In Unit 1, we introduced the concept of digital communities. As stated by John Herrman, New York Times columnist, in 2018: “The internet of old – composed largely of thousands of scattered communities populated by people who shared interests, identities, causes or hatreds – has been mostly paved over by the social-media giants”. Communities still exist – but perhaps more common are the paved highways of dispersed mass mediums offered by the social-media giants (Kozinets, 2020). Instead of community, in the social media environment, Kozinets proposes we employ the notion of consociality: “the physical and/or virtual co-presence of social actors in a network, providing an opportunity for social interaction between them” (Perren & Kozinets, 2018, p. 23). In this way, consociality is more about contextual fellowship (what we share), than a certain identity boundary (who we are).

But despite the rise of social-media giants and various fleeting forms of fleeting social interaction, communities do still exist. Hence, you may want to consider two possible points of departure for conducting your netnographic investigation: 

1) community-based Netnography, using the notion of community, focused on interactions characterized by (lasting) communal ties and practices; 

2) consociality-based Netnography, using the notion of consociality, focusing on interactions characterized by (fleeting) connections in contextual fellowships. 

In the first case, it is advisable to engage mainly in active approaches, that is, interactive data-collection procedures, to engage with the participants of a certain community. In the second case, passive approaches, such as selecting and archiving online traces using investigative data-collection procedures, can be enough to conduct a netnographic study (but active approaches may often be useful). In both cases, you will have to negotiate an entry, present yourself and secure informed consent as advised by ethical guidelines (see also Unit II). 

Regardless if you choose to focus on community-based Netnography or consociality-based Netnography, you will probably need to follow the participants across different sites and services. Following the participants, data can be produced in several ways: from social media traces, interactions, interviews, and researcher experiences. Kozinets (2020) describes three fundamental elements of Netnography that also reflect three different procedures for data collection: investigation, interaction, and immersion. Next in this unit, you will learn more about how the stance of participant observation during fieldwork combines investigative data-collection operations (the selective process of saving online traces from social interactions) with interactive data-collection operations (the result of some sort of interaction between the researcher and participants), and immersive data-collection operations (recording detailed descriptions and reflections in fieldnotes)

The research question(s) guiding the study and the nature of the field will decide if the study may focus almost exclusively on investigative operations and archive material, if immersive operations and field notes will be more useful, or if a combination of all three procedures can be used (we will return to the issue of active and passive approaches in the second half of this lesson). 

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References

• Kozinets, R.V. (2020). Netnography: The essential guide to qualitative social media research (3 ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
• Perren, R. & Kozinets, R. V. (2018). Lateral exchange markets: How social platforms operate in a networked economy. Journal of Marketing, 82(1), 20-36. https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.14.0250