Digital Ethnography
Chapter
Author(s) / editor(s):
Nick Taylor
Year: 2025
Abstract:
As with other forms of ethnography, digital ethnography is an interpretive approach to understanding culture; in this case, for understanding how a group, community, or culture engages and makes sense of digital technologies. While digital ethnography is often understood in spatialized terms—it is ethnography, but of virtual spaces—this chapter argues that such understandings are made increasingly untenable, both by the contemporary political economies of digital platforms (which rely on embeddedness in our everyday lives, rather than separation), and by the recognition that firm boundaries between ‘field’ and ‘home’ are rooted in histories of colonialism and extractivism. Borrowing from Science and Technology Studies (STS), this chapter outlines an approach to digital ethnography that understands digitality as embedded and embodied, and insists on a reciprocal and accountable relationship between participants and researcher as the foundation of ethnographic practice.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111316857-006
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