Netnography

The Essential Guide to Qualitative Social Media Research

Robert V Kozinets

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526482341
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Recherche scientifique et méthodologie

Netnographyis an adaptation of ethnography for the online world, pioneered by Robert Kozinets, and is concerned with the study of online cultures and communities as distinct social phenomena, rather than isolated content. In this landmark third edition, Netnography: The Essential Guide provides the theoretical and methodological groundwork as well as the practical applications, helping students both understand and do netnographic research projects of their own. Packed with enhanced learning features throughout, linking concepts to structured activities in a step by step way, the book is also now accompanied by a striking new visual design and further case studies, offering the essential student resource to conducting online ethnographic research. Real world examples provided demonstrate netnography in practice across the social sciences, in media and cultural studies, anthropology, education, nursing, travel and tourism, and others.

1 Introducing: Netnography, Qualitative Social Media Research Methods, and This Book

Chapter Overview

This chapter will be full of introductions: an introduction to social media, netnography, qualitative social media research, and this book. Over five billion people around the world use different types of social media, and this new edition of the book responds to the need for updated and improved ways to investigate and understand those uses. The chapter’s opening section will broadly explore some of the contours of social media today, looking at global usage patterns, exploring the most popular types of social media platforms, and encouraging some personal reflection on your own use. The next section of the chapter will introduce netnography, defining it as a form of cultural research that uses a set of specific qualitative practices to investigate social media. Netnography is affiliated with and distinct from other forms of digital anthropology and media anthropology. Like other forms of anthropology, it uses techniques that value immersion in a culture. However, these terms are redefined in particular ways in netnography. Netnography is different from other methods because it uses specific techniques and a pragmatic approach to investigate online traces. The chapter’s final section will introduce the contents of the book, demonstrating how the approach has been updated for a rapidly evolving world of social media. The five main sections of the book are devoted to methodology and history, empirical initiation, data collection, data analysis and interpretation, and communicating netnographic research.

‘We will become the Network Nation, exchanging vast amounts of both information and social-emotional communications with colleagues, friends, and “strangers” who share similar interests, who are spread out all over the nation. Ultimately, as communication satellites and international packet switched networks reach out to other cities and villages around the world, these social networks facilitated by computer-mediated communications will become international; we will become a “global village” whose boundaries are demarcated only by the political decisions of those governments that choose not to become part of an international computer network. An individual will, literally, be able to work, shop, or be educated by or with persons anywhere in the nation or in the world.’

(Starr Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff (1978) The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer, p. xxv)

Social Media Research

Exploring the Universe of Social Media

Take out your phone. Turn on your tablet. Boot up your laptop. Sit down at the desktop. Lo and behold: the wonders of social media. Flipping through a Twitter feed, checking Facebook updates. A Snapchat beep. A WhatsApp message. All of it – news to read, sports, research material, interconnected, a movie trailer, friends and family, a fitness influencer, merging and built into seductive electronic toys.

This is social media. This is a world within a world deeply affecting the world. Fast, current, zooming by, expanding, connecting everything to everything.

Redefining Social Media

Accurate and succinct definitions of social media are surprisingly hard to find. In a useful exception, Ulrike Gretzel (2017b: 1) defines and then explains social media as:

Web-based communication platforms or applications that take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies, which make it possible for users without technical expertise to easily produce and publish content on the Internet. Social media encompass a variety of different types, such as social networks, review sites, instant messaging applications, and video and photo sharing sites.

For our purposes, we can define social media as applications, websites, and other online technologies that enable their users to engage in a variety of different content creation, circulation, annotation, and association activities. Netnography is a way to study social media that maintains the complexities of its experiential and cultural qualities.

From Virtual Communities to Instagram Nano-influencers

When I started writing about virtual communities, Internet studies was still a relatively small field. No one would hear about social media for another fifteen years. Blogs were at least seven years away from wide recognition and the beginning of their growth. When the first edition of Netnography was published in 2010, social media was still a bit of a novelty. In 2009, when I wrote the first chapter of the first edition of the book, there were about 150 million active users on Facebook, and around a million Twitter users.

