Netnography Unlimited

Understanding Technoculture using Qualitative Social Media Research

Robert V. Kozinets, Rossella Gambetti, Robert V. Kozinets, Rossella Gambetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000317770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: R&D

Netnography has become an essential tool for qualitative research in the dynamic, complex, and conflicted worlds of contemporary technoculture. Shaped by academic fields, industries, national contexts, technologies and platforms, and languages and cultures for over two decades, netnography has impacted the research practices of scholars around the world.

In this volume, 34 researchers present 19 chapters that examine how they have adapted netnography and what those changes can teach us. Positioned for students and researchers in academic and professional fields, this book examines how we can better use netnographic research to understand the many ways networked technologies affect every element of contemporary business life and consumer existence.

Netnography Unlimited provides an unprecedented new look at netnography. From COVID-19 to influencer empathy, gambling and the Dark Web to public relations and the military, AI and more-than-human netnography to video-streaming and auto-netnography, there has never been a wider or deeper treatment of technocultural netnographic research in one volume. Readers will learn what kind of work they can do with netnography and gain an up-to-date understanding of the most pressing issues and opportunities. This book is a must-read for those interested in technology, research methods, and contemporary culture.

Section 1

Netnography Mobilized

1

Netnography Today

A Call to Evolve, Embrace, Energize, and Electrify

Robert V. Kozinets

It is May 2020 and I am writing this introductory chapter from my home office in Los Angeles, California. Hollywood and the film industry have shut down. Shopping malls are shuttered. The view from my screen when I access the local Los Angeles county public health website is captured in an impressionistic painting that I include here as Figure 1.1. According to the city of LA’s public health website and its running counter, there are 1,843 new cases of COVID-19 in the city today, and today 27 people lost their lives because of the virus. The vulnerable and fleshy colors of Figure 1.1 replace the cold blue color scheme of the original site because the figure comes from an immersion journal noting. It represents an artistic and emotional capture of the screen that encapsulates my sense of being in a particular place caught in a specific moment of time.

Figure 1.1My Impression of the LA County Public Health Screen, May 2020.

Adaptation is top of mind. COVID-19 is a force we feel each day, and its representation in traditional and social media pervade our collective thought and discourse to a very high degree. On-screen, influential social media content creators are treated as “essential workers,” their partnership is sought to help governments disseminate accurate information about public health (Heikkilä 2020, Solis 2020). In my life, the days are filled with work at my desktop and lots of Zoom meetings. These are punctuated by daily long walks, taken with protective masks worn over our faces, during which I notice the beauty of blooming plants and flowers, the calls of birds and shapes of clouds as I never have before. My school’s commencement was just broadcast online. Will Ferrell Zoombombed our school president’s speech to congratulate graduates and inform them that the school would be buying them each a new car. Deans, alumni, and school faculty were joined by celebrities and politicians. All of them were situated in their living rooms and offices, with bookcases, fireplaces, mantles, and art works in the background, expressing different sides of themselves than the ones we usually see. With camera connections, we open our homes and private sides to our screens. Media evolves and represents this new reality, such as in the Wired magazine cover in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2Cover of Wired Magazine, May 2020, Representing Our New Technological Adaptations to Coronavirus Sheltering In Place.

These Are the Times

It is a time of openness. Every day, seeing and hearing the unavoidable and unfathomable, the crisis breaks our hearts. It feels uncomfortable and homey, both familiar to me and strange, this collision of our public and private spaces and selves. As we are drawn into the spidering webworks of viral visualization, the predictive statistics of epidemiology, the numbers and charts with each tick a person taken ill, each number a soul departed, our minds struggle to grasp and hearts struggle to open against the quantification and objectification of so much fear, pain, and misery, whose sharing breeds more fear, and outrage.

