Media Ethnography Research Articles

Social Media Ethnography: The Digital Researcher in a Messy Web

Social media practices and technologies are often part of how ethnographic research participants navigate their wider social, material and technological worlds, and are equally part of ethnographic practice. This creates the need to consider how emergent forms of social media-driven ethnographic practice might be understood theoretically and methodologically. In this article, we respond critically to existing literatures concerning the nature of the internet as an ethnographic site by suggesting how concepts of routine, movement and sociality enable us to understand the making of social media ethnography knowledge and places.

Qualitative media diaries: An instrument for doing research from a mobile media ethnographic perspective

This article outlines the benefits of qualitative media diaries as a methodological tool for empirical research on mediatization and mobility. If applied within the wider field of mobile media ethnography, diaries can contribute to the analysis of mediated interaction even in transit. The idea of this methodological approach is to receive detailed information about an individual’s communicative relationships and practices articulated via various (mobile) media technologies on an everyday basis. Providing a theoretical frame for mediatization and mobility, the authors summarize the development of mobile media ethnography and present an overview of the application of diaries in media and communication research. Drawing on empirical studies in two fields of inquiry – diasporic communities and job-related mobility – the central aspect of this article is to reflect on the workings of and experiences with the application of qualitative media diaries.

A second birth? Cosmopolitan media ethnography and Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology

What does it take to carry out media ethnography in times and spaces of cosmopolitanization? How can ethnography reach beyond nationally or otherwise territorially bounded theories and methodologies, towards a new set of cosmopolitan approaches that manage to account for globalized logics of symbolic power? This article explores whether and how cosmopolitan media ethnography could be built around the epistemology of Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology. This would imply the methodological commitment to Bourdieu’s ideal of conversion of the scientific gaze, as well as the incorporation of his intermediary concepts of habitus and field. It is also argued that cosmopolitan media ethnography should be based on a non-media centric view revolving around the concept of texture – a concept through which it is possible to grasp the socially structured relationship between fields and spaces of flow and the various locations where symbolic power is ultimately played out. The theoretical points are brought into dialogue with recent experiences from media ethnographic fieldwork carried out among expatriate development workers in Nicaragua.

Absence of fan activism in the queer fandom of Ho Denise Wan See (HOCC) in Hong Kong

The queer fandom of female Hong Kong pop singer Ho Denise Wan See (HOCC) from 2009 to mid-2011 is dealt with through the qualitative methodology of in-depth interviews and media ethnography. HOCC, an idiosyncratic cultural producer who dabbles in the politics of ambiguity, creates texts that invite queer interpretations from fans and from queer activists in Hong Kong. Via analyses informed by both queer studies and audience studies, the various creative practices of fans in reshaping their sexual identities via popular culture are explored. These practices are highly political and empowering to a queer audience. However, the intensive rewriting of meanings as queer symbolic creativity and tactics in cultural politics fail to transform into formal institutional politics and more confrontational queer activism. This is so for several reasons. Internally, the hierarchical structure of fan organization, fan proximity to the culture industry, and the top-down encouragement of social charity as the only channel of activism have all reduced the possibility of transforming fans' queer sensibilities into institutional queer politics. Furthermore, Hong Kong, under the influence of three major discourses that seek to discipline and regulate sexualities—traditional Chinese ethics, the British colonial legacy, and the postcolonial revival of rightist Christianity—has a long social history of heterosexist discrimination and a preference for normalizing when striving for queer citizenship. This empirical study examines relations between cultural specificity and fan agency in a non-Western context.

Desires at Play

This article discusses knowledge production in game studies by exploring notions of emotion, closeness and (queer) desire in new media ethnography. It uses field notes and experiences from an ethnographic study of the online game World of Warcraft. As opposed to the kind of fieldwork where being, living, and staying in the field is the only option, new media ethnography brings with it the possibility of moving through different locations and bodies to the point where the borders between them may start to blur. The text positions itself within this very uncertainty to investigate its consequences for ways of knowing online game cultures. Drawing on autoethnography, as well as the body of ethnographic work interrogating erotic subjectivity and desire in the field, the discussion makes use of personal experiences - in particular an in-game as well as out-of-the game love affair - as potentially important sources of knowledge. Was it her, regardless of the game? Was it her through the game? Or was it the game “itself ”? The article provides the story of a particular way of being introduced to and of falling for a game, a woman, and the ways in which these two were intensely connected. Set against the backdrop of “the affective turn” in cultural and feminist theory, and in making visible how desire may circulate through game spaces, the article argues for an articulation of desire as intimately related to technology; of desiring technology and of technological, or perhaps technologized desires.

THE LABOUR OF MEDIA USE

The ‘active audience’ has theoretically been conceptualized from two perspectives: in political economy, it is suggested that television audiences work for the networks while watching and that they contribute to the valorization process with their labour. Although contested, it has survived among media scholars, also feeding into the discussion on web surveillance techniques. The other conceptualization comes from reception theory, media ethnography and cultural studies, where the interpretive work by audiences is seen as productive and resulting in identities, taste cultures and social difference. This article relates these perspectives by considering audiences as involved in two production–consumptions circuits: (1) the viewer activities produce social difference (identities and cultural meaning) in a social and cultural economy, which is then (2) made the object of productive consumption as part of the activities of the media industries, the end product being economic profit. This article argues for the relevance of analysing these as separate circuits, with different kinds of labour at their centre, and that recent debates on the active audience often misrecognize the difference.

