Digital Ethnography Research Articles

Virtual Ethnography of Ethical Behavior Communicating Netizens on Infrastructure Development Issues on the Instagram Account of the Governor of North Sumatra @Edy_Rahmayadi

This study aims to analyze the ethical communication behavior of netizens on infrastructure development issues on the Instagram account @edy_rahmayadi interpretively and to analyze the constructed motives in the netizens' interaction space on @edy_rahmayadi's Instagram posts, especially on infrastructure development issues in North Sumatra, in shaping public sentiment towards Edy Rahmayadi as the Governor of North Sumatra. The research methodology used in this study is a qualitative approach with a virtual ethnography method through data collection techniques such as participant observation, interviews, documentation collection, and triangulation. Data analysis uses the interactive model of Miles, Huberman, and Saldana. The results showed that the ethical communication behavior of netizens on @edy_rahmayadi's Instagram account was formed by several motives, including social background (age, religion, ethnicity, race, etc.), political interests that are still influenced by the 2018 North Sumatra gubernatorial election and Edy Rahmayadi's current political stance, professional and group interests, and other aspects related to current conditions in the field.

The Digital Marketing Through Instagram to Increase Online Engagement (Virtual Ethnographic Study with Cyber ​​Media Analysis on Rotiyu's Instagram Account)

The goal of this research is to analyze the effectiveness of digital marketing through Instagram in increasing Online Engagement on Rotiyu's Instagram account. This research is an ethnographic survey research conducted online. The research was conducted on the @rotiyu account which utilizes Instagram social media for digital promotion media. The types of data in this research are primary and secondary. Primary data collection was carried out using a questionnaire and the results of mechanical observations. Secondary data was obtained through literature study from various journals and articles related to research. This study uses virtual ethnography with cyber media analysis methods to find out digital marketing through Instagram in increasing online engagement. In the results of the study, researchers made categorizations to make it easier to present findings in the field, either through interviews or observational data on social media. Keywords: Instagram, Netnography, Online Engagement.

The Spiritualization of Domestic Violence in the Digital Era: Examining the Cathartic Role of Religious Institutions in Empowering Victims

This study delves into the intricate intersection of domestic violence, spirituality, and the digital age, aiming to understand the evolving dynamics and the role religious institutions play in providing catharsis for victims. As technology increasingly permeates our daily lives, the digital era has brought about new dimensions to the manifestation and perception of domestic violence. This research seeks to shed light on the phenomenon of spiritualization, where religious narratives and beliefs are interwoven with domestic violence experiences, either exacerbating or alleviating the trauma. Through a comprehensive review of scholarly literature, and digital ethnography, this study explores how religious institutions engage with domestic violence victims in the digital realm. It examines the ways in which religious teachings, counselling, and support mechanisms are leveraged to address the unique challenges posed by the intersection of spirituality, technology, and intimate partner violence.
 
 The research also investigates the potential pitfalls of spiritualization, considering instances where religious doctrines may inadvertently contribute to the perpetuation of abuse or hinder victims from seeking help. By analyzing online forums, social media platforms, and religious websites, the study aims to elucidate the ways in which digital spaces either facilitate or impede the spiritualization process for domestic violence victims. Furthermore, the role of religious leaders and communities in raising awareness, providing resources, and fostering a supportive environment for victims is explored. The study aims to identify best practices employed by religious institutions in addressing domestic violence in the digital age, offering insights for policymakers, advocates, and religious leaders to collaboratively develop more effective strategies for supporting victims and preventing further harm. Ultimately, this research contributes to the ongoing discourse on domestic violence, spirituality, and technology, offering a nuanced understanding of the complexities involved. The findings hold implications for both academic scholarship and practical interventions, emphasizing the need for a multidimensional approach to empower victims and create a more compassionate and informed societal response to domestic violence in the digital era. 
 
 keywords: domestic violence; digital era; Islamic law.

