Digital Ethnography

Digital ethnography coincides with the rise of the internet age and the increasing popularity of digital spaces for hosting human interactions. This became especially prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced us to lead our social lives almost completely online.

How does digital ethnography work? A group of participants is carefully selected to join a virtual space where ethnographers assign specific online tasks for them to complete. This is a unique aspect of digital ethnography because instead of having participants explain what they think they do, they show the researchers themselves. While performing these tasks, participants record their thoughts in an online journal, have discussions on forums, take photos or videos, or make digital mood boards illustrating their experience. Participants are also interviewed and asked both closed- and open-ended questions to gauge their overall feelings about the tasks.

Digital ethnography employs a range of qualitative research methods adapted for digital contexts. These include participant observation, in-depth interviews, and the analysis of digital artifacts. Unlike traditional ethnography, digital ethnography requires researchers to be adept at navigating and interpreting online interactions, understanding digital literacy, and ensuring ethical standards are maintained in virtual environments.

In the book Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice, Pink and colleagues lay out the following five principles for researchers within the field:¹

1. Multiplicity: Investigate the diverse ways people interact with digital environments by tailoring approaches to each study's unique requirements.

2. Non-digital-centric-ness: Recognize that digital interactions are intertwined with offline behaviors by considering both contexts in the analysis.

3. Openness: Maintain an open mind towards unexpected findings and unconventional data sources.

4. Reflexivity: Remain aware of researchers’ influence on the digital environment and the data collected. 

5. Unorthodox: Embrace innovative methods and perspectives that might not fit traditional research paradigms.

This research approach has enhanced the original foundations of ethnography. The digital world has provided us with access to large sets of archival data as well as new tools to process them. In this way, digital ethnography brings together big data analyses and discourse analyses to create a more comprehensive understanding of the subject being studied. 

Ethnography: A qualitative research method that involves the systematic study and detailed observation of people and cultures. The main goal is to understand the social practices, behaviors, and beliefs of a group of people from their perspective. It is a powerful tool to gain insights into the complexities of human societies.

Observation: A research method used in ethnography that describes the act of carefully watching, monitoring, or examining something or someone to gather information. It involves using the researcher’s senses (i.e. sight, hearing, touch) as well as other instruments to notice what is being observed.  

Anthropology: The scientific study of humans including their behavior, culture, and biological evolution. It seeks to comprehend the diversity of human experiences across time and space by integrating the biological understanding of humans (i.e. genetics and evolution) with the sociocultural (i.e. culture, language, group dynamics). 

Traditional ethnography, as a research method, developed out of anthropology in the early 20th century. The belief was that to deeply understand human communities, sociocultural anthropologists had to study people in their own natural environment.² During the course of the 20th century, the power of ethnography became more clear to scientists which led to its spread in use across social science disciplines, particularly sociology. 

In the 1990s, access to the internet became more widespread. Online interactions quickly widened into online communities, transcending borders and making the world more connected. Given the rising popularity of the digital world, it warranted academic interest and research. How are these communities formed? How are they maintained? And, what do people make of these communities? These are just some of the questions that popped up as the internet revolutionized the modern world. 

Scientists evolved the traditional ethnographic method of research to suit the emerging digital environment. This resulted in the new subfield of digital ethnography, expanding upon the concept of a field site by moving from a physically localized space to a virtual one. The subfield became more established in the mid-1990s following the official coinage of the term “netnography” by Robert Kozinets. Contributions from early pioneers of the subfield like Christine Hine and Howard Rheingold helped develop and refine modern digital ethnography into what it is today.

Robert Kozinets: An economist who coined the term “netnography” back in 1995. His efforts in developing digital ethnography helped make it a popular method for studying online communities. He has since combined marketing and branding theories with digital research methods, providing the field with a more contextualized understanding of digital culture.

Howard Rheingold: An American writer and critic and one of the first to study the social dynamics of online communities. He joined the influential online community “The WELL” known for its forums, sharing his experience in his seminal book, The Virtual Community.

Christine Hine: A senior lecturer at the University of Surrey whose interest lies in the sociology of science and technology. She has also developed influential methods in ethnography to combine knowledge from both online and offline social contexts.

Digital ethnography exemplifies the potential of using the internet as a research tool. First, digital ethnography is more cost-effective than traditional ethnography, minimizing travel expenses and carbon footprints. The availability of online tools such as EthOS and Indeemo also helps make conducting digital ethnography widely accessible and easy. Traditional ethnography typically requires researchers to have a slew of equipment ready, such as cameras and notebooks, to document their observations. In comparison, you just need a digital device to carry out digital ethnography. This means that the research funding received can be reallocated to other priorities in the investigation which in turn can enhance the quality of the data gathered.

The next potential advantage is that digital ethnography is globally accessible. A major challenge for organizations is having the ability to conduct international research. Thanks to the power of the internet, researchers can access and study communities from around the world without geographical limitations. A benefit of this ability is the inclusion of diverse voices and experiences that may otherwise be left unheard through traditional ethnographic methods. It is also important to emphasize this feature of digital ethnography given the increasing globalization we see in the world today. With the emergence of converging cultures resulting from globalization, digital ethnography is a useful tool to perform cross-cultural studies on such a phenomenon. 

