Digital media ethnographers on the move – An unexpected proposal (original) (raw)
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Media events in the age of global, digital media: Centring, scale, and participatory liveness
Nordic Journal of Media Studies
Many students of media studies have encountered the term "media events" early in their education and been preoccupied with core points of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz's seminal work Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History, published in 1992. Media events have also been taught and studied by media scholars through the years. This now classic book continues to intrigue even in a digital media environment markedly different from when Dayan and Katz wrote their book in the heyday of mass communication, with broadcast television at the centre. While working on this special issue, it has become apparent that media scholars still find the concept crucial for understanding how major events are constructed through media as shared experiences and frames of reference. At the same time, it is considered challenging to adopt for analysis and discussion in a fragmented and hybrid global media landscape characterised by "eventization" (Hepp & Couldry, 2010: 8), which is understood as an ever-changing plurality of smaller and larger events, constructed bottom-up or top-down. To substantiate the continuous explicatory force of the term media events in the current media culture, we must take into consideration the larger inventory of different media events. We also need to understand the more prominent role of audiences and the continuous pleasure of mediated centrings, however transient they may be: the sense created by media events of being part of larger or smaller communities and feeling the pleasure of shared experiences, focused attention, and joint belonging in the here and now. Moreover, we need to explore what scale means for our understanding of contemporary media events. Finally, we should look into how the trademark liveness of media events develops in a period of relentless social media postings and a temporality of the viral. Applying the concept of media events to a globalised and datafied media en
Ethnography of New Media Fall 2022
Official Course Description The development of digital technologies. New media as a research tool on social networks, digital technology, blogs, etc. Organized around multimedia projects and class exercises, this course will show how different groups use new media in the construction of new identities, virtual communities, and new forms of political participation. Additional Course Description From the changing nature of work and fame to algorithmic profiling, digital technologies have come to play an ever more important role in the world around us. To understand the ways that they are shaping the contemporary, this course locates in history certain fundamental questions while turning to empirical, anthropological inquiry as an antidote to both techno-optimism and pessimism. We ask, what is a medium? What role do media play in producing or shaping digital identities, or bifurcating reality? What is the relationship between technological advances and precarity? How are media implicated in social change? The course will provide an overview of some of the key concepts structuring research into these questions across a range of disciplines, and of the growing literature about how these technologies shape human capacity for knowledge, practices of governance, and ethical formation. Students will design and undertake a semester-long research project on a digital technology topic of their choosing, toward developing skills that will serve them in future research and in their careers going forward.
Digital ethnography and media practices
The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies: Research Methods in Media Studies, Volume 7, 2014
This chapter deals with ethnographic methodology used when studying digital media, social contexts and cultural practices. The organization of the chapter includes: Firstly, an introduction to ethnography and its challenges when going digital. Secondly, an overview of the different kinds of digital ethnography depending on the object of study: (a) the ethnography of online communities, virtual worlds and social media sites; (b) the connective ethnography proposal through online and offline field settings and (c) the ethnography of everyday life and the issue of audiences and creative practices in new media. Thirdly, we will present some methodological issues related to how to do online ethnographic fieldwork (participant observation, interviews, digital tools for registering, analyzing and presenting data and ethical considerations).
2013
Call for Papers: Scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines have embraced ethnography as a way to understand media as artifacts, experiences and practices. Whilst this trend has contributed significantly to the study of media, culture and society, researchers that adopt or are inspired by ethnographic approaches to the study of media face the challenges of producing knowledge on both the margins and intersections of clearly demarcated disciplines. What are the constraints and opportunities created by media ethnography’s inherent hybridity? How can researchers effectively locate the field, especially given the rise of multi sited and digital ethnographies? What range of research methods is appropriate? To what extent can media ethnography be thought of and practiced as an independent field? What is distinctive about the knowledge that is produced through an engagement with media ethnography? Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture invites submissions from internationa...
Ethnography of Digital Media Course Syllabus Fall 2022
From transformations in work and intimate relationships to panics over media piracy, in the 21st century, digital media has come to play an ever more important role in politics, economics, and identities. Ethnography – a methodology based on long-term immersion in the lives of the people who the ethnographer is interested in studying – is particularly useful as a means of understanding lived experiences and effects of digital media. Ethnography has also been central in highlighting the operations of digital media outside of the Global North, which all too often dominates popular and scholarly discussions. But digital media also confronts ethnography with new challenges as researchers must devise ways of studying social dynamics over both online and offline contexts and between geographically distant locations. In this course, we consider how ethnographers have adapted to these new methodological challenges and how ethnography can shed light on a range of pressing topics in media studies, including the politics of infrastructure, labor and the information economy, media piracy, fan cultures, journalism and disinformation, and contemporary social movements. As part of the course, students also conduct their own ethnographic research project on a digital media topic of their choosing. This course, then, will at once introduce you to debates within digital media ethnography; expand your understanding of how digital media reinforces or challenges difference and power in locations around the world; and teach you how to design and carry out your own ethnographic research project from data collection through writing up results in an engaging manner. This course meets the Writing Intensive SLA Tier-2 requirement.