Just nine years later, social media have become a major part of the fabric of contemporary human society. About 5 billion people, roughly two-thirds of the world’s population, are connected through their mobile phones, and about 4 billion of them use these devices to connect to broadband. Ninety-five percent of Americans own a cell phone, with 77 percent of them smartphones. All of these connections potentially link people to one another through a variety of social media sites and other interaction platforms, as well as to the affordances of apps and the agency of algorithms. From its humble beginnings in work machine networks, today’s social media is an unprecedented, global, amplified, electrifying technocapitalist experience.

Social media today thus comprise a complex social system that reflects and reveals human society and is also, itself, a unique social phenomenon. Netnography is designed to help you make sense of that system and the way people interact with and within it.

Netnography and Social Media’s Evolution

Social media has evolved dramatically over the past decade, emerging as a commonplace, influential, and yet still deeply misunderstood phenomenon. Netnography: The Essential Guide to Qualitative Social Media Research responds to the need for a more expansive, inclusive, applied, and up-to-date way to understand social media. The book continues to evolve the two prior volumes and extends them into a new, internally structured system for mixed qualitative methods inquiries using social media data. The emphasis in netnography today is on a qualitative research approach to social media data, rather than on ethnography, anthropology, marketing research, or any one field or methodological approach.

This volume is a near total reboot. It refocuses netnography on social media’s vital, and ever-challenging new realities. It offers researchers a detailed and specific approach to conducting qualitative research using social media as the basis of its datasets. Netnography encompasses interviews, data scraping, archival work, online observation, and active engagement with new forms of data collection, visualization, thematic analysis, and field-level rhetorical representation. This edition intensifies the focus on technique but maintains a strong grounding in social scientific theory that seeks, more than ever, to bridge fields such as communication, computer science, cultural studies, anthropology, and psychology. This chapter provides three types of general overview. To begin with, it examines the current terrain of social media. It then introduces and overviews netnography. And finally, it outlines the contents of this book.

Do We Really Need Another Name for Online Ethnography?

Netnography? Do we really need a new name for ethnography, even if it is done online?

Coining a new name for something that already has a perfectly good word to represent it is needless complexification. Unfortunately, we see a lot of this needless complexification in the worlds of business and academia, where audiences reward superficial innovation by scholars or consultants but often do not have the patience or ability to judge its validity in relation to historical precedent.

As you will see in the historical overview contained in Chapter 2, when I first coined the term in 1995, the act of doing social media research of any kind was still emergent, sketchy, and mostly unnamed (and, generally speaking, just not done at all). It was clear to me that the procedures that worked well in the physical terrain of qualitative research, such as asking for consent, did not translate to the online environment. So, encouraged by the feedback of my peers, I began developing netnography as a new discipline that adapted ethnographic and qualitative research methods to the novel and still emerging contingencies of social media environments. Since that time, however, the term ‘online ethnography’ has come to be accepted as denoting the general category of applying ethnographic research concepts and procedures to online environments such as social media.

As well, a range of different researchers working in different fields have coined a host of new terms for online ethnographic work. These new terms include ‘cyber-ethnography’ (Ward, 1999), ‘virtual ethnography’ (Hine, 2000), ‘network ethnography’ (Howard, 2002), ‘webnography’ (Puri, 2007 ), and ‘digital ethnography’ (Murthy, 2008), as well as a long list of ancillary techniques developed in marketing research agencies such as ‘mobile ethnography’ and ‘show & tell ethnography’. So the question then becomes whether these names actually mean something above and beyond the mere idea of online ethnography. Do terms such as these tell us anything beyond the mere fact that an ostensibly ‘ethnographic’ type of research can be performed using networked computing devices? Otherwise, this is mere mindless neologizing – renaming for naming’s sake, rather than designating in order to add specific meaning and value to the state of our knowledge.

If we are giving a new name to a particular way of doing something, like ethnography, then that new name should signify the approach is significantly different from other ways of doing that same thing. Thus the name netnography – a portmanteau combining network, Internet, and ethnography – has always stood for a cultural focus on understanding the data derived from social media data, characteristics that the approach shares with all other types of online ethnography. However, it differs from other types of online ethnography in its praxis, the specific way that the idea of online ethnographic work is put into practice at the level of action, or boots on the ground.

