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Netnography

Chapter · February 2015

DOI: 10.1002/9781118767771.wbiedcs067

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 Netnography: Understanding Networked Communication Society

By

ROBERT V. KOZINETS

York University, Toronto, Canada

Chapter for The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

Edited by Anabel Quan-Haase and Luke Sloan

First Draft Only

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 “From a theoretical point of view, Netnography is regarded as one of the most

important research tools (Bartl & Stockinger, 2014). It enables researchers to access the

community members’ knowledge online which in turn helps to provide in-depth insights

about the consumers. Robert V Kozinets,(2002) the man behind Netnography has coined

this term to provide a rich insight into consumers’ interaction online. The author

highlights online environment that provides rigor and ethics in the field of Market

Research. This is done through the discussion of an online coffee newsgroup where its

implications also are discussed” (Chao 2015).

This quote is from an online article in an online journal called The Scholedge

International Journal of Business Policy & Governance. I had not heard of this journal

previously, but was alerted to it by my Google Alerts account. The article’s author is Biming

Chao from the School of Sociology & Population Studies, Renmin university of China, CHINA.

This is one of the first English articles from a Chinese university that used the term netnography.

As you can see, the author mentions me, “Robert V Kozinets,(2002) the man behind

Netnography” as if I was a living article, an animated research contribution. It is not purely for

vanity that I mention this, and that I choose editorially to begin the chapter in manner, quoting

someone who quotes me and mentions me by name. As we will discover later in this chapter, the

elevation of personal branding is a central element of the netnographic research process.

Did the author of this article intend to feature me as a living article? Did Biming Chao

expect that this citation would begin a book chapter written by me? Academia has always been

dynamic, with researchers conversing with one another through their documents. Netnography

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seeks to intensity those conversations, amplify them, make them increasingly accessible online

public spaces as a collective project, an ideology-examining enterprise, a human project of self

and social betterment.

Why start with people? Because, in a netnography, social media research is human

research. Netnography is cultural research, research driven towards human understanding.

Performing a netnography means maintaining an anthropological preoccupation with the human,

socially grounded, epistemologically self-critical, axiologically attuned with notions of social

betterment and Koro-Ljundberg’s (2015) renewed sense of sense of participant-driven research.

Appropriate performance thus means that the netnography enacts, Miller and Horst’s critical

contention that ‘the key to digital anthropology, and perhaps to the future of anthropology itself,

is, in part, the study of how things become rapidly mundane’ (2012, p. 29). Technology is very

much a physical manifestation. Server farms take up enormous amounts of space and deplete

massive amount of precious energy and other resources. The study of communications is the

study of resources and priorities. In this study, somehow, virtual communications seem

insubstantial, without form. Social media has been treated for a long time as if it were immaterial

and virtual. Netnography recognizes that contemporary human relations with information and

communications rapidly become mundane, and seem often to become immaterial, in two senses.

First, that they rapidly seem much less relevant than they did when they were new. Second, that

they seem to be non-physical somehow, our communications bouncing around so rapidly from

screen to screen that we confuse them with our own collective thoughts. Bouncing around from

thought to thought will be the format for this wide-ranging chapter, which now proceeds to

define netnography, then to illustrate it through examples of work current when this chapter was

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written, and then to briefly speculate about the future of netnography as a method for researching

communication media, including of course the type of media currently called social.

DEFINING NETNOGRAPHY

The nature of contemporary netnography is that of “a specific set of related data

collection, analysis, ethical and representational research practices,” where a significant amount

of the data is collected through a very humanist participant-observational research stance

(Kozinets 2015, p. 79). This is ethnographic research, conducted within and upon the new

tempero-spatial cultural coordinates mediated by contemporary networked communications,

such as the Internet and the variety of devices and forms that humans use to access it. Many

research methods focus on the Internet, the devices, the technologies with which it is associated.

Not netnography. Humanism, attention to the details and contexts of human stories and human

understandings, of people using technologies, is the hallmark of genuine netnography, just as

attention to human detail distinguished all ethnographies from all non-ethnographies.

