Dear Alcione,

This is neither a very clear or all-encompassing response to your question but it may go some distance towards answering it. I'm someone with a background in both linguistics and anthropology, and have published in both areas. One of many responses is that there can not possibly be a single theoretical response that would encompass digital/virtual ethnography and/or netography as a means of researching digital culture, which by definition is so diverse thematically, so there can be no single underlying response to the intriguing question you have raised.

For this reason it is absolutely necessary to look at a single thématique that underpins the thousands, if not millions of the vast subcultural areas to be found on the internet. EG Virtualisation could be regarded as a subset of Information Visualisation, although the latter may or may not have an analogue in reality.

Having always had a love of humour and a good knowledge of humour theories, this article, with 90% of examples from the digital world reflects one of the ways in which to go about it. But it is ONLY one way to approach it. You could also look at the work of Limor Shifman whose digital skills certainly surpass mine, which is usual in persons younger than I.

Here's some information on it and a link to an article I wrote about it, but I would advise anyone who sets to to do this to apply their existing knowledge base to digital texts, virtual ethnography, and/or netography, rather than attempting to try to create a "grand narrative" on the basis of the latter areas alone.

This is my article (which incidentally was published by another Polish University, Lodz (sorry, but I can't insert diacritical marks on this site), in conjunction with De Gruyter - and of course it takes the application of ethnographic and anthropological skills to be able to negotiate the vastness of the digital world in order to make some kind of sense of any topic from that huge monolithic space, the digital world-space.

Nicholls, C. (2020). Online Humour, Cartoons, Videos, Memes, Jokes and Laughter in the Epoch of the Coronavirus. Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, (10), 274-318.

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.10.17

This has been a difficult question to which to respond, owing to how diffuse the topic is, but I hope that it contributes just a little to what you're hoping to do. One positive is that man young people (students etc. are reading it and appreciating it because ultimately it is THEIR WORLD.

It may simply be too ambitious to try to include all of those factors simultaneously. But because the link above leads to Open Access to the article, there is no limit on sharing it with others.

With best wishes for your huge undertaking!

Best wishes, Christine Nicholls

[DR. Christine Nicholls, Australian National University]

IMAGE BELOW: COPYRIGHT COURTESY OF FIONA KATAUSKAS, RESIDENT CARTOONIST OF EUREKA STREET ONLINE MAGAZINE, a liberal minded Jesuit publication.

Hi Alcione,

You should find the following books useful for getting started on your research:

Pink, S. et al. (2016) Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice. Sage.

Hewson, C. et al. (2016) Internet Research Methods 2nd Edition. Sage.

Kozinets, R.V. (2015) Netnography Redefined 2nd Edition. Sage.

Hinton, S. & Hjorth, L. (2013) Understanding Social Media. Sage.

Hooley, T. et al. (2013) What is Online Research? Bloomsbury.

Liam.

Hi, Alicione,

Hopefully, they'll be useful.

. Ethnographic research 2.0: the potentialities of emergent digital technologies for qualitative organizational research. Journal of Organizational Ethnography, v. 2. n. 1, p. 23- 36, 2013. Disponível em: . Acesso em: 30 maio 2014

Emergent digital ethnographic methods for social research. In: HESSE-BIBER, Sharlene (Org.). Handbook of Emergent Technologies in Social Research. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. p. 158-179. Disponível em: . Acesso em: 17 dez. 2013.

Reading those books suggested by Liam French is one important step (especially Pink), but in addition you need to marry that preliminary information with your own existing knowledge base. There is a problem otherwise with digital anthropology/ethnography - and that is the fact that there are literally billions of examples on the net, and it will be an overwhelming and unmanageable task...Keeping it manageable is premium.......it needs a broader context than simply the various definitions of what it entails...

Digital Anthropology for someone like me, who is 74 years old, and belongs to the "old guard", is a NON-ANTHROPOLOGY. The main technique of the ethno-anthropologist is participant observation, which is fully realized when you really go down on the field. Long, long ago, scholars relied almost entirely on sources, not just first-hand (such as missionaries or government officials), but even second-hand. Writing theories and monographs while sitting comfortably at home and in an armchair (Armchair Anthropologists). Then we saw that it was necessary, as they say, to "get your hands (and shoes) dirty". Going to the ground. Where difficulties of all kinds are often encountered. But it is there that we are together with the object-subject of our investigations: the inhabitants of the village, of the neighborhood of a city, and so on. It is there that a relationship is established with the other, which is made up of interrelationships and inter-locutions of various kinds, verbal, but also non-verbal. Without forgetting the administration of questionnaires, with open or closed answers, or the development of topics by school students.

Sometimes it will be necessary to use an interpreter, but it will be always the face-to-face relationship to be privileged. As I have constantly tried to do during of my researches carried out in Africa (Northern Kenya and South Sudan), Mexico, Inuit of the Canadian Arctic, maritime communities of the North Atlantic (Arctic Svalbard, included).

Therefore digital anthropology cannot become a specialization of a discipline which, by its very nature, is interested in man in flesh and blood, and not in virtual realities. While it is the technological aspect, i.e. immediate access to the world, in its most diversified ramifications (libraries, archives, universities, images, ministries, international agencies, etc .; video conferences and webinars: skype, zoom or remo, with colleagues scattered around the four corners of the earth, etc.), has meant that today it is no longer necessary to organize expensive and prolonged study missions, to collect background or collateral data from around the world: historical, demographic and of other nature, which we can simply and quickly get from home.

Take a look at this doc compiled by Deborah Lupton: "Doing fieldwork in a Pandemic". A series of alternatives to in-person interaction and possibilities during periods of quarantine. It was crowdsourced from contributors around the world during the first months of the pandemic in 2020. Here is the link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1clGjGABB2h2qbduTgfqribHmog9B6P0NvMgVuiHZCl8/edit?ts=5e88ae0a

Dear Alcione,

Hope you are doing well.

I recommend you to take a look at the following thesis, published in 2015. Personally, it helped me a lot to understand how virtual ethnography and netnography work together.

Mancheva, M.E. (2015) Hidden Transcripts on Public Transportation: A Meta-Methodological Exploration of Visual Ethnography in Qualitative Transportation Research. Master thesis in Sustainable Development, University of Uppsala, Department of Earth Sciences.

Best of luck,

Cristian

I would like to thank everyone who presented me with very interesting documents on the topic Cristian Adorean María Moreno Parra Franco Pelliccioni Christine Nicholls Jenny Rebolledo Morelo Jenny Rebolledo Morelo Liam French I will look carefully at each one of them. Thanks a lot!

That's very decent and kind of you, Alcione.

Very best wishes for your impending research, Christine