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Digital Methods for Ethnography: Analytical Concepts for Ethnographers Exploring Social Media Environments
Abstract
The aim of this article is to introduce some analytical concepts suitable for ethnographers dealing with social media environments. As a result of the growth of social media, the Internet structure has become a very complex, fluid, and fragmented space. Within this space, it is not always possible to consider the “classical” online community as the privileged field site for the ethnographer, in which s/he immerses him/herself. Differently, taking inspiration from some methodological principles of the Digital Methods paradigm, I suggest that the main task for the ethnographer moving across social media environments should not be exclusively that of identifying an online community to delve into but of mapping the practices through which Internet users and digital devices structure social formations around a focal object (e.g., a brand). In order to support the ethnographer in the mapping of social formations within social media environments, I propose five analytical concepts: community, public, crowd, self...
... Thus "context is an important part of interpretive analysis" (Brennen, 2017, p. 22), particularly as applied to media texts selected strategically and parsed to build analysis in support of a broader argument (Fürsich, 2009, p. 240). Additionally, our method leverages Caliandro's (2018) approach appropriate to digital ethnographies that suggests following the thing, following the medium, and following the natives. This paradigm helps guide our examination of each show's impact on social media and information flows across plat-forms, particularly in terms of tracking or "following the circulation of an empirical object within a given online environment or across different online environments and observing the specific social formations emerging around it from the interactions of the digital devices and users" (Caliandro, 2018, p. 560). ...
Whereas personal expression has become a core practice of journalism whose merits can include greater attention to context and interpretative analysis, these freedoms from the constraints of traditional broadcast conventions can pose serious risks, including the ideological hijacking of journalism by partisan actors. In popular right-wing podcasts, such as those hosted by Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino, the element of opinion amplifies the tendency of the podcast medium to relegate news to a secondary concern behind the emotional impact. Not only do podcasters like Shapiro and Bongino contribute to a fractured media environment of hyper-partisan news and commentary, but they also utilize social media platforms and transmedia networks to undermine traditional journalism and replace it with an alternative conservative media ecosystem-a multiplatform, full-service clearinghouse of news and commentary afforded by the publishing capabilities of the internet and the distribution algorithms of social media platforms like Facebook. This study charts the evolution of conservative audio production, from the influential work of talk radio star Rush Limbaugh through the latest innovations by conservative podcasters, as exemplified by Shapiro and Bongino. Our study builds on previous scholarship on meta-journalistic discourse to examine how right-wing podcasters use exclusionary language to delegitimize the institution of journalism and offer a self-contained, ideologically conservative version of journalism as a replacement.
... Debido a que la educación no-presencial de emergencia y los cambios recientes en la producción y difusión del discurso docente en entornos digitales complican los enfoques convencionales de la etnografía, se eligió implementar el instrumento en un contexto virtual, dado que las metodologías etnográficas pueden adaptarse al investigar formas digitales de comunicación (Caliandro, 2018;Kavanaugh y Maratea, 2020); sin olvidar que se debe elaborar una estrategia metodológica para realizar etnografía para internet, en lugar de etnografía de internet (Hine, 2004;2015). ...
El análisis expuesto aquí procede de los resultados parciales del trabajo de doctorado “Aprendizaje y enseñanza informada: literacidad informacional en estudiantes de Ciencias de la Educación”. Para empezar, durante la COVID-19 los universitarios transitan en el supuesto de que las tecnologías disminuyen las consecuencias del aislamiento. No obstante, tal acontecimiento llegó a resaltar el problema de los estudiantes para buscar y usar la información. La propuesta es reflexionar cómo usan los universitarios la literacidad informacional y cuáles son los mecanismos y estrategias para el manejo de la información. Para lograr el propósito y complementar la interpretación de la teoría, se eligió la etnografía virtual a través de la entrevista en profundidad para examinar a estudiantes de la licenciatura en Ciencias de la Educación de la Universidad Autónoma de Tlaxcala. Finalmente, los resultados exhiben que la relación entre la información y el estudiante es una correlación personal, y muestran las diferentes representaciones de razonamiento, percepción, inclinaciones, necesidades e intereses entre estos dos entes. Asimismo manifiestan que cada lector es diferente ante cada texto y presenta una respuesta particular. Además evidencian que la habilidad para manejar la información es un acto cuyas normas se desarrollan y establecen solo mientras ese acto se realiza. Por lo tanto, es necesario que, en el aula, los universitarios desarrollen habilidades de información.