At the risk of going off on a critical tangent, let us pause to examine a couple of negative

case examples before we praise the fine work being done by hundreds of netnographers across a

range of social science fields including education, geography, nursing, psychology, library

sciences, sociology, addiction research, sexuality, gender, linguistics, communications,

sociology, and anthropology. It is critical for researchers today to define what type of online

ethnography they are conducting. Because many poorly conceived theories of what constitutes

online ethnography are arising from people like Rogers (2009) and Caliandro (2014). These

researchers hold the mistaken belief one can do purely observational studies using computer

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data, never speak to a person, never communicate interactively in the research with a human

voice, and then call this ethnography: “digital” ethnography, to be precise. How, exactly, is this

ethnography? Ethnography without interaction is a bit like bread without yeast. Perhaps a better

question to ask is why: Why would so many seek to call their software analytics on downloaded

data “ethnography”.

The answer is that ethnography, like anthropology, has become cool. Any glance at

popular business magazines reveals that these two terms—ethnography and anthropology—have

become even more attractive of late. And so the explanation for why many people lately,

particularly in business, in business schools, in the research business, in consulting and research

and advertising, want to say they are doing “ethnography”, and then throw a digital in front of it,

or else try something else, such as a “Webnography” (Puri 2009). Anjali Puri is the Director of

Product Development and Management at The Nielsen Company, one of the foremost market

research companies in the world. In an article without citations, and apparently working in some

sort of a corporate void that has no access to the Internet or to any academic research that might

impact their procedures or thinking (or compete with their revenue stream), The Neilsen

Company’s Anjali Puri develops “Webnography” as “an approach that uses conversations on

web forums as a source of consumer insight” (Puri 2009, p. 273), although definitionally and

methodologically speaking this is as much as it offers.

But running a few Google Trends searches does not quality you to call what you are

doing ethnography, any more than classifying netnography as a “Focus Group 2.0” (Caliandro

2014, p. 666) will convince anyone that running a few automated searches qualifies as serious

anthropology. Digital ethnography, according to Caliandro “is an ethnography grounded by

digital methods rather than one based on the internet itself” (2014, 667; italics in original).

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Apparently, “digital” methods (and I remain unclear on how a method can be “digital”; does this

mean some methods are “analog”?) are somehow “proper” if they have no offline equivalent and

thus “take the nature and affordances of the digital environment seriously” (ibid). Accepting this

statement means accepting the ridiculous assumption that performing participative ethnography

with physical human beings somehow becomes less serious, and more frivolous, if the same

method is taken to a “digital environment”. This is Caliandro’s sense of “online groundedness”

(ibid), which manifests itself in methods that include network analysis, semantic analysis, and

discourse analysis, but do not apparently involve any direct contact with human beings as

thinking and feeling human others, any form of participative engagement other than engagement

with a software program, or any involvement in the wider project of understanding how

technology affect the individual and collective state of being of various human peoples. I have no

issues with these approaches being called digital methods, social media analytics, or digital

social media research—all of these are accurate. But they are not ethnographic methods, nor are

they anthropology.

If we want a more accurate and inspiring sense of the meaning and direction of digital

anthropology, we should turn to Miller and Horst (2012). Miller and Horst emphasize the role of

materiality in digital anthropology, arguing that studying what it means to be human also means

studying how human beings socialize ‘within a material world of cultural artefacts that include

the order, agency, and relationships between things themselves and not just their relationships to

persons’ (2012, 24-25). “We thus have three forms of materiality to contend with in any

anthropology of the digital: the materiality of technology and the digital infrastructure itself, the

materiality of digital content itself, and the materiality of the digital as an actual context” both

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for human senses and bodies and increasingly for and upon human culture and society (Kozinets

2015, 81).

What does this have to do with netnography? Netnography is a part of this enterprise, a

very specific part. In general, and perhaps most importantly, netnography associates itself very

closely with the idea that human beings should study other human beings, as much as possible,

as other human beings, despite the temptations of technology and mass data to want to reduce

and dehumanize our humanity into numbers and other decontextualized and decontextualizing

descriptors. Quantification is a powerful disguise for exploitation. We must remember, when

tempted to quantify fast amounts of online “content” or “data” that during the Holocaust

“Accounting numbers were substituted for qualitative attributes of individuals thereby denying

them their humanity and individuality and making them invisible to Germans not directly

involved in the attempted annihilation of all European Jews” (Funnel 1998, 435). Beyond

eschewing dehumanizing decontextualization, netnography also embraces and adapts

anthropology’s nostalgic and somewhat quaint fascination with questions of history, tradition,

human nature, primitivism and what it means to be human in a world of near constant change.

