ABSTRACT
“Netnography” is well-established and continues to evolve to incorporate engagement with human experience that includes intellectual, emotional, cultural, historical strategies as well as participation-like social engagement in the context of investigating qualitatively online traces of activity to determine meaning. Auto-netnography is a relatively new extension to netnography and can be employed as a research methodology for individuals working, living with or learning within any field of digitally mediated applications who intend to understand their emotional connection to that field from which cognitive, sensory and digital sources of data can be obtained. This chapter focuses on auto-netnography as methodology and my experience of theoretically developing an auto-netnography framework to guide my own and others’ research in the context of presenting narratives with varying emphases on the triadic axes that inform the balance of the self (auto), digital culture (netno) and research process (graphy). This unique feature of auto-netnography draws together the opportunity to research aspects of the self, living and/or working with digital media in a way that other methodologies do not. Whilst social media as a learning construct is presented as the focus for this chapter, I argue that auto-netnography can be adapted to respond to any digitally mediated field of inquiry. Readers of this chapter are urged to use, critique, adapt and extend my model of auto-netnography to meet their own needs as unlimited netnographer’s and insider-researchers.
