Netnography

Netnography
Author: Robert V Kozinets
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2010
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1848606451

With as many as 1 billion people now using online communities such as newsgroups, blogs, forums, social networking sites, podcasting, videocasting, photosharing communities, and virtual worlds, the internet is now an important site for research. This exciting new text is the first to explore the discipline of 'Netnography' - the conduct of ethnography over the internet - a method specifically designed to study cultures and communities online. For the first time, full procedural guidelines for the accurate and ethical conduct of ethnographic research online are set out, with detailed, step-by-step guidance to thoroughly introduce, explain, and illustrate the method to students and researchers. The author also surveys the latest research on online cultures and communities, focusing on the methods used to study them, with examples focusing on the new elements and contingencies of the blogosphere (blogging), microblogging, videocasting, podcasting, social networking sites, virtual worlds and more. This book will be essential reading for researchers and students in social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, marketing and consumer research, organization and management studies and cultural and media studies.

Researching Anthropology on the Internet

Researching Anthropology on the Internet
Author: David Lee Carlson
Publisher: Cengage Learning
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2003
Genre: Anthropology
ISBN: 9780534567934

Written by David Carlson, this online guide is designed to assist anthropology students in all of their needs when doing research on the Internet. Part One contains general information necessary to get started, and answers questions about security, the type of anthropology material available on the Internet, the information that is reliable and the sites that are not, and the best links to take students where they want to go. Part Two looks at each main subfield in anthropology and refers students to sites where the most enlightening research can be obtained. Available online only.

Coming of Age in Second Life

Coming of Age in Second Life
Author: Tom Boellstorff
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2015-08-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0691168342

Millions of people around the world today spend portions of their lives in online virtual worlds. Second Life is one of the largest of these virtual worlds. The residents of Second Life create communities, buy property and build homes, go to concerts, meet in bars, attend weddings and religious services, buy and sell virtual goods and services, find friendship, fall in love--the possibilities are endless, and all encountered through a computer screen. At the time of its initial publication in 2008, Coming of Age in Second Life was the first book of anthropology to examine this thriving alternate universe. Tom Boellstorff conducted more than two years of fieldwork in Second Life, living among and observing its residents in exactly the same way anthropologists traditionally have done to learn about cultures and social groups in the so-called real world. He conducted his research as the avatar "Tom Bukowski," and applied the rigorous methods of anthropology to study many facets of this new frontier of human life, including issues of gender, race, sex, money, conflict and antisocial behavior, the construction of place and time, and the interplay of self and group. Coming of Age in Second Life shows how virtual worlds can change ideas about identity and society. Bringing anthropology into territory never before studied, this book demonstrates that in some ways humans have always been virtual, and that virtual worlds in all their rich complexity build upon a human capacity for culture that is as old as humanity itself. Now with a new preface in which the author places his book in light of the most recent transformations in online culture, Coming of Age in Second Life remains the classic ethnography of virtual worlds.

Media Worlds

Media Worlds
Author: Faye D. Ginsburg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2002-10-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520928164

This groundbreaking volume showcases the exciting work emerging from the ethnography of media, a burgeoning new area in anthropology that expands both social theory and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the way media—film, television, video—are used in societies around the globe, often in places that have been off the map of conventional media studies. The contributors, key figures in this new field, cover topics ranging from indigenous media projects around the world to the unexpected effects of state control of media to the local impact of film and television as they travel transnationally. Their essays, mostly new work produced for this volume, bring provocative new theoretical perspectives grounded in cross-cultural ethnographic realities to the study of media.

Life Online

Life Online
Author: Annette N. Markham
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1998
Genre: Communication
ISBN: 0761990313

In Life Online, Annette Markham adopts an ethnographic approach to understanding Internet users by immersing herself in online reality. She finds that to understand how people experience the Internet, she must learn how to be embodied there.

SAGE Internet Research Methods

SAGE Internet Research Methods
Author: Jason Hughes
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 1681
Release: 2012-06-25
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1446275930