Netnography focuses in ever finer-grained detail on the question: “How exactly is technology

changing the human experience?”1

This is an extremely important aspect of netnography: the axiology of technology studies,

technology studies with a keen critical edge but also a journalist’s fairness and zeal, an artist and

entertainer’s freedom to notice and critique, but a scientist’s love of principles, deep research,

1
Is netnography part of a Far Left “Neo-Hippy” Movement? Aligned with anthropology, it may be one place to construct a coherent
critique of capitalism. The answer to whether Kozinets and his netnography align themselves with an updated version of the historical hippies is
almost beyond dispute at this point in netnography’s development. However, there is one aspect to this all this alleged “hippieness” which is
rather paradoxical, like the go-go capitalist hippies once they hit middle age. As Kozinets (2012) points out, Netnography is meant to be
marketed. It started in the field of marketing, and it is now not only a research brand, but also a tool for you, Dear Reader, to brand yourself.
Netnography today is a commercial product still waiting to be fully capitalized and exploited by industry. Only if it can be trademarked, bought
and sold like a “Webnography” (Puri 2009) special sauce on the marketplace will netnography live long and then help you, Oh Gentle Reader,
prosper beyond your wildest dreams of avarice. Or critique the capitalist industrial-military-media complex.

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interpretation rituals and practices. Tools and power words are the stock in trade. Moments of

absolute co-creation await between you-as-the network and the network-as-you, manifesting as

your personal academic brand: you. In a culture of unchecked narcissism, it’s all about you. And

netnography is too.

In sum, the key to remember about the difference between netnography and online

ethnography is this. Online ethnography is a broad category that encompasses a wide range of

different research practices. There are many, many, kinds of online ethnography, including

claims that the observational downloading which some researchers are doing is ethnographic,

even though it is unrecognizable as participant observation, which is usually held up as the

hallmark of ethnography. Netnography is a specific kind of online ethnography. It requires

participation through researcher engagement and conversation, which often should be in person.

A netnography could not be done which was entirely composed of in-person interviews,

however.

An online ethnography with particular reasons for doing what it is doing is a

netnography. An online ethnography with a particular methodology, and specific research

practices, arts and sciences combined, these elements locate it as a netnography. All individual

netnographies are unique. However, each individual netnography is a netnography because it

draws upon the same specified set of research practices, beliefs, motivations, framings, concerns,

and traditions.

EXAMPLES OF NETNOGRAPHY

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 Although books such as Hine’s (2000) Virtual Ethnography, Boellerstorff et al.’s (2012)

Ethnography and Virtual Worlds, Horst and Miller’s (2012) Digital Anthropology or Underberg

and Zorn’s (2013) Digital Ethnography “may offer theoretical overviews, general advice,

examples and case studies, they tend to be focused on particular field sites (e.g., virtual worlds,

such as Second Life), or particular approaches (e.g., eliciting and collecting online storytelling

narratives). They are examples of different forms or sites of netnography, sometimes, in some

ways” (Kozinets 2015, p. 22 n2). Netnography now embraces and specifies practices that clearly

differentiate the method from other approaches to online research. In netnography, taking the

time to introspect is part of the method. In netnography, creating a personal academic branding

strategy is part of the method. In netnography, visualizing data in creative new ways, pushing the

boundaries of representation, is part of the method. Research web –pages and related social

media outreach, usually on Facebook and Twitter, often on LinkedIn, are part of the method. I

don’t think any of these things could be said confidently for online ethnography or digital

ethnography as a general, and rather generic, brand.