Circulating Communities Online: The Case of the Kauhajoki School Shooting

Circulating Communities Online: The Case of the Kauhajoki School Shooting

Bollyculture: Ethnography of identity, media and performance

This article offers the concept of ‘Bollyculture’ as a paradigmatic frame for understanding the media/dance cultures and life-space of young South-Asian Americans. Drawing on an extended ethnographic study of India Nite1 (a performance of Bollywood inspired dances), the essay argues that concepts like Bollyculture capture the hybrid and contested nature of diasporic subcultures, while offering concrete ways of observing the longitudinal and discursive impact of Bollywood on issues of identity, gender and culture.

Youth Worx

The YouthWorx project is a recently established initiative in inner urban Melbourne that enables ‘at risk’ and marginalized young people to participate in community radio and in multimedia production. YouthWorx seeks to offer direct pathways from youth arts to skill-building, and to entice disaffected young people into more socially productive pathways, through the provision of high-quality media and multimedia training. Yet the effectiveness of media education in creating active participants in democratic society is difficult to assess. This article examines some of the broader thinking behind the linkage of youth, media, identity and citizenship, and considers the difficulties of implementing a workable evaluation of causal links between those disparate fields. It also reports on the findings of the media ethnography component of the initiative, as we track the first cohort of young people through the training program.

Multidimensional Social History of Television: Social Uses of Finnish Television from the 1950s to the 2000s

The article discusses the social uses of television from the late 1950s to the mid-2000s. In the tradition of media ethnography, it depicts both the structural and the relational uses of television. It looks at changes in watching television in social intercourse: in family viewing and social life outside the home. The primary sources for the study are two collections of written reminiscences about television in Finnish everyday life. The article shows how multidimensional the uses of television have been over the decades and how TV has often played an important role in social life. Looking broadly at the findings, one could say that despite the many technological and cultural changes in television’s history, most of the main features of television habits remain. TV is still a social family media.

The ethnography of new media worlds? Following the case of global poker

This article relates the current transformation of ethnographic practice to the emergence of new media technologies. It contrasts multi-sited ethnography with actor network theory’s method of following the construction of new media worlds through chains of mediators. The authors exemplify this through the extraordinary emergence of global poker and its shifting constitution across the entire spectrum of traditional and new media technologies. They argue that poker vividly illustrates how following makes sense of these emergent new worlds while at the same time it is an excellent vehicle for problematizing key issues of ethnographic practice.

Resisting the Spectacle of Pride: Queer Indian Bloggers as Interpretive Communities

Community formation/sustenance in the real/virtual realms is especially important in an age where media are increasingly convergent and interactive. Using the theory of interpretive communities, this article analyzes a network of queer Indian bloggers/readers/commenters and their reading of the mainstream media coverage of India's first national Gay Pride marches. Media ethnography and qualitative content analysis decipher the strategies used by the interpretive community, and explore how bloggers are at once consumers/audience of mainstream media and producers of alternative media. Resistance to mainstream media-sponsored gender-normativity is problematized, and the analysis reveals a simultaneous “talking-back” and legitimization of media authority.

K-Films in the Classroom: Exploring New Media Ethnography Using the Korsakow System

In this paper I look at how new media techniques could contribute to the authoring of ethnographies in anthropology courses. Immersive, navigable ethnographies make new imaginative worlds and political configurations possible. I argue that anthropologists should challenge logocentric discourses not only through our theories and our rhetoric, but also through our modes of representation as well. After briefly reviewing some key aspects and metaphors associated with new media, I offer examples of how we use the Korsakow hypermedia software package in my course on new media ethnography.

Visualizing Change: Participatory Digital Technologies in Research and Action

New visual technologies are changing the ways that anthropologists do research and opening up new possibilities for participatory approaches appealing to diverse audiences. Participatory digital methodologies featured in this special issue include digital storytelling, Photovoice, interactive multimedia as new media ethnography, participatory digital archival research, and participatory geographic information systems (GIS). Other methodologies involving participatory digital methodologies that are gaining traction in anthropology include community-based filmmaking (Biella 2006) and collaborative blogging and website production (Hess 2001; Young 2007). Research participants are producing digital representations of their experiences, taking and sharing pictures, and mapping their own environments. These methodologies produce rich visual and narrative data guided by participant interests and priorities, putting the methods literally in the hands of the participants themselves. They appeal to wide audiences, allowing for access to and production of anthropological knowledge beyond the academy.

