Ethnography in Digital Spaces: Ethnography of Virtual Worlds, Netnography, and Digital Ethnography

With the rise of Web 2.0, the Internet has become not only a means of mass communication, but also a means of mass consumption. Millions of users surf social media daily looking for information about consumer goods and to shop (eMarketer 2013). Thanks to the interactive possibili ties of social media, online consumers go further than looking, discussing brands and products among themselves, proposing evaluations and modifications in use, using them as vehicles to create communities or to express their own identity; in a word, they produce culture through con sumer goods (Belk 1988). It is in the strategic interest of companies to take note of the production of culture from the bottom up for two reasons: to link user-driven innovation to their business and marketing processes (Carù and Cova 2007) and to bridge the gap between the meanings that companies assign to their brand and products and those actually pro duced by consumers (Walsh 2011). the most appropriate method to understand the culture that consum ers produce within their daily life practices on social media is undoubtedly web-based ethnography. In the last few years, various styles of web-based ethnography have been developed, each of them identified by different labels: “virtual ethnography” (Hine 2000), “Internet ethnography” (Miller and Slater 2001), “netnography” (Kozinets 2002), “cyber‑ethnography” (Teli et al. 2007), “digital ethnography” (Murthy 2008), and “ethnography of the virtual worlds” (Boellstorff et al. 2012). Often, these terms are used as synonyms; sometimes rightly so, some other times wrongly so. Never theless, my aim in this chapter is not so much to bring order to this termi nological jungle once and for all; more modestly, I would like to focus on three particular styles of web-based ethnography: the ethnography of vir tual worlds, netnography, and digital ethnography, because each is an ethnographic style grounded on distinct theoretical and methodological paradigms, and each represents a trajectory for ethnographic engagement in business arenas. ethnograPhy of VIrtual worl