Netnography

Netnography is the ethnographic study of Internet behaviors. The rising adoption of the Internet, the closing of the digital divide, the integration of the Internet into everyday life, and the rise of user-generated content have made the Internet an important area of study. The distributed and decentralized nature of the Internet led to new opportunities for human association and communication. Communities of interest could form cheaply and include members worldwide, irrespective of the geographical distances between individuals. More formally, the evolution of core concepts related to how individuals interact was facilitated through the Internet. These concepts notably include identity (the user, the avatar, the impression of others), community (how one defines a community online), and place (the terminal, the server, and cyberspace). As these concepts evolved, theorists began to explain these evolutions and explore the emergent concepts. They also began to adapt research methods to be sensitive to the evolutions fostered by the Internet. Researchers in business and marketing, in particular, embraced the opportunity to investigate online communities as an alternative method of exploring consumer cultures.

Background

During the mid-1990s, the potential value of the sociotechnical developments supported by the Internet became increasingly apparent. Researchers sought to analyze the discussions that occurred online and the virtual communities in which they occurred. They also explored new forms of communication, identity, and community that were developing on the Internet. While marketing and cultural consumer researchers already employed a variety of social science tools for qualitative analysis (such as surveys and interviews), the uniqueness of the Internet fostered a desire to develop new tools that were more sensitive to the Internet and to fulfill the novel opportunities that the Internet provided.

A variety of terms emerged in the literature to differentiate research in online communities from more traditional ethnographic research. These terms include virtual ethnography, online ethnography, webnography, digital ethnography, and cyberethnography. In a 1998 paper, cultural researcher Robert V. Kozinets proposed a methodology for online ethnographic research called netnography. Kozinets formed the concept three years earlier to analyze online discussions concerning the Star Trek franchise. Early netnography recognized the emergence of research on online communities and noted the need for a unifying framework for conducting this research.

From the outset, netnography aimed to centralize online research into a formal discipline, to distinguish online ethnographic research from offline ethnographic research, to aid the development of standards for online research, and to confer legitimacy onto the emerging methods of studying online communities. The adoption of netnography has steadily increased since Kozinets’s 1998 paper. In a retrospective published in 2013, Kozinets recalled that a "beachhead" strategy had been adopted, in which top-tier publications were targeted for netnography research. Kozinets stated that the perceived legitimacy conferred by these publications fueled the adoption of netnography. Netnography has been adopted more broadly and in fields outside of cultural consumer research, notably in sociology and economics.

Overview

Netnography is a methodology framed by ethnographic research that focuses on investigating consumer cultures in online communities. The term is a portmanteau formed from the words Internet and ethnography. Most commonly, netnography consists of fieldwork conducted in cyberspace and the textual interpretation derived from that fieldwork. It adapts multiple methods of analyzing data from consumer research, cultural studies, and cultural anthropology to the unique aspects of environments mediated by computer communication, and encapsulates these under a single term. As such, netnography distinguishes itself as a separate field from traditional consumer research and ethnography. That is, it is distinct from traditional consumer research methods such as surveys, focus groups, and interviews in that it is immersive, and it is distinct from ethnography in that it is contextually sensitive to online environments.

The novelty of netnography stems from its application to the online world. In many cases, Internet phenomena and computer-mediated settings are distinct enough from their offline counterparts to warrant new approaches to exploring these phenomena and settings. In other cases, there may be no offline counterpart to an online experience, further justifying the need to explore novel approaches to traditional ethnographic techniques. For example, an online community may exist only on the Internet, and so the most direct ethnographic analysis of that community implies an analysis through the Internet.

Fundamental ethnographic concepts overlap with netnography. Community, identity, space, and participation are all central to netnography. In addition, research phases such as planning, entrée, data collection, and data analysis are also shared with ethnography. New understandings of these techniques and new approaches to these research phases have emerged in response to the distinct nature of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and the differential social communities that CMC engenders. Examples of the distinctness that netnography tackles are various: Internet identities may be plural or transient, and anonymous or pseudonymous. Participation may be less encapsulating online and qualitatively different than it is offline. Communities and the limits of those communities may require different identification criteria when online (especially when geographically distributed or ephemeral). Similarly, netnography must manage the vast quantities of data available online and formalize investigative techniques at different levels of immersion from passively lurking to neutrally observe a community to active participation that affects a community, tests hypotheses, and directs outcomes.

Netnography has been applied to investigating identity, self-preservation, and learning. Studies have applied netnography to assess how videogame players respond to in-game advertising, explore perceptions of file sharing, investigate reviews for tourism, and investigate consumer activism. A 2011 study titled "A Review of the Academic Impact of Three Methodological Innovations: Netnography," by Bengry-Howell et al., found that mentions of netnography occurred in a range of disciplines—from marketing (47 percent) to management (17 percent) and business (12 percent). Numerous reasons make netnography attractive: It is often cheaper and faster than offline data collection; transcription is unnecessary since the objects analyzed are already accessible on the Internet; consent gathering is simplified as much data is intended to be public; and unobtrusive research through lurking is facilitated. In a similar research study of 722 articles in the Scopus database in 2023, researchers found that the United Kingdom produced the most research in the area, with most research from Griffith University and published in the Journal of Business Research. The primary areas of netnography study involved consumer behavior, customer engagement, authenticity, co-creation in online brand communities, and sustainable tourism. These key areas offered insight into the direction of netnography research and trends in the field.

Netnography has evolved to match the changing state of technology and society. Research has sought to address the evolving structure of online communities in the era of social media platforms, the rise of user-generated content, artificial biases in content (e.g., fraudulent reviews), and the increasing interconnectivity between online communities. Further, new subdisciplines, such as auto-netnography (inspired by auto-ethnography), have emerged. These methods have been successfully applied to business research. Businesses can use email, blogs, Wikis, review platforms, social networks, and more to monitor their brand reputation, understand consumer behavior, and create research-based management and advertising strategies. Some businesses use netnography to identify social media influencers they wish to collaborate with or send a product to try. These methods can be nearly free, such as a small business manually observing the online activity of customers who follow their social media pages, or sophisticated and expensive, such as a company using web scraping software or data mining companies to extract large amounts of data from the internet.

Bibliography

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