... Our empirical data on the Christchurch mosque attacks was collected using digital media ethnography (Airoldi, 2018;Caliandro, 2018;Sumiala & Tikka, 2020), complemented by computational data collection and analysis methods (see Harju & Huhtamäki, 2021), as part of a large research project 2 to develop a methodology for studying global media events of terrorist violence. To illustrate our conceptual analysis in this article, we focus on the immediate aftermath of the event and the qualitative material collected in the two-week period starting on 15 May 2019, approximately five hours after the perpetrator entered the Al-Noor Mosque, and ending on 29 May 2019, when the national memorial service for those killed in the attacks was held. ...
The updating of media event theory for the digital age has been underway for some time, and several researchers have pointed out that the complexity of the hybrid media environment poses a challenge when it comes to understanding how media events in the present digital context ritually create belonging. In this article, we examine violent media events as hybrid phenomena and discuss their ritual workings in the present digital media environment. We apply what we call the 5 A’s – actors, affordances, attention, affect, and acceleration – as key analytical tools to empirically study such events. We also develop the concept of hybridity in relation to media events by proposing three auxiliary A’s: assemblage, amplification, and accumulation. Building on our earlier work, we call for more analytical consideration of the ambivalences in the ritual constructions of belonging (and non-belonging) in such violent events. We use the Christchurch massacre of 2019 as a case study to illustrate these conceptual developments.
... Detailed description of this motivations is discussed in the results section of this research.Quantitative phase: Measuring motivations of online political posts. The structure of the Internet (as a platform) is described as a very complex, fluid, and fragmented space(Caliandro, 2017). It captures people within online environment to interact and form virtual communities, thus making it challenging for researchers to observe underlying phenomena. ...
Social networking sites had become influential as a platform for discourses, social interaction, and self-presentation (Delise, 2014). Facebook (FB) had become mainstream that its feature of posting political posts and information impacts the society. It is the objective of this study to explore the nature of online political posts and its users. A purposively sampled participants were selected (n=200), and their online political posts were coded and analyzed. Using exploratory sequential mixed methods, six major motivations to use social media was identified thru content analysis. Multiple correspondence analysis was done to cluster individuals into defined groups, namely: political activism, political slacktivism, and politically enmeshed. Moreover, the structure of online political habitus was constructed. It is cognitively structured by the individual level of political knowledge and socially constructed by political participation. Implications of the result show the crucial role of values formation during the early formative years in a person’s life. The established beliefs and values later dictate a person’s online political engagements. Moreover, educational attainment also contributed to the development of online political habitus of individuals wherein they are instinctively motivated to do political posting.
Human-technology relations are time and place related processes. Today, it is very common to describe human-technology interaction by stating that technology is ubiquitous and permeating all aspects of our everyday lives. This is often compounded by the fact that technological development has been rapid, and it seems to be accelerating. This speed makes the understanding the effects that technology has on us and our lives challenging or even difficult to realise. These kinds of notions have been repeated for decades already. The point here is not to criticize other scholars, but to argue that to reveal the value of quotidian human-technology entanglements we need to focus on the most mundane parts of our lives, scrutinizing something we do not necessary recall nor take notice of. This has been labelled as the “secret world of doing nothing” by ethnologists Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgeren (2010) to describe the most mundane activities of our everyday lives.
This article offers an analysis of social movement transnationalisation, using Extinction Rebellion as its case study. In order to investigate the temporal and geographical dynamics of Extinction Rebellion’s transnational diffusion, and the interaction of these dynamics with protest events, we draw on two primary datasets: one describing where and when all 1265 of the movement’s local groups emerged globally, the other containing all major protest events with which it is associated. We contend that although Extinction Rebellion has been impressively international from its early stages, the highest density of local groups – or “chapters” – is found in Western Europe and the Anglosphere. Drawing on della Porta’s theory of “eventful protest”, we argue that peaks in the creation of new local groups across the world followed major protest events. Hence, we argue that Extinction Rebellion protests were instrumental in the movement’s own transnational diffusion. The data also reveal that the period from early 2020 to June 2021 (the time of data collection) represented a nadir in new chapter creation, indicating a possible COVID-19 effect in the movement’s diffusion.
