Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice

"The examples throughout the book show how taking a digital approach enables us to acknowledge and seek out ways of knowing (about) other people's worlds that might otherwise be invisible and that might be unanticipated by more formally constituted, and thus less exploratory and collaborative, research approaches."

Ethnography is a way of practicing research that acknowledges the role of theory as well as the researcher's own role. In digital ethnography, researchers are often in mediated contact with participants rather than in direct presence, and they might be in conversation with people throughout their everyday lives (because digital media and technologies are part of daily life). This book defines a series of central concepts in this new branch of social and cultural research.

The authors are interested in how the digital has become part of the material, sensory, and social worlds we inhabit, and what the implications are for ethnographic research practice. They suggest ways of acknowledging and accounting for the digital as part of our worlds that are both theoretical and practical and that offer frameworks through which to do ethnography across specific sites and questions.

Just as they divide up the chapters of this book according to the idea of using concepts of experience, practice, things, relationships, social worlds, localities, and events as units of analysis, so they could conceptualise the ethnographic process through these very categories.

The book outlines 5 key principles for doing digital ethnography:

1. Multiplicity: There is more than one way to engage with the digital.
2. Non-digital-centric-ness: The digital is de-centred in digital ethnography.
3. Openness: Digital ethnography is an open event.
4. Reflexivity: Digital ethnography involves reflexive practice.
5. Unorthodox: Digital ethnography requires attention to alternative forms of communicating.