Finally, digital ethnography provides us with a method to systematically study and understand online cultures. With the rise of the technological age, we are leading much of our lives with digital technology—whether that be smartphones, laptops, AI, you name it. It is hard to imagine life without these advancements! Given the pervasiveness of technology in this day and age, digital ethnography provides us with the valuable opportunity to gather deep and contextualized insights into how people interact, form communities, and construct identities online. Just as much as understanding human societies was important with the development of traditional ethnographic methods, digital ethnography serves the same purpose but for the online world.

Despite the potential of digital ethnography, controversies around this method still exist. The field of anthropology has been stubborn in accepting new subfields that branch away from what is traditionally understood to be such. Take visual anthropology and ethnographic films as examples.³ If these subfields struggled to be accepted in the field, digital ethnography may also experience the same resistance. This is especially the case given how disembodied digital ethnographic research is from physical reality—a pillar of traditional ethnographic study.

Another critique is that we currently lack the proper skills needed to study the online space. For a long time, anthropologists had to learn new languages to study new cultures—so why isn’t acquiring niche internet languages with unique vocabularies given the same attention when studying digital technology? If the doors are open to learning about our relationship with technology, then only being able to understand regular language limits the acquisition of the complete picture. 

On a similar note, data privacy and security are some of the guiding practices for navigating online spaces. But these concepts aren’t necessarily part of the typical anthropologist’s vernacular. This begs the question: how should digital ethnographers protect participants’ sensitive information? The lack of security raises ethical concerns about the safety of participants’ identities. With the simultaneous rise in cybersecurity and online identity theft, it’s clear that digital ethnographers need to be wary about how they are protecting their participants’ private data.^{4, 5} 

Maintaining Social Connections Through Music During COVID-19 Lockdowns

During the COVID-19 lockdowns in Australia, researcher Trisnasari Fraser and colleagues took the opportunity to use digital ethnography for their research on social connections via intercultural music. By turning to digital platforms such as YouTube as their field of study, the researchers tracked how the proliferation of online music activity contributed to the maintenance of social bonds during a time when physical interaction was limited. 

Overall, the researchers discovered that studying YouTube’s platform was a naturalistic method of examining people’s listening history since the whole world had moved online. However, this shift entailed weighing different considerations.⁶ For example, since most online communication is conducted through text, this meant digital ethnographers had to focus on extracting and analyzing written information rather than simply observing people speaking to one another. This goes to show that digital ethnography is not simply a change in the research medium but entails the incorporation of entirely different skills and techniques. 

Unveiling the Chinese Blogosphere

Researcher James Leibold used digital ethnography, along with survey data and comparative analysis, to shed light on the behavioral trends in Chinese internet blogging communities. The insights gathered challenged the polarizing narratives that characterize academic discussions about the internet in China: digital activism versus cyber-censorship.⁷ Leibold engaged with the less-explored parts of China’s digital community to reveal elements of Chinese culture and politics that would otherwise be inaccessible through traditional ethnographic methods. This innovative research demonstrates how digital ethnography reveals the two-way relationship between the real world and the virtual world, such as through politics.

Ethnographic Study

After reading specifically about digital ethnography, you may be wondering about the overall research practice it stems from. Ethnography is a qualitative research method, commonly used in anthropology, that involves first-hand interviews and observations to grasp a comprehensive view of people’s lives and cultures. This TDL article lays out everything you need to know.

Creating a Superfan: The Behavioral Power of Online Communities

TDL contributor Kaylee Somerville dives deep into the role of online branded communities in growing customer loyalty and creating “superfans.” She takes a look at how behavioral science is used by companies to enhance customer engagement by offering benefits like exclusive content, rewards, and personalized interactions. On top of that, the elements of trust, social identity, and knowledge-sharing in these online communities are explored to reveal their impact on building customer relationships and driving business growth.

1. Pink, S., Horst, H. A., Postill, J., Hjorth, L., Lewis, T., & Tacchi, J. (2016). Digital ethnography: Principles and practice. Sage Publications.
2. Dean, J. (2023, September 20). Digital Ethnography: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. JSTOR Daily. https://daily.jstor.org/digital-ethnography-an-introduction-to-theory-and-practice/
3. MacDougall, D. (1999). The visual in anthropology. In M. Banks & H. Morphy (Eds.), Rethinking Visual Anthropology (pp. 276–295). Yale University Press.
4. Statista Market Forecast. (2024). Cybersecurity - Worldwide. Statista. https://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/cybersecurity/worldwide#:~:text=Revenue%20in%20the%20Cybersecurity%20market
5. National Council on Identity Theft Protection. (2024). 2024 Identity Theft Facts and Statistics. IdentityTheft.org. https://identitytheft.org/statistics/
6. Fraser, T., Davidson, J. W., & Hew, A. (2023). Intercultural Music Engagement over Electronic Bridges: Online Ethnography and Actions Research during COVID-19 Lockdown. The World of Music (New Series), 12(1). https://doi.org/10.59998/2023-12-1-1314
7. Leibold, J. (2011). Blogging Alone: China, the Internet, and the Democratic Illusion? The Journal of Asian Studies, 70(4), 1023–1041. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41349981