing.
Can we live a more examined existence? Introspection, grounding you academic work,
your work as a researcher, your life in the world of questions and quests, is the base of
netnography. On the personal level, can you live a more examined life? Netnography
might be able to help you get there.
CONTEMPLATING THE FUTURE OF NETNOGRAPHY
Relevant to the tensions within netnography is the technology development trend and its
human direction that we can discern from the recent news story that e-book sales have
plummeted worldwide (Kozlowskie 2015). E-book sales are down over 7 percent from last year,
while sales of physical print books are up almost 9%, showing that not only are people who have
tried the Kindle and iPad reading experience giving it up in favor of the traditional book form (as
a book), but also that consumers have not been swayed by the various arguments in favor of
ebooks, such as their decreased ecological impact. It is predicted in the story that e-books will
21
always have a significant minority of the marketplace, perhaps around the 20% level they have
now naturally received (without government subsidization or regulations), and that people will
never give up on physical books. They like the physical contact. The heft. The feel in the hands.
The portability. The stability. The ability to read surreptitiously, and by firelight. The body, its
risks and its pains, is still vitally important to our desires. In fact, without it, we would likely
have no desires. We would be indistinguishable from the machines. They who have no body and
no desires. The technologies that increasingly invite us to make them increasingly real and, like
jealous children, dance more with them, rather than with one another.
Society becomes the complicated throughput device for the mutual creation and
satisfaction of these desires, desires without organs, desiring machines (Deleuze and Guattari
1972), and we gratify them using the most sophisticated technological toys of the time. We can
see some of the greatest theoretical artistry in recent times in French thinkers, as we have for
many years. And of course netnography builds on many of them, from Baudrillard, Touraine,
Cova, Virilio, Maffesoli, and Foucault, as well of course Debord. At the same time, netnography
consider the current social reality very seriously, and in particular takes literally Donna
Haraway’s notions of cyborgs as well as Katherine Hayles’ notions of post-humans. As well it
appreciates and learns much from the research representations of Shannon Bell and other posthuman feminist scholars and philosophers.
Netnography in this chapter links to a human consciousness project most closely aligned
with the anthropology of consciousness on the academic side, but also tightly aligned with the
core expressive notions of the arts and the (digital) humanities, the human sciences of artistic
representation (rather than scientific). It is for this reason that netnography aligns itself within an
expansionary tradition seeking to unite politics, science and spirituality—not to mention the
22
consumer cultural world of the commercial realm: the socioeconomic spheres, with all their
classes, projects, production, co-creations, and identities—as well as all of their attendant
desires. Desires, in a purely Lacanian sense. Desires that are, most of all, desires for more
desires. Desires for desires that are so unquenchable that they will always remain. And we desire
the things that we must have in order to sustain the desire itself—the minimum choice between
satisfaction and insanity. Netnography is one way, and only one, to begin to examine those
desires in our own lives, individually and collectively.
It is in these heady final moments, at the very end of the chapter of this book where we
can stretch our headspace to contemplate the future of netnography. We might consider through
the concept the relation to Koestler’s (1972) notion of holons and Ken Wilber’s use of them, how
netnography theory and the seven major “levels or waves of human existence”, which are linked
to the seven levels of Abraham Maslow and through them both to Ken Wilber’s promising subtitle of an “Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality” (2000) can unite into
a form of four-part series that begins and ends with the netnographic elements of fire, earth, air,
and water in the form of the humanist, symbolic, digital, and auto netnographies (Kozinets 2015,
p. 207). We might at least, in passing, consider it.
23
REFERENCES
Boellstorff, Tom, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce and T.L. Taylor (2012) Ethnography and
Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Caliandro, Alessandro (2014) ‘Ethnography in digital spaces: Ethnogrpahy of virtual
worlds, netnography, and digital ethnography’, in Rita Denny and Patricia Sunderland (eds),
Handbook of Anthropology in Business. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. pp. 658–680.
Chao, Biming (2015), “Relevance and Adoption of Netnography in Determining
Consumer Behavior Patterns on the Web,” The Scholedge International Journal of Business
Policy & Governance, 2 (6), 12-17.
Funnel, W. “Accounting in the Service of the Holocaust,” Critical Perspectives on
Accounting, 9 (August), 435-464.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1972), Anti-Œdipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark
Seem and Helen R. Lane, London and New York: Continuum.
García-Álvarez, López-Sintas, Jordi, and Alexandra Samper-Martínez (2015), “The
Social Network Gamer’s Experience of Play: A Netnography of Restaurant City on Facebook”,
Games and Culture, 1-21.
Hine, Christine (2000) Virtual Ethnography. London: SAGE.
Horst, Heather A. and Daniel Miller (2012), Digital Anthropology, London: Bloomsbury.
Koestler, Arthur (1967) The Ghost in the Machine. New York: Macmillan.
Koro-Ljundberg, Mirka (2015), Reconceptualizing Qualitative Research: Methodologies
without Methodology, London, SAGE.
Kozinets, Robert V. (2015), Netnography: Redefined, London: SAGE.
24
Kozinets, Robert V. (2012), “Marketing Netnography: Prom/ot(ulgat)ing a New Research
Method,” Methodological Innovations Online (MIO), Issue 1, Volume 7, Spring 2012, 37-45, see
online at http://www.pbs.plym.ac.uk/mi/index.html.
Kozlowskie, Michael (2015), “Book Sales Plummet all Over the World in 2015”,
Goodreader.com, available online at http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/e-book-salesplummet-7-5-in-the-first-3-months-of-2015#disqus_thread.
Logan, Ashleigh (2015), “Netnography: observing and interacting with celebrity in the
digital world,” Celebrity Studies, 6:3, 378-381.
Miller, Daniel and Heather A. Horst (2012) ‘The digital and the human: A prospectus for
digital anthropology’, in Heather A. Horst and Daniel Miller, Digital Anthropology. London:
Bloomsbury. pp. 3–35.
Orsolini, Laura, Papanti, Gabriele Duccio, Francesconi, Giulia, and Fabrizio Schifano
(2015), “Mind Navigators or Chemical Experimenters? A Web-Based Descripton of EPsychonauts”, Cyberspsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 18 (5), 296-300.
Page, J. Bryan and Merrill Singer (2004), Comprehending Drug Use: Ethnographic
Research at the Social Margins, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University.
Puri, Anjali (2009), “Webnography: Its Evolution and Implications for Market
Research,” International Journal of Market Research, 51 (2), 273-275.
Rogers, Richard (2009) The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods. Amsterdam, Holland:
University of Amsterdam Press.
Underberg, Natalie and Elayne Zorn (2013), Digital Ethnography: Anthropology,
Narrative, and New Media, Austin, TX: University of Texas.
25
Wilber, Ken (2000), A Theory of Everything: Integral Vision for Business, Politics,
Science and Spirituality, Boston, MA: Shambhala.
26
All in-text references underlined in blue are linked to publications on ResearchGate, letting you access and read them immediately.