Two key takeaways in doing ethical netnographic research are understanding informed consent and minimizing harm, two key issues we introduced on the previous page (see 2.1.2). Concerning the role of the researcher, you should note some specifics of Netnography as what you bring to the field and your interaction with the field and how that relates to the importance of transparency and reflexivity. Reflexivity as what you bring to the field means the pre-conceptions - that your background matters, as well as your research interest and theoretical perspective.

Reflexivity as interaction with the field means being able to use an abductive approach. This entails being reflexive about visibility in the field, which you can relate to in the section on participant observation (see Unit III). A good question to guide this reflexivity is to ask yourself how you, as a researcher, may affect the field. Another guiding aspect is reflecting on how you build relations with informants and how that pertains to transparency and trust, balancing closeness with distance. This means you may become friendly, but you are still a researcher. Keeping a journal on reflexive research ethics in relation to Netnography is a good practical way to keep thinking about ethics, articulating it and analysing it. Hence, making it part of the research material.  

 

This moves us to another question: Does this mean then that everything is netnographic material? To answer this, you will find yourself in the need to distinguish different types of netnographic material. As we will discuss further in Unit III, there are various netnographic materials: archival, elicited, and field notes. The link to ethics is that you can consider different ethical perspectives on different types of netnographic material. 

As stated above, research ethics concern informed consent and protection from harm, which is also part of some legal perspectives. GDPR is an acronym for General Data Protection Regulation. It is a privacy and security law drafted and passed by the European Union (EU). A good website to learn more about GDPR is https://gdpr.eu/what-is-gdpr/. GDPR matters to Netnography because it asks questions about online social interactions as private or public. 

Creative Commons is a well-known public copyright license for the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A good website to learn more about Creative Commons is https://creativecommons.org. Creative Commons is good to add to your thinking about GDPR in asking questions about what data and publications of the data could be shared and not. 

Exercise: What can GDPR mean for netnographic research?

Read the article by Jeffrey, Ashraf and Paris (2021), and reflect on what they argue GDPR means to Netnography and how that matters for future netnographic studies. Consider the topic you have started working on as part of the learning scenario introduced in Unit I. Make field notes in your field journal to support your analytical thinking and create an important record for the netnographic inquiry you are interested in.

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References

• Jeffrey, H. L., Ashraf, H., & Paris, C. M. (2021). Hanging out on Snapchat: disrupting passive covert Netnography in tourism research. Tourism Geographies, 23(1-2), 144-161. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2019.1666159
• Kozinets, R.V. (2020). Netnography: The essential guide to qualitative social media research (3 ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Chapter 6.
• Markham, A. N., & Baym, N. K. (2009). Internet inquiry: conversations about method. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.