Il saggio si inquadra nel più ampio ambito degli studi sulle migrazioni oltre le aree metropolitane, di particolare interesse nel contesto italiano divenuto oramai da tempo un consolidato crocevia migratorio. Questi territori rappresentano osservatori privilegiati per comprendere e analizzare alcune importanti implicazioni sociali dell'immigrazione. I dati presentati e discussi ricostruiscono esperienze e pratiche di cittadinanza "dal basso" implementate nel quadro di due progetti FAMI realizzati presso l'Hotel House di Porto Recanati, un sistema immobiliare marchigiano ad alta concentrazione di popolazione di origine straniera e oggetto, da tempo, di studi sociologici, etnografici e demografici. Le evidenze empiriche indicano come il coinvolgimento diretto dei residenti, nella loro qualità di soggetti portatori di interessi nel corso delle diverse fasi progettuali, si sia rivelato una "buona pratica", oltre che una strategia vincente nell'intento di promuovere interventi di riqualificazione multilivello in un immobile che presenta da diversi decenni gravi segni di criticità intrinseche sul piano strutturale e sociale. Inoltre, attraverso le prassi virtuose introdotte in ambito progettuale, è stato possibile avviare strategie più efficaci di fronteggiamento dei gravi eventi emergenziali legati alla pandemia da Covid-19.
In Digital Methods, Richard Rogers proposes a methodological outlook for social and cultural scholarly research on the Web that seeks to move Internet research beyond the study of online culture. It is not a toolkit for Internet research, or operating instructions for a software package; it deals with broader questions. How can we study social media to learn something about society rather than about social media use? Rogers proposes repurposing Web-native techniques for research into cultural change and societal conditions. We can learn to reapply such “methods of the medium” as crawling and crowd sourcing, PageRank and similar algorithms, tag clouds and other visualizations; we can learn how they handle hits, likes, tags, date stamps, and other Web-native objects. By “thinking along” with devices and the objects they handle, digital research methods can follow the evolving methods of the medium.
Rogers uses this new methodological outlook to examine such topics as the findings of inquiries into 9/11 search results, the recognition of climate change skeptics by climate-change-related Web sites, and the censorship of the Iranian Web. With Digital Methods, Rogers introduces a new vision and method for Internet research and at the same time applies them to the Web's objects of study, from tiny particles (hyperlinks) to large masses (social media).
Digital methods have previously been described as ‘a term that seeks to capture a recent development in Internet-related research, summarized as approaches to the web as data set’. Using this as a starting point, this paper positions digital media methods as a methodological approach that incorporates internet-based data, while also including other communicative and social media platforms such as Instagram, Vine, Twitter, giffy, Periscope, and Facebook amongst others. Digital media methods also extends to database research, data generated by sensors, drones and autonomous automobiles. Contemporary research engaging digital media methods is built upon the ‘computational turn’ where ‘computational approaches is increasingly reflected across a number of disciplines, including the arts, humanities and social sciences, which use technologies to shift the critical ground of their concepts and theories’. As media and communication scholars, our ‘research is increasingly being mediated through digital technology… affecting both the epistemologies and ontologies that underlie a research program’. This paper highlights three significant points of departure for digital media methods in the media and communication discipline: the increasing need for typologies and ontologies in social media research; the significance of mapping public issues; and the difficulties researchers face as text-based communication shifts to visually oriented platforms.
Exploring the new professional scenes in digital and freelance knowledge, this innovative book provides an account of the subjects and cultures that pertain to knowledge work in the aftermath of the creative class frenzy. Including a broad spectrum of empirical projects, The Reputation Economy documents the rise of freelancing and digital professions and argues about the central role held by reputation within this context, offering a comprehensive interpretation of the digital transformation of knowledge work. The book shows how digital technologies are not simply intermediating productive and organizational processes, allowing new ways for supply and demand to meet, but actually enable the diffusion of cultural conceptions of work and value that promise to become the new standard of the industry.