In this midst of pandemic and technology are human voices, so many of them. We open also to them as they humanize the times by making jokes, sing from balconies, rage at the idiocy of the government, show their pets, talk openly about their loneliness and isolation, speak to us, and connect to us as we struggle to reach out to them. A young ballerina did a dance in her driveway with a garbage bin. Maybe people watched it this week, but we don’t say it went viral any more. I’m heartened and awed every day by the presence of so much shared creativity, so many original people online. The humor is hilarious and never-ending as humanity uses social media to amuse and soothe itself. As I click, talk, and scroll through another day, I hear, recognize, and save the following woman’s voice, saying:

I’ve become more and more aware of a rather embarrassing truth about myself in all this. I’m much more content in this scaled down shelter in place lifestyle. I didn’t realize how much of my spending was related to my fear of missing out or not living as full a life as others seems to be. My husband and I are sheltering with our son, daughter-in-law and 2 granddaughters. Our days are spent playing with our 2-year-old granddaughter, taking walks in the park, watching movies and taking an occasional trip to the grocery store. I actually feel more fulfilled and happier with my life than I think I ever have. I will be fascinated to see the lasting effect this “back to the basics” period has on me and on our country.

(“Allison Garvey,” posted in a leading American newspaper’s comment section, April 10, 2020)

Allison Garvey expresses the new reflectivity of the age. Like her, my life now seems more grounded and emplaced, more stable. We have more time to think, to read and reflect. That time was liberated by the constraint of our mobility, as major parts of the social and physical worlds we used to inhabit migrate online. Online life is much of our life now. Connective media have become a major part of how we experience society and perhaps how we want to experience it. The embodied world slows down as the electric world speeds up. Whereas netnography used to offer a window into some people’s behavior some of the time, all human experience today is opening to its grasp. Right now, in the age of coronavirus, and moving forward, netnography is more expansive, relevant, and necessary than ever.

Adaptation Is Evolution

This chapter is obviously not about the coronavirus, but about netnography. But it begins with this overview of the current historical moment for three important reasons. First, because netnographies, like all ethnographies, have evolved within their contexts. Does this contextualizing mean that a historical study of an expired online site is worthless to our understanding of events today? This morning I received a rejection email from the organizers of the 2020 Association of Internet Research conference for a presentation that was based on the social media regulation work related in Chapter 4. It was my first submission, and the conference had gone virtual. The reviewer comment justifying the rejection appeared to be concerned that we quoted Ribisl (2011, 43), who wrote about how “the internet is fast becoming a new battleground” that provides tobacco companies with “a venue that may stimulate demand for them through advertising and promotional messages.” The reviewer emphatically notes that this was “a wholly different ‘internet’ than the one we’re experiencing now. The literature review needs to be brought up to date.” But does it make sense to reject out of hand “internet” research that is more than a few years old, based on the notion that the context is completely different now?

To answer, perhaps we might look back at what that research actually says, rather than judging it by some silly conception of a research stale dates. The first online ethnographies I read were by researchers like Henry Jenkins, Shelley Correll, and Howard Rheingold. They were obvious acts of bricolage, inspired by Malinowski’s notions of participant-observation, and although they are situated in what is now a historical technological context, the technocultural world they captured is remarkably relevant today. Writing about the practices of online fandom, Jenkins’ (1995) study of a Twin Peaks Usenet group (which expanded work he had initially presented in 1990), details the same fascinations with authorial vision, admiration for complex world-building, debates over canon, splits between experts and amateurs, and crowdsourced problem solving that we would find in any online fan group today. Correll’s (1995) work using the BBS system reveals a very familiar online setting featuring its users’ desire for a sense of family and community, tensions between conformity and individualism, a predominance of lurkers, the use of nonverbal symbols (emoticons rather than emojis), and the annoyance of incendiary and insulting trolling (“bashers,” she called them). I have written many paeans to Howard Rheingold’s foresight and his work’s continuing relevance (e.g., Kozinets 2010, 8–9; Kozinets 2020, 51–2). Rheingold (1993), situated in The WELL of the early ’90s, offers deep insights into the same politics and power struggles that vex contemporary social media. As a final example, consider the social media discussion of the Ebola outbreak I write about in Kozinets (2015, 208–218). At the time, I noted the tensions around forced quarantines, the blaming of foreign governments, the conspiracy theories about its creation in secret laboratories, the debates around various medical issues and the hopefulness for vaccines. All of these insights are directly applicable to the COVID-19 context today. That tells us something about the persistence of these patterns.