Netnography is a Brand You Can Trust. Netnography remains pragmatic. It locks into the

battlegrounds of reality and observation, where the more mystical quantum physicists, but

ultimately all of them, embraced consciousness-related explanations of the most delicately

measured phenomenon, such as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, other observer effects, and

the Copenhagen interpretation of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment. If it is true, as they

believe, and I believe alongside them many days, that an observing mind creates reality, then

netnography seeks to understand how this mind creates and is recreated by technology, digital,

mobile, informational, communicational, transactional, cultural exchanging, eye-and-brain-

filling. These are a panoply of never before seen enchantments. On a human level, netnographers

9
feel the same heartfelt commitment to technology development as does everyone else, perhaps

even more than everyone else, since the field tend to attract those with an edge of technophilia.

On the other hand, however, they must learn to critique it, to see it for the inevitable social

construction of technologically determined inevitability which it is. Technology development

seems so natural that it is as invisible as is water to a fish—in the old but never less effective

anthropological metaphor.

Looking backward at old thinking can make one look silly. Certainly that is the case now

for the early exploratory definitional scribblings on netnography. Foolishly, perhaps, Kozinets

(2002) defined netnography as ‘a new qualitative research methodology that adapts ethnographic

research techniques to study the cultures and communities that are emerging through computer-

mediated communications’ (62). This definition no longer makes complete sense. After two

decades, it is strange for this article to still be calling netnography “new”—although some still

do. For example, Laura Orsolini, MD, along with three other MDs, published an article in the

journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, in which they examined the

behavior of “psychonauts”, modern shamans in pursuit of psychedelic experiences, in online

drug forums. In a fascinating investigation with significant value to theory and practice, they

describe netnography as “a new qualitative research methodology that applies an ethnographic

approach to the study of cultures and online communities” (Orsolini et al. 2015, p. 297).

Certainly, Orsolini et al,. (2015) are right in that the method is indeed new to the field of

psychology, even to cyberpsychology. However, it is not new to the world.

More contestably, perhaps, we might wonder if it makes sense to talk about “cultures and

communities” that manifest through communications and exchanges mediated by information

technologies. In addition, it may not make sense to think of single sites or communities, or of

10
communal and cultural identification to somehow follow posting or commenting, or otherwise

interacting with others, through a particular web-site. Am I am member of the Red Bull “online

brand community” simply because I liked their Facebook page in order to receive a coupon, or

wrote a posting during the heat of the moment of Felix Baumgartner’s edge-of-space, freefall,

Stratos jump? Although corporate advertising agencies and brand managers would love to think

so, I think not.

“Symbolic netnography follows the focus and precepts of earlier methodological writings

on netnography (e.g., Kozinets, 1998, 2002a, 2010) which were written while the Internet and

social media were in an earlier stage and the theoretical implications of developments such as the

critiques of community and the rise of networked individualism had yet to be integrated.

Conceptions of culture and community with hard definable boundaries are now replaced with

more liquid notions of online social experience and interaction, but the basic precepts and foci

remain completely intact. There is still, after all, much work to be done to investigate and

understand the various ways in which identity groups and identity projects play out in online

social interactions and experiences” (Kozinets 2015, p. 246).

Ashleigh Logan’s (2015) article in Celebrity Studies is a favorite among the most

recently published netnographies, even though its brevity leaves me hungry for the fully-realized

follow-up. Her article is a netnography with key allegiances to the symbolic netnography. Just as

it is with Logan (2015), most currently published netnographies are symbolic netnographies.

“Symbolic netnographers seek out and find interesting sites, cultures, groups and people and

translate their meaning systems as values, practices and online social rituals. Discourse is a key

construct. . . . Symbolic netnographies represent the online social experience and interaction of

particular people’s groups, nations, languages, cultures and identity formations in the traditional

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textual form of an article, chapter, dissertation or perhaps book. They draw upon particular sites

in order to create narratives of sharing, exploration, cooperation, conflict, exchange,

empowerment, disparity and much more. Their output is meant to be read. They have a direct

lineage and interconnection with traditional use of ethnography and related qualitative research

techniques. . . .” (Kozinets 2015, pp. 246-249).