Netnography 3e is a Recipe Book for Qualitative Social Media Research

Christine Hine, whose term ‘virtual ethnography’ is still widely used, has written that ‘ethnography is strengthened by the lack of recipes for doing it’ (Hine, 2000: 13). Netnography differs from virtual ethnography and from most approaches to ethnography in its fundamental disagreement with Hine’s statement. When I tried to learn ethnography from within a business field, I found the lack of clear direction for doing it frustrating and disheartening. Why couldn’t ethnographers just state what they were doing, and perhaps offer some options to guide me in the different choices I needed to make?, I wondered. I appreciate the flexibility of the ethnographic method that Hine is celebrating. But that high regard for flexibility assumes a type of hands-on mentorship and a basic level of knowledge and ability that is not always the case. I believe it also relates to a more general type of mystification in qualitative research, particularly regarding interpretation, that is both unnecessary and counter-productive.

Pedagogically dismissive attitudes, which seemingly glorify obfuscation, have led to major misunderstandings of ethnography such as Lubet’s (2018) critique of ethnography as a form of inaccurate reporting. Lack of a clear guiding recipe to follow may have also led researchers to play fast and loose with research ethics – for example in the inhumane treatment of Brazilian Yanomami populations by ethnographers (Tierney, 2001), or with ethnographers’ complicity in a range of colonialist, misogynist, and exploitative ventures (Bosk and De Vries, 2004).

This edition of Netnography embraces the provision of clear direction. It provides its readers with a number of basic recipes for getting social media research done. At this point in its development, after over two decades of adjustment, elaboration, and refinement, three editions of this book, and hundreds if not thousands of peer-reviewed articles, research projects, and dissertations based on its principles, netnography is a detailed, sophisticated, and differentiated set of techniques. Clear recipes, names, flowcharts, and directions give this edition of Netnography an unprecedented depth. They give you, the netnographer, clearly elaborated choices. By providing adequate and in-depth explanation of the methodological reasoning behind the guidance, there is no loss in flexibility. In fact, you can think of the many exercises in this book as fulfilling the same task as recipes. As you learn to become a better chef, you become freed to experiment with adapting and creating your own recipes. But first, you must be given the recipe for the soufflé!

Netnography as an Organized Set of Research Tools

Netnography today is not merely another name for online ethnography, but a set of general instructions relating to a specific way to conduct qualitative social media research using a combination of 25 different research practices grouped into three distinct categories of data collection, data analysis, and data interpretation ‘movements’. There is an immense amount of detail and flexibility in the way that netnographic researchers can apply, adapt, and combine the data collection operations of investigation (simplification, search, scouting, selecting, and saving), interaction (interview, involvement, innovation, and informed consent), immersion (reconnoitering, recording, researching, and reflecting), and the data integration methods of analysis (collating, coding, combining, counting, and charting) and interpretation (theming, talenting, totalizing, translation, turtling, and troublemaking).

Netnography provides new terminology for a new field that needs additional systematizing, and still will. Many of these ideas, if not most of them, came from my examination of published research by authors such as you. These authors have been changing and altering the early practices of netnography to help them better fit to the contingencies of particular field sites, topics, and academic fields of knowledge. They also have changed and systematized some of the ways to communicate to readers and fellow academics about them.

Netnography has become a syncretic amalgam of research practices and viewpoints from computer science, cultural studies, media anthropology, education, nursing, and my own native fields of marketing and consumer culture research. For example, as you will learn in this book, there is a particular netnographic praxis for collecting investigative data that specifies simplifying, searching, scouting, selection, and saving operations that is entirely unique to netnography and not found in this form in any other account of online ethnography. Similarly, netnographic practices espouse and describe a particular variant of ethnographic participant observation called ‘engaged data operations’. They commit to a cultural understanding of social media through an integration of data analysis and hermeneutic interpretation operations. Th...