1.1 Digital Methodology: Methods of Digital Anthropology

It used to be that ethnographers were physically present with the people they study. In the digital age, however, digitally mediated research is becoming increasingly popular. Ethnographers increasingly use social media, video calls, etc to do their research. Doing ethnography through the Internet could be thought of as a "digital method" of ethnography. The digital method may not always be ideal, but as ethnographers, we think that our work is important and we work around the impediments that exist (such as pandemics, travel bans, etc.).

Netnography? Digital Ethnography?

One term to describe ethnography on the Internet is "Netnography". Jakob Svensson an anthropologist in Sweden describes what this means in this video.  Michael Wesch describes a similar process as "digital ethnography". Anthropologists generally aren't too precious about whether you call it "netnography" or "digital ethnography" or something else. 

Digital Methods?

Another way to think about research about and using digital technologies is "Digital Methodology". Here Dalsgaard talks about Digital Methods in particular in an insightful discussion about using the anthropological toolkit to approach digital technologies.  

 Commitment to fieldwork

As mentioned in Section 0, the method of participation-observation defines anthropology. For instance, by entitling his book "Coming of Age", anthropologist Tom Boellstorff connects his work to Margaret Mead, who is famous for conducting participant observation in Samoa. This method of long-term fieldwork is shared by contemporary Anthropologists. Tom Boellstorff also uses the method of long-term, participant observation in Coming of Age in Second Life. To understand this reference, it is useful to turn to Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa. This Blog outlines a little about her research methodology and the ensuing controversy that emerged from her findings. Note that rather than a 'primitive' population, as was the aim in the early years of Anthropology, Boellstorff's ethnography was conducted entirely online.

Online & offline research

One choice in the method of digital anthropologists relates to online and offline research. Some anthropologists, including Boellstorff, insist that conducting research entirely online is possible and perhaps preferable. Here Jeff Juris has a different take:

Miller's "Introduction to Digital Anthropology" (2018), which we covered in Section 1, makes the case for combining offline and online. Miller (2018) writes: 

The value of ethnography is demonstrated in that in all these cases we find an appreciation that online activity can only be understood relative to changes that have taken place offline.

Jeff Juris, who researches digital activism, prefers to research online & offline as he explains here.

 

In what ways does this contradict Boellstorff's approach? The answer is that Boellstorff explicitly disagrees with Miller's idea that anthropology of the internet should also be based in 'actual', offline worlds. In Chapter 2 of Coming of Age in Second Life, he argues that researching Second Life entirely online was a better method.