This paper explores the four difficulties of actor-network theory: the words "actor," "network," "theory," and the hyphen. The originality of ANT lies in the fact that this not so much an alternative social theory as it is a method of unravelling the activities of the actor who constructs their own world. By focusing on operations of structuring and summation rather than on concepts of "actor" and "network," we are able to show that the tension between the macro and the micro levels in the social sciences is largely artificial. ANT allows us to overcome this tension by channeling our attention away from objects and towards circulations instead. According to the author, the main contribution of this theory to the social sciences is the transformation of the social from the surface, territory, or region of reality into circulation. In the latter half of the paper, the author discusses the potential of ANT as a symmetrical anthropology of the modern and the defining structure of modernity. This implies accounting for the emergence of the ontological opposition between "out there" and "in there" (the nature and the subject), and (the deletion of) political and theological interests. The difference between ANT and many kinds of reflection on modernity, post-, hyper-, pre-, and antimodernity, is simply that it took to task simultaneously all of the components of what could be called the modernist predicament. According to the author, ANT is not a theory of the social any more than it is a theory of the subject, or a theory of God, or a theory of nature. It is a theory of the space or fluids circulating in a non-modern situation. In the conclusion of the article, the author offers an optimistic take on the potential of developing ANT further and giving it new forms.
Social media play a prominent role in mediating issues of public concern, not only providing the stage on which public debates play out but also shaping their topics and dynamics. Building on and extending existing approaches to both issue mapping and social media analysis, this article explores ways of accounting for popular media practices and the special case of ‘born digital’ sociocultural controversies. We present a case study of the GamerGate controversy with a particular focus on a spike in activity associated with a 2015 Law and Order: SVU episode about gender-based violence and harassment in games culture that was widely interpreted as being based on events associated with GamerGate. The case highlights the importance and challenges of accounting for the cultural dynamics of digital media within and across platforms.
Twitter’s hashtag functionality is now used for a very wide variety of purposes, from covering crises and other breaking news events through gathering an instant community around shared media texts (such as sporting events and TV broadcasts) to signalling emotive states from amusement to despair. These divergent uses of the hashtag are increasingly recognised in the literature, with attention paid especially to the ability for hashtags to facilitate the creation of ad hoc or hashtag publics. A more comprehensive understanding of these different uses of hashtags has yet to be developed, however.Previous research has explored the potential for a systematic analysis of the quantitative metrics that could be generated from processing a series of hashtag datasets. Such research found, for example, that crisis-related hashtags exhibited a significantly larger incidence of retweets and tweets containing URLs than hashtags relating to televised events, and on this basis hypothesised that the information-seeking and -sharing behaviours of Twitter users in such different contexts were substantially divergent.This article updates such study and their methodology by examining the communicative metrics of a considerably larger and more diverse number of hashtag datasets, compiled over the past five years. This provides an opportunity both to confirm earlier findings, as well as to explore whether hashtag use practices may have shifted subsequently as Twitter’s userbase has developed further; it also enables the identification of further hashtag types beyond the “crisis” and “mainstream media event” types outlined to date. The article also explores the presence of such patterns beyond recognised hashtags, by incorporating an analysis of a number of keyword-based datasets.This large-scale, comparative approach contributes towards the establishment of a more comprehensive typology of hashtags and their publics, and the metrics it describes will also be able to be used to classify new hashtags emerging in the future. In turn, this may enable researchers to develop systems for automatically distinguishing newly trending topics into a number of event types, which may be useful for example for the automatic detection of acute crises and other breaking news events.
The activist use of Facebook pages in the 2011 movements of the Egyptian revolution and the Spanish Indignados saw phases of exponential growth in user engagement in proximity to key protest events, signaled by spikes in likes and comments. This article analyzes these episodes as moments of digital enthusiasm facilitated by emotional communication on political Facebook pages. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative analysis of Facebook data, I argue that two elements concurred to build moments of digital enthusiasm: (a) the hopeful narrative produced by activist admins managing political Facebook pages, and (b) the receptivity and cooperation of ordinary Internet users who overwhelmingly reinforced the message put forward by activist admins. This emotional dialogue between admins and users generated a process of emotional contagion that helped establish propitious psychological conditions for mass protest participation. Moments of digital enthusiasm demonstrate the power of social media and emotional communication in mass protest mobilization. However, they also highlight the risk of evanescence of collective action in a digital age.