JeSuisCharlie: Towards a Multi-Method Study of Hybrid Media Events
This article suggests a new methodological model for the study of hybrid media events with global appeal. This model, developed in the project on the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, was created specifically for researching digital media—and in particular, Twitter. The article is structured as follows. Firstly, the methodological scope is discussed against the theoretical context, e.g. the theory of media events. In the theoretical discussion, special emphasis is given to i) disruptive, upsetting, or disintegrative media events and hybrid media events and ii) the conditions of today's heterogeneous and globalised media communication landscape. Secondly, the article introduces a multi-method approach developed for the analysis of hybrid media events. In this model, computational social science—namely, automated content analysis (ACA) and social network analytics (SNA)—are combined with a qualitative approach— specifically, digital ethnography. The article outlines three key phases for research in which the interplay between quantitative and qualitative approaches is played out. In the first phase, preliminary digital ethnography is applied to provide the outline of the event. In the second phase, quantitative social network analytics are applied to construct the digital field for research. In this phase, it is necessary to map a) what is circulating on the websites and b) where this circulation takes place. The third and final phase applies a qualitative approach and digital ethnography to provide a more nuanced, in-depth interpretation of what (substance/content) is circulating and how this material connects with the 'where' in the digital landscape, hence constituting links and connections in the hybrid media landscape. In conclusion, the article reflects on how this multi-method approach contributes to understanding the workings of today's hybrid media events: how they create and maintain symbolic battles over certain imagined constructs of social imaginaries of solidarity, belonging, contestation, and exclusion, a topic of core value for the theory of media events.
The media go-along: Researching mobilities with media at hand
This article contributes methodologically and theoretically to Christine Hine’s call for a mobilities oriented internet ethnography. First, a ‘media go-along’, combining interviews and observations of a personal communication service at hand, is developed. Research participants give verbal and visual tours, framed by the researcher’s discursively constituted invitations for orientation. Then, a theoretical framework integrating an analysis of media environment mobilities is developed. From research material on hook-up and dating apps targeting non-heterosexual men, it is shown how 1) research participants’ navigation is materially contingent upon the medium and subject to momentary purposes and styles, 2) researcher presence and access must regularly be re-inscribed discursively, and 3) mobile media analysis, based on the media go-along’s representations of verbal, material, affective, and kinetic aspects of social interaction, is useful in the analysis of socially-conditioned access to, and production of, single media practice and experience.
Being There Live: An Ethnographic Approach for Studying Social Media Use in Mediatized Live Events
Social Media + Society, 2021
While live event experiences have become increasingly mediatized, the prevalence of ephemeral content and diverse forms of (semi)private communication in social media platforms have complicated the study of these mediatized experiences as an outsider. This article proposes an ethnographic approach to studying mediatized event experiences from the inside, carrying out participatory fieldwork in online and offline festival environments. I argue that this approach both stimulates ethical research behavior and provides unique insights into mediatized practices. To develop this argument, I apply the proposed methodology to examine how festival-goers perceive differences between public and private, permanent and ephemeral when sharing their live event experiences through social media platforms. Drawing on a substantial dataset containing online and offline participant observations, media diaries, and (short in situ and longer in-depth) interviews with 379 event-goers, this article demonstrates the value of an ethnographic approach for creating thick descriptions of mediatized behavior in digital platforms.
Contemporary subjects, mediatization and socio-cultural practices
International Journal for Innovation Education and Research, 2019
This paper relies on digital ethnography as a methodological frame and addresses the cyberspace as a context for the research of social and discursive interactions. Mediatization is taken as a key concept for the investigation of cultural practices that involve digital technologies. The assumptions are supported by the study of the case of “Know your meme”, a website dedicated to find and document memes and viral phenomena. Grounded on a critical view of the interrelations between digital media, communication and society, it pinpoints remix and multimodality as two of the main stylistic resources employed in meaning-making processes. The analysis suggests that the contemporary subject resorts to digital media affordances and the immediateness of internet communication to create/share memes in response to offline events. It also considers that featuring memes as objects in a curator’s page turn these texts into social-cultural artifacts. Assuming a dialogic point of view, the discuss...