The emphasis in Symbolic Netnography is on researcher participation in the field, and

Logan’s work leaves little doubt she was actively engaged with her online Others: “From

February 2014 to October 2014 I observed, interacted and engaged with these bloggers and their

followers as a participant observer. Observations, interactions and reflections were recorded in

field notes. Data were captured visually via screenshots and the copy and paste method” (Logan

2015, pp. 378-379). However, perhaps because of the short length of the article, we get little of

the sense of the researcher (or personal academic brand of the researcher) as ethnographic

instrument, of Ashleigh as Kate fan. How did Asheligh, for instance “replikate” the look of

Kate? Could she, in future, share some postings of herself in Kate Middleton fashion, discuss the

responses, share her self-reflections from reflexive fieldnotes, and then reflect upon those

reflexive reflections in deep data analysis that begins to penetrate not only into the sociology,

cultural codes, and data science of the experience, but also its phenomenology.

On to another example of researcher participation. Ercilia Garcıa-Alvarez, Jordi Lopez-

Sintas, and Alexandra Samper-Martınez, in their 2015 article about social network gamers

playing Restaurant City, a game hosted on Facebook, provide an excellent and detailed

description of their netnography. In it, they develop the method of netnography in ways that

presciently anticipate the alterations and transformations of the netnography approach.

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 “The fieldwork, conducted over 3 years, was undertaken in three stages. In the

first stage, very soon after RC [Facebook’s Restaurant City game] was launched in 2009,

the researchers enrolled as participants via Facebook, thereby becoming part of the

gaming community who managed restaurants in a ‘‘street’’ with (at the high point of the

game) 38 neighbors. In this initial phase, the researchers spent 1½ year familiarizing

themselves with the social and technical aspects of the game: they created an ‘‘American

rocker style’’ restaurant themed by the style of furniture (e.g., chairs with electric guitar

backs), decoration (e.g., a custom motorcycle parked in front of the restaurant), employee

apparel (black T-shirt and jeans), and the kind of food served (burgers, cookies, etc.). The

second stage, which shaped the field book (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995), consisted of

data collection based on four approaches: (1) exhaustive screen captures of all the

interaction microprocesses taking place during the game, (2) written recordings of

interactions between the netnographers and players, (3) interpretive written recordings of

all sessions reflecting netnographer gaming experiences, and (4) recording of off-line

interactions. Taking advantage of the possibilities offered by the Facebook platform, an

asynchronous online focus group was organized with the most experienced RC neighbors

(Atkinson & Hammersley, 1994; Morgan, 1996). The researchers’ identities were

revealed, the purpose of the research was explained, and anonymity was guaranteed.

These neighbors were sent a mail through Facebook and were invited to a private

‘‘event’’ (a social networking site application) to take place over 2 weeks. The protocol

included a combination of open exploratory questions and more in-depth questions

covering aspects such as motivations to start and to continue playing RC, routines, and

the impact of online and off-line interactions. This procedure allowed the researchers to

13
 analyze individual perspectives and reactions, with the researchers playing a role in

discussions that was active (Morgan, 1996) yet nondisruptive of participant dynamics

(Agar & MacDonald, 1995). The researchers repeatedly returned to the field for a further

2 years (Kozinets, 2010), playing the game, chatting with neighbors, and observing and

recording changes in the dynamics of the game. In 2012, announcement of the game’s

withdrawal led to the third stage of the research, in which we recorded the reactions,

problems, and attitudes of our neighbors and of other RC players as reflected in the

official fan page, blog, and forum. We collected information from these sites by

interacting with participants, taking care to reveal the identity of the researcher and the

research objectives. In parallel, supporting documentation was collected consisting of

news reports and specialist press articles regarding the game and the companies involved

in its development and management” (Garcıa-Alvarez, Lopez-Sintas, and Samper-

Martınez 2015, pp. 5-6).

The method is beautifully described. As we clearly see, the researchers did not limit

themselves to ridiculous thinking about online and offline, technological and physical, native and

virtual “realities” or differences, differences which are as relevant as trying to distinguish

between a speaker and what is spoken. Instead, the authors considered their research to be one

“configured by the online and off-line interactions of players (Isabella, 2007) in a gradual

hybridization (Ruhleder, 2000) that rendered meaningless the distinction between an online

world and another off-line world (Garcia, Standlee, & Bechkoff, 2009)” (pp. 4-5). What we have

in this article is a three year long netnography that follows an online game field site from very

close to its beginning to its demise. The netnographers exhibit full participation in the site/game.

