ABSTRACT
Netnography today is more relevant than ever. Netnography researches technocultural contexts, especially relating to social media, and these connective media have become a major part of the human experience. Netnographers seek to understand technocultures, the systems of meaning, value, and power that accompany people’s interactions with one another through technologies and with technologies themselves. Netnography includes interviews, immersion, online traces, mobile, and livestream data, and it expands engaged observation into the technological environment, including platform interfaces, bots, and interpretations of the hidden effects of algorithms. Like all methods with a history, the story of netnography has been a story of adaptation. The book’s five sections and 19 chapters attest to the power of evolving netnographic approaches and present readers with a method that is more dynamic and open-ended than ever before. Together, these chapters illustrate the vast range of netnographic projects today, taking stock of netnography’s multidisciplinary past and present. This chapter also explores netnography’s promise as the methodological arm of a novel discipline of technocultural social media studies. Further, it suggests a critical axiology focused on exposing and overturning the systemic inequities structured into today’s media and technocultural contexts.
