Locating Media Ethnography

Abstract

What are the qualities and distinguishing features of media ethnography? Certainly, in developing research designs and reporting findings, ethnography has a history of being guided by an identifiable range of investigative activities, such as participant observation, conversational interviews in naturalistic settings, observation and the recording of speech-in-action, and detailed field note documentation (Spradley 1979, 1980; Fetterman 1989; Sanjek 1990; Wolcott 1995; Denzin and Lincoln 1998). As this range of investigative activities attests, what ethnography has historically done best is “make direct contact with social agents in the normal courses and routine situations of their lives to try to understand something of how and why these regularities take place” (Willis 2000, p. xiii, emphasis in original). It is therefore fair to say that participation in and the witnessing of activities and events over time to form a research record lie at the qualitative heart of what ethnography does, and does well. But despite a large and growing body of scholarship from which to draw, these qualifying characteristics are not always salient in media ethnography, making it difficult to describe the contours and confines of what is meant by ethnography in media ethnography. This chapter is an attempt to explore and identify what qualities and distinguishing features are used to define and give shape to media ethnography. To pursue this charge, I want to revisit Nightingale’s (1993) question of “What’s ethnographic?” about media ethnography. Although Nightingale originally offered the question rather pithily by casting into doubt the ethnographic credentials of ethnographic research focused on media audiences, I think it is useful to return to her query, albeit this time taking it as an exploratory challenge. In fact, I want to engage this challenge by taking up a second, more recent set of questions posited by Coman and Rothenbuhler (2005), who ask, “Where is the dividing line between doing ethnography in the classic sense and doing research that is ethnographic in