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Visual information on the screen is captured, fieldnotes are written, “off-line interactions” are

recorded, informed consent is earned, full disclosure is present, a research web page of sorts is

utilized, participants are recruited and interviewed, ethical standards are followed. This is the

very model of symbolic netnography, with full researcher engagement.

Excellent netnographies have also been written and performed without personal

involvement of this sort. Orsolini et. al (2015) provide a good example of an observational

netnography that yields fascinating results. Rather than engage in psychedelic practices

themselves and share them online (something that might not be feasible, or at least may not be

advisable; however, see Page and Singer 2004), Orsolini et al. (2015, p. 297) conducted a

“nonparticipant netnographic qualitative study of a list of cyber drug communities (blogs, fora,

YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter pages)”. As they tell, us, inviting us to read critically between

the lines, they were able to complete their netnography in two months, with their university

Ethics Committee’s approval, scanning 102 pro-drug websites, and screening 13,770 forum

threads authored by 2,076 users. In a point I would be happy to debate with them, they further

state: “In line with best practice protocols for online research and in compliance with unobtrusive

and naturalistic features of netnographic research, no posts or other contributions to private or

public forum discussions were made” (p. 297). Nonetheless, their netnography is full of

fascinating insights into the shared online worlds of the psychonauts that leave me intrigued.

NETNOGRAPHIC DATA AND THE RESEARCHER BRAND

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 Netnographic data is also important to the definition of netnography. The elaborations of

types of netnographic data, relation to data, and even the social construction of the category of

data itself are far more developed than they have ever been before. Nonetheless, scholars such as

Logan broaden the method, customize it to the ever-liquid sociotechnical environment of

people—in her case the fans and followers of The Royal Kate Middleton—and expand

netnography.

“In a netnographic study, there are no restrictions about what type of online information

can be used as data (Kozinets 2002, 2009). The amount and type of data collected vary and is

largely dependent on the nature of the phenomenon of interest. Reaching data saturation, that is,

when no new ideas or themes emerge – is usually a good indication that enough data have been

collected. The social media element of my netnographic study lasted nine months. It contained

831 Facebook posts and 431 tweets and included both pictorial and textual data. These data were

analysed in the same way as traditional ethnographic data.” (Logan 2015, p. 379.).

Logan tells of her netnography participants creating self-made photo collages of

themselves in outfits and poses that Kate Middleton has worn and posed. These are shared using

popular platforms like Facebook and Twitter.2 In the shared photo collages, or attached to them,

there are usually textual posts with fashion information, often explanation of the brands, the type

of clothing, its price, and where varieties of it can be purchased, most commonly online, but also

in brick and mortar stores. Unlike traditional ethnographies of forums, where one celebrity

newgroups were the only choice, today we have these interactions occurring on the mass sites

like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, YouTube, and others, as well as on blogs

2
Why not Instagram, I must wonder. Pinterest? Snapchat? Movement between platforms
and sites is now fluid in netnography. Netnographers follow people and topics, practices and
meanings, as well as following sites.

16
and, quite likely, still some forums. What this means is that studies of online social groups do not

need to be site-specific. The movement between sites is liquid and simple. No loyalty is owed or

given to any particular platform. The presence of people, topics, and resources draws people to

communicate through particular communication channels. When a better one comes along, they

move. Thus, determining the motivations and orientation of these particular groups is important

to understanding their interactions and communications.

Here, Logan’s exact wording become important: “These photo collages were used by

participants not only to explain the ‘how to’ or the instruction of ‘replikating’, but also to boost

their popularity as ‘micro-celebrities’ who ‘piggyback’ off of Kate Middleton’s recognisability

as a fashion icon.” (Logan 2015, p. 379). This is interesting because it offers a motivation as well

as an online mechanism for the transfer of subcultural and cultural capital. How do these forms

of capital transfer through contemporary media communication? They do it through becoming

embraced by individuals as part of their nicro-celebrity brand and through them into groups as

they are capitalized in a technocapitalist fashion system/advertising system and data/intelligence

targeting sales economy society. As the community works, it capitalizes, creating demand for

clothing, oiling the wheels of the global fashion industry that works through mass adoration and

lemming-like emulation of alpha bitches (as in successful female dogs) like Kate Middleton.