This is not to say that the world of connective technoculture is the same now as it was in the time of BBS, Usenets, and The WELL. Changed contexts often create substantial change and novel adaptations. But it is to say that people are similar, and that technocultures have lineages. Technologies and the names for things may change, and platforms may come and go. But there are many principles, practices, identities, values, and meanings that persist. And for this, capturing our context and providing a thick description of the present confer lasting value. The way we think about related topics, the ways we use technoculture to relate to one another about them, these are part of a historical trajectory that includes, recapitulates, and extends our past. Thus, the netnographies of those times contains valuable lessons for our time and for all times.

Technoculture Is Our Evolutionary Context

The second reason I start with the coronavirus crisis is because, as a tool, netnography is subject to the same kinds of contextualizing adaptations as other tools. Cultural and technological contexts have been changing since our ancient ancestors climbed down from the trees and took to the savannahs. Our species, homo sapiens, adapted to a range of environments, both harsh and hospitable. We turned plants and animals into crops and livestock, rocks and trees into tools and buildings, ideas into engineering, sand into computer chips. Our tool-building and techniques have been our adaptations. And then we became adapted to the tools we built, evolving bodies and minds that were better at making and using them. We evolved technologies and culture that transformed together, “the various identities, practices, values, rituals, hierarchies, and other sources and structures of meaning that are influenced, created by, or expressed through technology consumption” (Kozinets 2019, 621)—and we adapted research tools to study them. We can think of technocultural contexts as places where technology consumption and culture meet. Phenomena such as selfies, social media protests, bitmojis, memes, ransomware, and Instafame are examples of technocultural contexts amenable to study by netnography. Individually and collectively, we are, inevitably, both co-creating and being influenced by technoculture today.

Netnography is an adaptation of ancient methods of understanding what it means to be human, methods that were already ancient when Herodotus applied them to his tales of foreign conquest in the Greco-Persian wars. Netnography partakes in the ongoing evolution of the human sciences over thousands of years as they migrate, are altered, and must endlessly transform to take advantage of new environments and the novel tools and techniques we develop and to which we must adjust. Heraclitus wrote that you never step into the same river twice, because it is not the same river and you are not the same person who stepped into it before. Every netnographer is like Heraclitus, a keyboard jockey stepping into a different field behind their screen, an ever-new social media data stream. Because of this, every netnographer must accommodate their research to new devices, new rules, new platforms, and new types of data.

An Electrified Sociality

And the third and final reason I begin with the coronavirus is because the current crisis has electrified sociality, making the topics and methods of netnography more important than they have ever previously been. Almost as soon as I began developing the method, netnography shapeshifted into its next form like an agentic being whose transformations I was fated to chronicle. Each netnographic investigation of a new site—from Quake video games to soda pop fans blogs, Second Life embodiments to Facebook virus information, Instagram foodporn, and YouTube utopias in the wild—each study became an opportunity for me to rethink what a netnographic site was—and what a netnography currently must be. Rapidly blowing winds of change created vast openings for innovation in the way media connected us and the means by which we study it. This volume, with most of its chapters written just before the virus hit, reveals that pace of change.

Today, as I sit here writing, most of the concerns in the news and on connective media are coronavirus crisis related. Tomorrow, there will be something else. Endless change. Endless struggles to adapt, and each of those evolutions creates new situations requiring their own adaptations, novel puzzles for researchers to solve. Every day we wake up, like Heraclitus, to a new world, a new set of challenges, and the stream keeps rushing faster and faster. Overflowing the banks, the river is flooding, threatening to engulf us all.

The Netnographic Nucleus

It is through a lens on this overflowing technocultural world that this chapter introduces you to the world of netnography today. Adjusted and adapted to their times and contexts, the specific ways netnographies are conducted can be slippery and flexible and there is no real point in trying to stabilize them too much. But the core of netnography is constant. Despite the surface transformations, “the essence” or sine qua non regarding what a netnography is and is not remain crystal clear to me.

Netnographies always focus on social media and technoculture. They usually rely on data from social media, and often extend them. And netnographies always feature researcher immersion: an ethnographic—nay, a netnographic—sensibility. They draw from human impressions, from the central conception of the netnographic-researcher-as-instrument, to form cultural understandings about language, power, identity, and desire in the worlds where technology and the social intersect. Netnographies apply a technocultural lens to explain and conceptualize the things that make us human and draw us to...