The Threat Of Online Sexual Violence And Social Media Pitfalls in Adolescents

This article focuses on adolescents who actively use social media and their vulnerability to Online Gender-Based Violence. The research was conducted qualitatively using the virtual ethnography method to look at the social and cultural phenomena of using cyberspace. As an analytical tool, the author uses Mead's Symbolic Interaction Theory to explore the phenomenon of OGBV among teenagers. The emergence of the phenomenon of online gender-based violence is one of the many negative impacts of using social media. Teenagers who became informants stated that they were afraid of losing their virtual communities on social media and not enough had been literate about online gender-based violence. This research confirms that there is still a need for more digital safety literacy that directly focuses on Online Gender-Based Violence and also needs literacy in pockets of youth and adolescents, accompanied by targeted understanding, so that adolescents can avoid the emergence of OGBV and other negative impacts.

The Impact of Media in Cancel Culture Phenomenon

The life of our society has gone through enough changes along with the development of technology. One of the changes that can be felt is the appearance of digital culture such as Cancel Culture, an action where netizens boycott a celebrity or a certain public figure due to his/her taboo action. The purpose of this research is to know the role of the media in the cancel culture phenomenon by using Determination Technology theory. This study uses descriptive qualitative approaches with virtual ethnography . The scope of the research l focuses on the Cancellation phenomenon of the Instagram accounts of @arawindak and @kite..entertainment for two reasons. The first reason is the alleged cancellation of "Arawinda" known as the “pelakor” (a married woman who engages in adultery with a man other than her husband ) who received the attention of the Indonesian media and society resulting in easy access to related data regarding Cancel Culture. The second reason is the lack of scientific studies about Cancel Culture especially on Instagram. The large amount of data and the analysis that would be required to study the Cancel culture as a whole in a qualitatively extensive manner will result in a lack of clarity of the end results. Researchers also held interviews with 5 informants (2 informants who did not engage in cancel culture and 3 informants who engaged in the cancel culture). The results of this study find that the media plays an important role in the cancel culture phenomenon through social media. The media plays a role in accelerating the boycott process in view of the characteristics of social media, which are not restricted to time and space. Thus, it can reach even more members than boycotts that occur in the real world. The impact felt through the cancel culture phenomenon carried in the media is even bigger and permanent. Therefore, through this research, it is hoped that people will be more careful in their actions and understand the concept of cancel culture.

Keffiyeh trend on social media as a form of solidarity for Palestine

This study explores the widespread adoption of the keffiyeh trend within the global community, including Indonesia, as a form of solidarity in support of Palestine. The surge in the keffiyeh trend intensified following Israel's forceful assault on Palestine, purportedly in response to Hamas' actions on October 7, 2023.Employing virtual ethnography through the analysis of social media content, the research delves into the historical context of the keffiyeh among Arabs. Known by different names across various Arab nations, such as kufiyah, gutrah in Saudi Arabia, shemag in Iraq, and keffiyeh in Palestine, this head-to-neck covering initially served as protection for village workers during outdoor activities. In the 1980s, the keffiyeh underwent a transformation into a fashion accessory, gaining popularity among young individuals with a bohemian style in New York. Notably, major global brands like Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton even incorporated keffiyeh motifs into their products. Despite its fading significance, the keffiyeh experienced a resurgence as a symbol of solidarity during global demonstrations and actions defending Palestine following Israel's renewed attacks. Participants in the Palestine Defense March prominently featured the keffiyeh, sharing images on social media platforms, notably Instagram, leading to a resurgence of the keffiyeh trend within the wider community.

A look through her photographs: The case of Vanessa, a young Afro-Mexican woman

The article presents some results of the Master's thesis "Young Afro-Mexicans in the Face of racialization: photography on Instagram as a form of resistance." On this occasion, we delve into the experience of Vanessa, a young Afro-Mexican woman who uses the social network Instagram to show her position on her experiences in the face of racialization. The photographs created by Vanessa included a virtual ethnography exercise, which was selected and analyzed based on Corona Berkin's model (2011), with the denotative, connotative, and dialogic levels. These integrated the research categories formulated under self-representation and resistance against racialization. The work was complemented with the development of in-depth interviews. The results emphasize the connotative and dialogic levels, through which Vanessa's position is evident to re-signify her corporality and establish a position against the stereotype of the sexualized black woman. This reflects the construction of a discourse of self-representation reflected in her photographs, where this practice becomes a means to make various forms of resistance to racialization visible.

