ABSTRACT
Digital ethnography is a methodological approach that aims to facilitate the analysis of the wealth of social insights contained within the many platforms of digital media. Since the mid-1990s, the powerful surge of new technologies, particularly the Internet, has had enormous implications for the ways in which societies and individuals communicate. Online spaces are becoming increasingly vital arenas for social interaction, yet there is limited analysis on how research methods can develop to reflect the growing significance of virtual communities in shaping social and cultural trends. This lagging of research methods addressing digital media may be attributed to the gap between the speed of innovation of digital media, and the time it takes for academic research to attract interest and funding (Page et al., 2014). The infiltration of digital media into popular sociological research methods remains remarkably limited, and Murthy (2008, p. 837) argues that ‘social researchers cannot afford to continue this trend’. To keep pace with the rapid advances in new technologies, digital ethnography as a methodology must be constantly updated and remodelled. While the changeability and diversity of digital media ‘can make them difficult to study, [it] can also make them compelling objects for ethnographic enquiry’ (Coleman, 2010, p. 488). Practitioners of digital ethnography recognise the importance of digital media as sites for ethnographic research, and the unique opportunities they present for the study of specific groups and communities. Digital ethnography builds on traditional ethnography, where researchers physically live amongst a particular community, to allow researchers to instead analyse cyberspace to examine specific cultures. The lines between virtual and real communities has become so blurred that distinctions between the two are almost useless (Wilson and Peterson, 2002), and the importance of online communities is now undeniable as they increasingly come to define modern communication.