Reminiscing Television

■ This article presents and discusses the methodological issues arising in a project on the advent, diffusion and integration of Finnish television over its 50-year history. The study uses oral history, in the form of written reminiscences, to explore the changing role of television in the life of Finns. This social historical study combines methods of ethnographic television audience studies and oral history studies. This kind of approach is rarely used in media ethnography. It raises questions around themes such as the importance of context, the nature of narratives and coding methods. This article also summarizes how the project's data and methodology have served to produce a third generation media history study. ■

Writing Media Culture: Representation and Experience in Media Ethnography

Writing Media Culture: Representation and Experience in Media Ethnography

Saigon from the diaspora

In the wake of reform in Vietnam and the end of the cold war, overseas Vietnamese are returning to their former homeland in increasing numbers. For most of the first generation in the diaspora, memories of wartime Saigon are now being augmented by a touristic experience of contemporary Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. This essay asks how the co-presence of these differently spatialized and temporalized ways of knowing the city affects the production and consumption of images of Saigon in overseas Vietnamese communities in the West. Based on media ethnography carried out in Vietnamese households in Sydney, the paper argues that changes in the way Saigon is represented in overseas Vietnamese popular culture reflect a shift in the larger politics of diasporic identity. While narratives of exile and refugeehood remain potent forms of affective (if not instrumental) politics in overseas Vietnamese contexts, transnational forms of consciousness and identification are beginning to enter into diasporic public culture, albeit in a highly contested way. Connecting spaces As an anthropologist of migration, my interest when working on transnational media invariably lies in the way in which media flows interact with migratory circuits. How do media texts flow between diasporas and homelands? How do they circulate between different diasporic locations? How do such sites of media production and consumption both retain their distinctiveness and blur into one another? How do these flows produce audiences and, perhaps, public spheres that exceed the traditional borders of the nation state (Appadurai, 1996)? Explorations into these kinds of postnational geographies have been described by some as the 'return' of the problem of space to anthropological enquiry, and I believe they constitute a natural point of engagement between the disciplines of anthropology and geography (Rankin, 2003). In this paper, I look at the role of media, and in particular visual representations of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, in articulating spatial connections between the Little Saigons of the Vietnamese diaspora and the 'Big Saigon' of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV). 1 How do contemporary flows of people, cash, commodities and culture between Little and Big Saigons show up in representations of Ho Chi Minh City produced in and by the diaspora? Media texts both represent and constitute these flows, such that this form of popular culture is arguably the most transnationalized aspect of Vietnamese social life. Thus it is necessary to ask how movements of media performers, producers and texts between homeland and diaspora operate to determine the visual representa- tion of transnational Vietnamese geographies and, above all, the imag(in)ing of the city of Saigon. In addition, one must take into account the fact that the audience itself is mobile: the diasporic consumers of Vietnamese language music video periodically travel between diasporic sites (e.g. from Sydney to California) and between diaspora and homeland (Sydney to Saigon). These very mobilities are in turn beginning to shape the way Saigon is represented and interpreted in diasporic popular culture such that the city is shifting from being figured as a locus for diasporic nostalgia to an exciting site of culinary and cultural tourism. This representational shift intersects with the complex

The ethnographic semiotics of a suburban moral panic

This article describes Worth's notion of ethnographic semiotics as part of an overall strategy employing the anthropology of visual communication in ethnographic research focused on media portrayals of a suburban community during a moral panic over a concentrated number of teenage heroin overdose deaths. While the full-length ethnography details multiple media events surrounding the moral panic, the central place of one piece of print media is described in detail. This article served as a catalyst for the moral panic that occurred within the suburb, facilitated community response, and became a template for further national media coverage in the United States. In addition, the article became an instrumental research tool for elicitation among informants during ethnographic research. The overall study and employment of Worth's ethnographic semiotics serve as a bridge between foundational studies in the anthropology of visual communication and contemporary methodologies employed in media ethnography.

Holding Environment as Home

Holding Environment as Home

Security, media and multicultural citizenship

This special issue reports on a collaborative UK research project which examined how new security challenges are constituted in the intersecting relationships between political and military actors, news producers, news representations and discourses, and news audiences. This article introduces the ethnographic reports which follow, and describes the theoretical premises and methodological strategies of the research. It outlines an innovative, multi-disciplinary methodology - `Integrated Multidisciplinary Media Analysis' - which integrates Collaborative Media Ethnography (a novel method in itself) with institutional and textual analysis. This combination of mutually informing approaches affords unique insights into social and cultural processes. The research process began with explorations of how public knowledge and understanding of security issues relate to and are shaped by everyday cultures of media practice, the subject of the following reports. Combined with the findings of researchers investigating the perceptions and working practices of security-policy and media professionals, and others working on the textual analysis of salient news broadcasts, our study reaches three main conclusions. First, that ritualized interactions between policymakers, journalists and 'citizen audiences' constitute the media-security nexus as a 'battlespace' of mutual disrespect and suspicion. Second, that this exacerbates the marginalization and racialization of many ethnic minority groups but in particular British Muslims, who face declining prospects for multicultural citizenship. Third, that security policymakers must struggle to find public legitimacy in view of the growing scepticism and hostility of national and diasporic news media and audiences.