The Role of Ning Influencer in Realizing Religious Moderation on Social Media

This article discusses the preaching of ning influencers in spreading the value of religious moderation on social media. This research is devoted to Ning Imaz's da'wah content on the YouTube platform. The significance of this research is established through two arguments. First, the Islamic boarding school community has an important role in the dynamics of religious life in Indonesia. Second, the existence of ning Islamic boarding schools is vital in the contestation of da'wah on social media. Islamic boarding schools, as institutions that have legitimacy in Islamic scholarship, need to capture the collective understanding that exists in the wider community regarding the patronage of religious figures who tend to be extreme and intolerant. The method used in this research is digital ethnography. The actualization of the value of religious moderation in the form of video content is a means of correcting religious misunderstandings that are spreading on social media.

Spain and the Old Regime of Post-truth: Freedom of Speech, Ritualised Politics, and Postmemory on Social Media

The Spanish legal framework inherited from the Franco dictatorship (1939‒75) and its recent development foster political dynamics that ordain it as an old regime of post-truth, where denialism of fascist history is the official truth. Through digital ethnography I demonstrate that this kind of post-truth is further amplified through digital platforms, although there is also room for countercultural practices of antifascist truth-making in Spanish digital media. The lack of freedom of speech and the ritualisation of political discussion can hinder democratic truth-making practices, but postmemory forms of engagement with digital media also offset the impact of denialist post-truth. The conclusion questions whether the democratic liminality of the Spanish public sphere online and offline provide a breeding ground for post-truth.

Special Issue: Digital Truth-Making: Anthropological Perspectives on Right-wing Politics and Social Media in "Post-truth" Societies

How do users of social media platforms produce, shape and share truths online? In this introduction, we outline our understanding of digital truth-making as a process that builds on the affordances of digital infrastructures to entangle information with social, cultural and emotional dynamics in a way that co-constitutes beliefs and convictions about the world. The contributions to the special issue illuminate how different variations of this process can be illuminated with the help of digital ethnography and additional empirical methods. In doing so, they exemplify how digital anthropology can contribute to ongoing debates about populism and right-wing politics in “post-truth” digital societies.

Feeling the Truth: Emotions and Digital Truth-making within Right-wing Populist Networks on Twitter/X

Based on an investigation of how everyday users participate in right-wing populist discourse on social media platforms, this article explores the emotional practices that shape and legitimise purported truths about the threat posed by Islam to the Western world. The article builds on the findings of an online ethnography of a right-wing community of users on Twitter. Drawing on a practice theory approach of emotions that considers the properties of social media platforms, we argue that right-wing populist claims to truth do not function in a linear way. The emotions mobilised in this context do not solely focus on rejection and exclusion. Rather, right-wing populist truth-making is a complex process in which emotional practices of inclusion and exclusion are interwoven. 

From Cinderella to i-woman: Web novels, fandom, and feminist politics in China

i-Woman is a new genre of female-oriented web novel that emerged in China after 2020. By intentionally reversing the Cinderella story pattern of the classic romance, the i-woman genre and its feminist fans challenge patriarchal discourse and explore a new feminist way of writing. More than just a fandom of a popular literature form, i-woman is also a feminist mobilization strategy in contemporary Chinese online feminist activism. A textual analysis of i-woman novels and a digital ethnography of its communities suggests that by incorporating separatist feminist ideologies into novels and trying to build solidarity in fandom communities, digital feminists are conducting feminist activism in the form of fantagonism. Building an ideal feminist solidarity is performed as an exclusion of certain types of novel genres and their readers. Operating feminism through fandom opens new online spaces for feminist activists while affecting and restricting its operation. This developing fandom form shows potential for fandom culture to turn into political participation and offers insights into how to operate digital feminism in contemporary China.