Facebook posts were also used as data. In fact, Logan notices how branding and

marketing practices are adopted in the group. Netnographies attend to contexts of corporate

connection and control. Media were used in similar ways, to provide “short bursts of information

about the quality of ‘replikate’ and ‘copykate’ items,” (p. 379) to provide attention and

recognition from the others who would follow them and their advice.

17
 Marking her study as a netnography, Logan works through netnographic terminology and

make it her own: “Alteration is essentially the familiarisation with the codes and norms of online

behaviour. For example, in the online Kate [Middleton] community it was important to

understand the ways in which different bloggers alternated between the terms ‘replikate’ and

‘copykate’. This was important for understanding the hierarchy of these bloggers within the

community, because the power of ‘micro-celebrity’ was higher for those who ‘replikate’.”

(Logan 2015, p. 379). Here, we witness netnographic decoding of the language of the online

crowd, of the online place, a local dialect, sets of practices, goals, and technorituals that seems

very much like the contextualizing of an anthropologist.

Concordant with the acts and practices of an embodied anthropologist performing the

anthropologist’s role in a physical site accompanied by a person, people, or artifacts, the

participant-observer stance of netnography necessitates a type of private and public performance

which I term the Scientific Performance of the Anthropologist Online. While this Scientific

Performance of the Anthropologist Online is conducted over wires and optic cables dug into the

earth and hung on it from electrified poles, it originates in and manifests through the human

reality of the data scholar, the social scientist charged through her or his position to explain what

is going on in social media and their networks on the Internet and the other datanets, including

those which link up mobile applications, owned by social media companies such as Apple and

Facebook, continuously monitored by many agencies, both commercial and governmental. All of

these topics are important for us to study in order to understand the fully enmeshed nature and

power structure of this multifaceted and in fact very divergent and rich set of communications

possibilities we currently call media, including social—although they are all social.

18
 Like ethnography, particularly post-crisis of representation ethnography, netnography is

interested in the interface between the researcher and the world. This technologically mediated

interface is the juncture of participation. Moreover, it is the crux point where the netnography is

initially created through the collection of data and ultimately presented through research

representation. It is the focus on this interface that draws netnography not only to research

representation, but also to researcher representation: how will the researcher represent herself in

her dealings with the social world which, in netnography, unlike traditional netnography, is

virtually limitless. The answer is, as already intimated, by a conscious and deliberate self-

presentation strategy drawing on the notion of the netnographic researcher as a personal

academic brand.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF NETNOGRAPHY

There are currently four different types of netnography (Kozinets 2015). First, there are

symbolic netnographies that seek to explore and explain meaning systems and practices relating

to particular groups. Next, there are autonetnographies, which are attuned to the inner,

phenomenological experience of the researcher while they are conducting the (usually symbolic)

netnography. Digital netnographies are another type. Digital netnographies incorporate any and

all methods of data analysis, including those using software for word and language recognition

and for the calculation and representation of social relationships, into the wider enterprise of

human understanding. Human understanding overrides all forms of mechanistic understanding,

giving context to data analysis, in digital netnography. Humanist netnographies are

netnographies focused on social and individual issues, seeking self and social betterment and

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aiming for public accessibility, activism, and action. The intersections between the four types are

many—these are ideal types, not actual forms.

Netnographies can vary in many other ways as well. We can think of a spectrum of

netnographic representation, where netnographic variance can manifest its deviations in the

following ways:

1) Small data to large data ratio: what data will be considered “Small”? Numbers

seem to be the smaller of the two choices: numbers or words. Numbers seem to

have far fewer interpretations to them than words, far less cultural charge. But

still, they have many interpretations, and often lots of cultural charge. Perhaps

it is arbitrary to compare words and numbers. Perhaps we might better compare

the insights we are able to receive from each of them.

2) Lots of data to little data: netnographies are like extraction and exploration

mining rigs; netnographies can try to use a lot of tools to analyze word counts,

sentiment analyses, and natural language similarities to known routines.

However, this is not human understanding. Human understanding happens at a

human level. Cultural understandings are built up over several human

understandings. They are a collective phenomenon. The purpose of

netnography is to inspire cultural understanding.