Historically, social researchers have shown a willingness to exploit new technologies to enhance, facilitate and support their various activities. However, arguably no other technological development has influenced the landscape of social research as rapidly and fundamentally as the Internet. This collection avoids both uncritical embrace and wholesale dismissal by considering some of the key literature in the field of Internet research methods. Volume One: Core Issues, Debates and Controversies in Internet Research introduces themes and issues that run across all four volumes such as: epistemology, ontology and methodology in the online world; access, social divisions and the ′digital divide′; and the ethics of online research. Volume Two: Taking Research Online - Internet Survey and Sampling addresses the range of resources, digital archives and Internet-based data sources that exist online from relatively straightforward and practical guides to such material through to more polemical pieces which consider problems relating to the use, access and analysis of online data and resources. Volume Three: Taking Research Online - Qualitative Approaches considers the broad range of approaches to conducting researching via or ′in′ the Internet. The focus is on conventional methods that have been ′taken online′, and which in doing so, have become transformed in scope and character. Volume Four: Research ′On′ and ′In′ the Internet - Investigating the Online World follows logically from that which precedes it in exploring how social research has been ′taken online′, not simply through the deployment of existing methods and techniques via the Internet, but in researchers′ increasing recognition and investigation of the online world as a sphere of human interaction - a socio-cultural arena to be explored ′from the desktop′ as it were.

Reflexive Ethnography

Reflexive Ethnography
Author: Charlotte Aull Davies
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2012-08-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 113676349X

Reflexive Ethnography is a unique guide to ethnographic research for students of anthropology and related disciplines. It provides practical and comprehensive guidance to ethnographic research methods, but also encourages students to develop a critical understanding of the philosophical basis of ethnographic authority. Davies examines why reflexivity, at both personal and broader cultural levels, should be integrated into ethnographic research and discusses how this can be accomplished for a variety of research methods. This revised and updated second edition includes: a new chapter on internet-based research and ‘interethnography’ chapters on selection of topics and methods, data collection and analysis, and ethics and politics of research practical advice on writing up ethnographic study new and updated research examples. Postmodernist relativism can lead to an over-emphasis on reflexivity that denies the possibility of social research. Reflexive Ethnography utilises postmodernist insights – incorporation of different standpoints, exposure of the intellectual tyranny of meta-narratives – but proposes that reflexive ethnographic research be undertaken from a realist perspective. Reflexive Ethnography will help students to use and understand ethnographic research practices that fully incorporate reflexivity without abandoning claims to develop valid knowledge of social reality.

Digital Anthropology

Digital Anthropology
Author: Heather A. Horst
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2013-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857852930

Anthropology has two main tasks: to understand what it is to be human and to examine how humanity is manifested differently in the diversity of culture. These tasks have gained new impetus from the extraordinary rise of the digital. This book brings together several key anthropologists working with digital culture to demonstrate just how productive an anthropological approach to the digital has already become. Through a range of case studies from Facebook to Second Life to Google Earth, Digital Anthropology explores how human and digital can be defined in relation to one another, from avatars and disability; cultural differences in how we use social networking sites or practise religion; the practical consequences of the digital for politics, museums, design, space and development to new online world and gaming communities. The book also explores the moral universe of the digital, from new anxieties to open-source ideals. Digital Anthropology reveals how only the intense scrutiny of ethnography can overturn assumptions about the impact of digital culture and reveal its profound consequences for everyday life. Combining the clarity of a textbook with an engaging style which conveys a passion for these new frontiers of enquiry, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of anthropology, media studies, communication studies, cultural studies and sociology.

Why the World Needs Anthropologists

Why the World Needs Anthropologists
Author: Dan Podjed
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2020-11-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000182738

Why does the world need anthropology and anthropologists? This collection of essays written by prominent academic, practising and applied anthropologists aims to answer this provocative question. In an accessible and appealing style, each author in this volume inquires about the social value and practical application of the discipline of anthropology. Contributors note that the problems the world faces at a global scale are both new and old, unique and universal, and that solving them requires the use of long-proven tools as well as innovative approaches. They highlight that using anthropology in relevant ways outside academia contributes to the development of a new paradigm in anthropology, one where the ability to collaborate across disciplinary and professional boundaries becomes both central and legitimate. Contributors provide specific suggestions to anthropologists and the public at large on practical ways to use anthropology to change the world for the better. This one-of-a-kind volume will be of interest to fledgling and established anthropologists, social scientists and the general public.

Virtual Ethnography

Virtual Ethnography
Author: Christine Hine
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2000-04-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1847876498

Cutting though the exaggerated and fanciful beliefs about the new possibilities of `net life′, Hine produces a distinctive understanding of the significance of the Internet and addresses such questions as: what challenges do the new technologies of communication pose for research methods? Does the Internet force us to rethink traditional categories of `culture′ and `society′? In this compelling and thoughtful book, Hine shows that the Internet is both a site for cultural formations and a cultural artefact which is shaped by people′s understandings and expectations. The Internet requires a new form of ethnography. The author considers the shape of this new ethnography and guides readers through its application in multiple settings.