The Shitposting of Jazz to Come: Virtual Communities, Internetworks, and the Dank Jazz Meme

ABSTRACT This article is a virtual ethnography of an online community of jazz fans and musicians that engage in the consumption and dissemination of internet memes about jazz. It argues that internet memes are not, or are not merely, trivial funny images shared online – that memes matter in the social study of jazz. I explore the position of memes in the contemporary jazz milieu, finding them to play an active role in a variety of community functions including evaluating authenticity, enculturating members, and interacting with familiar and unfamiliar individuals on- and offline. They are a window into the discursive practices of jazz communities, a credible pathway of jazz pedagogy, and possess genuine artistic credentials, bringing them within the remit of jazz practice itself. Jazz memes are what I call internetworks, an ontological and aesthetic term that projects them into the future of jazz and positions them firmly within its social gestalt. For ordinary jazz enthusiasts, memeing is a meaningful activity.

Examining gender differences in adolescent exposure to food and beverage marketing through go-along interviews

This study explores how adolescents engage with unhealthy food and beverage marketing in online settings, from a gender perspective. Employing an online ethnography approach and using go-along interviews, we explored the experiences of adolescent boys and girls aged 13–17 as they navigated their online experiences with digital food and beverage marketing. Notable themes emerged, including the identification of predatory actions by food companies, the role of protective factors such as family, and the influence of social media influencers in shaping adolescent dietary preferences. Importantly, this research unearthed gender disparities in the participants' responses. Girls, in particular, exhibited a heightened awareness of the protective role played by their families, emphasized the influence of color in marketing strategies, recognized the significance of gender in marketing, and reported exposure to alcohol advertisements—findings that boys less frequently echoed. The study underscores the importance of adolescence as a critical phase in development, during which food companies target these impressionable individuals, driven by their independence and potential for brand loyalty. Moreover, it highlights the potential avenue of gender-specific marketing, offering valuable insights into the gendered dimensions of adolescents' food marketing experiences.By examining the interplay between digital food marketing and gender, this research addresses a critical gap in the literature, shedding light on how gender influences adolescents' perceptions, responses, and behaviors in the context of food marketing strategies. These findings have the potential to inform adolescents of the marketing techniques that target them and guide policymakers in developing and implementing evidence-based regulations aimed at safeguarding adolescents from exposure to unhealthy food marketing.

Digital Platforms and the Maintenance of the Urban Order

Abstract Neighborhood digital platforms – such as Nextdoor, Citizen, Neighbors, anti-crime Facebook groups, Ring surveillance technology, and 311 see-click-fix applications – are recent entrants into urban life. Existing accounts suggest they help build intra-community relationships, but that they also amplify paranoia, racism, and carceral impulses of American homeowners. We ask: how is the new technology increasing solidarity and exclusionary impulses, and what role does it play in the changing American urban landscape? Using offline and online ethnography of one community’s year-long contestation over public space, we find that three effects of the platforms help explain the maintenance of urban order in this case. First, the platforms push residents to see disparate instances of urban disorder as a linked manifestation of organized crime. Second, the platforms help to turn fleeting and uncorroborated accounts into durable events that foster community efficacy. Third, by increasing perceptions of urban disorder and greater community efficacy, the platforms facilitate the accrual of offline material resources. We suggest that in highly contested areas of American cities – areas where wealthy residents vie with a largely Brown and Black working-class for use of space – neighborhood digital platforms help to funnel services that support property value into smaller sections of otherwise disinvested neighborhoods.

Understanding Collective Gaze in Social Media

Based on the previous Panopticon theory, this paper proposes new perspectives to observe the gazing behaviors on social media, attempting to regard the onlookers as the gazers who watch and judge specific social issues in cyberspace. To explore the culture and behavioral characteristics of the gazers, this paper resorts to the Virtual Ethnography research method to construct a feasible interpretative model to understand and describe the definition of the collective gaze. This paper finds a dynamic relationship between the gazers and the gazees being gazed at, which can help figure out the mechanisms of the collective gaze, including the motivation of the gazing behaviors and the communication channels among the gazers. In addition, this paper finds that the impacts exerted by the collective gaze are quite complex after quantitative and qualitative analysis of the statistical data, images, and textual information obtained during the research. Overall, this paper provides a reasonable and understandable description of the new media landscape on social media brought by the collective gaze.