3) Purpose. Is your netnography to be commercial? For a company to help them

understand their target consumer and communicate and empathize with them

enough so that they buy more product? Or is your ethnography cultural? A

cultural academic portrayal of the languages and full symbolic meaningful

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 stories of a group of people, and most especially your story within that story,

your situated sense of yourself and your ideas in relation to other selves and

most especially their related ideas, in order to gain publication, put some good

lines on your curriculum vita, and move your career along?

Maintaining trust, authenticity, and a sense of meaning in such an environment is

the sacred task of netnography. Netnography enters a world in which, for most scientists,

beliefs and preconceptions are still a very big part of the ideology of scientific practice.

Netnography asks each of us to be aware of what we are assuming, thinking, and doing.

Can we live a more examined existence? Introspection, grounding you academic work,

your work as a researcher, your life in the world of questions and quests, is the base of

netnography. On the personal level, can you live a more examined life? Netnography

might be able to help you get there.

CONTEMPLATING THE FUTURE OF NETNOGRAPHY

Relevant to the tensions within netnography is the technology development trend and its

human direction that we can discern from the recent news story that e-book sales have

plummeted worldwide (Kozlowskie 2015). E-book sales are down over 7 percent from last year,

while sales of physical print books are up almost 9%, showing that not only are people who have

tried the Kindle and iPad reading experience giving it up in favor of the traditional book form (as

a book), but also that consumers have not been swayed by the various arguments in favor of

ebooks, such as their decreased ecological impact. It is predicted in the story that e-books will

21
always have a significant minority of the marketplace, perhaps around the 20% level they have

now naturally received (without government subsidization or regulations), and that people will

never give up on physical books. They like the physical contact. The heft. The feel in the hands.

The portability. The stability. The ability to read surreptitiously, and by firelight. The body, its

risks and its pains, is still vitally important to our desires. In fact, without it, we would likely

have no desires. We would be indistinguishable from the machines. They who have no body and

no desires. The technologies that increasingly invite us to make them increasingly real and, like

jealous children, dance more with them, rather than with one another.

Society becomes the complicated throughput device for the mutual creation and

satisfaction of these desires, desires without organs, desiring machines (Deleuze and Guattari

1972), and we gratify them using the most sophisticated technological toys of the time. We can

see some of the greatest theoretical artistry in recent times in French thinkers, as we have for

many years. And of course netnography builds on many of them, from Baudrillard, Touraine,

Cova, Virilio, Maffesoli, and Foucault, as well of course Debord. At the same time, netnography

consider the current social reality very seriously, and in particular takes literally Donna

Haraway’s notions of cyborgs as well as Katherine Hayles’ notions of post-humans. As well it

appreciates and learns much from the research representations of Shannon Bell and other post-

human feminist scholars and philosophers.

Netnography in this chapter links to a human consciousness project most closely aligned

with the anthropology of consciousness on the academic side, but also tightly aligned with the

core expressive notions of the arts and the (digital) humanities, the human sciences of artistic

representation (rather than scientific). It is for this reason that netnography aligns itself within an

expansionary tradition seeking to unite politics, science and spirituality—not to mention the

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consumer cultural world of the commercial realm: the socioeconomic spheres, with all their

classes, projects, production, co-creations, and identities—as well as all of their attendant

desires. Desires, in a purely Lacanian sense. Desires that are, most of all, desires for more

desires. Desires for desires that are so unquenchable that they will always remain. And we desire

the things that we must have in order to sustain the desire itself—the minimum choice between

satisfaction and insanity. Netnography is one way, and only one, to begin to examine those

desires in our own lives, individually and collectively.

It is in these heady final moments, at the very end of the chapter of this book where we

can stretch our headspace to contemplate the future of netnography. We might consider through

the concept the relation to Koestler’s (1972) notion of holons and Ken Wilber’s use of them, how

netnography theory and the seven major “levels or waves of human existence”, which are linked

to the seven levels of Abraham Maslow and through them both to Ken Wilber’s promising sub-

title of an “Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality” (2000) can unite into

a form of four-part series that begins and ends with the netnographic elements of fire, earth, air,

and water in the form of the humanist, symbolic, digital, and auto netnographies (Kozinets 2015,

p. 207). We might at least, in passing, consider it.

23
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