Traversing bodies and territories: feminist activism against digital violence

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes how feminist collectives approach the internet as a feminist territory to defend it from violence. Feminist media studies have recently focused on bodies as sites of oppression and resistance in our digital society. In this article, however, I contend that violence is not limited to bodies; it extends to the territories that these bodies occupy. I demonstrate the importance of territory as a political place of feminist enunciation,1 from which new strategies against digital violence emerge. I argue that it is possible to conceptualize the internet as a territory through communitarian feminism, a theoretical and political contribution to feminism from Indigenous women in Latin America. I further claim that the body-territory category proposed by communitarian feminism can help feminist media studies broaden its analysis of how power relations around violence, data extractivism, and inequalities manifest. The article is based on a digital ethnography of four social collectives enunciating a feminist internet in Mexico. The contribution of this article is twofold. First, it contributes to the theorization of the internet as a territory. Second, it presents evidence of current feminist strategies for defending digital territory.

Algorithmically Mediated Nostalgia through Recordings of Post-Communist Parties on TikTok and Instagram

Among numerous capabilities, social media platforms have also enabled users to remix and repurpose analog videos through their features. This remediated media is further propelled by the platforms’ algorithmic systems, thus enhancing their visibility among users who, as affective publics, can interact with it and further remediate it. This paper discusses how the nostalgic discourse takes shape on Instagram and TikTok around remediated analog videos of parties and celebrations during the 1990s in Romania and how the platform affordances and the algorithmic imaginary of the affective publics influence the nostalgic discourse. The exploratory study utilizes a mixed method – combining digital ethnography, discourse analysis, and digital humanities – the research identifies a double-folded nostalgia, which is impacted by the interplay between each platform’s specific affordances and the imagined rules and styles of the platforms, imagined by their users.

Reconsidering Ru(li)net: Russian literary self-publishing platforms and the war in Ukraine. A case study of Litnet.com

In this paper, I examine online self-publishing literary platforms in Russia from a historical and legislative perspective. Using a mixed methods approach, including digital ethnography, field diary, phenomenological interviews, I trace how the Russian Internet, and particularly literary self-publishing platforms, transformed from a free space without legislation or geographical borders to a limited digital arena controlled by the Russian state. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this transformation was complete: the boundaries of the Russian literary Internet coincided with the geographical borders of Russia. The notion of Runet as a community of Russian-speaking people was broken by regulative acts of the Russian government and a war. Literary and online self-publishing practices, contrary to Soviet samizdat, depend on state legislation due to their commercial nature. Regulatory acts limit authors’ capacities to express their thoughts and feelings in literary work.

Roof/Room Pieces: An Ethnography of Lockdown Lives, and Digital Perfor- mances of Rabindranritya

This essay is an exploration of precarity and sociality within performing arts in India. It analyses dances made digitally for audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-21) and engages with scholarly literature and movement system with reference to Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and forms of dance identified as rabindranritya. Interpreted through interdisciplinary research methods of digital ethnography, questionnaires, content analysis and dance studies, the essay aims to understand why some of us continued to dance through the global pandemic. I focus on YouTube as a site of research as we realize that technology’s relationship with human and arts have now evolved and ‘liveness’ could be optional. I question various forms of precarity in arts industries through respondents’ answers and observe what notions of sociality are exchanged between the performer and their audience. I bring to light the mundane and vibrant of the quotidian lockdown lives of performers who remained cloistered at home, but with cameras on them, how they seized the pandemic precarity and continued dancing with a sense of immediacy and new kinds of intimacy, communicating their imaginations and emotions and bridging social- temporal-spatial distances.