Digital ethnography: The next wave in understanding the consumer experience

Design Management Journal,  Spring 2003  by Masten, Davis L,  Plowman, Tim M P

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Business discovers ethnography

During the past five years or so, ethnography has been widely embraced (and to a degree uncritically co-opted) by the business world, and various attempts have been made to reconfigure its techniques to suit business purposes. But because these reconfigurations are still based upon the ethnographic methods of anthropologists like Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Alfred Kroeber, and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown-practitioners whose work is nearly a century old-innovation within commercial ethnography is limited to its application in novel contexts. Moreover, commercial ethnography as it is traditionally practiced means large-scale, complex projects, usually involving a multidisciplinary team made up of ethnographers, technologists, psychologists, and the like. These projects are typically done for short periods of time, given that it is very costly to establish behaviors and accompanying analyses over periods of much longer duration. Although Cheskin and a few other firms are fortunate enough to be involved in large-scale, global ethnographies, these studies, often done simultaneously in numerous countries, are frequently impractical for the industry at large.

After developing a thorough inventory of ethnographic techniques appropriate to business-based ethnography, Cheskin divided them into three categories of data-gathering: self-reporting, passive observation, and participant observation. We then developed digital equivalents to these traditional methods, as well as entirely new methods of data capture.

Introduction to Digital Ethnography

In essence, Digital Ethno is the modern, digital equivalent of traditional, Malinowskian ethnographic forms. The critical distinction is that while traditional ethnographers physically immerse themselves in distinct places and their cultures, digital ethnographers capitalize on wired and wireless technologies to extend classic ethnographic methods, like participant observation, beyond geographic, as well as temporal, boundaries. This method is ideally suited to documenting the fluidity and flexibility already distinguishing contemporary cultures and communities. Participants communicate their experience via the Internet and other digital technologies. Digital ethnographers gather these details, whether they're in the form of words, images, or audio files, and determine their significance as they are played out in the context of participants' lives.

Despite the fact that there is now a growing academic literature and practice of what has been called hypermedia ethnography or cybersociology, we have largely had to forge our own way in developing Digital Ethno.2 Much of this previous work concerns online ethnography using data-gathering methods such as site perusal and online interviewing. These are generally text-based techniques transplanted on to the Internet. They are not inherently digital.

Digital Ethno concentrates more on how ethnographic data gathering can be extended to the Internet and wireless communication devices in new and creative ways, especially in light of recent software, hardware, and protocol adoption. An extranet and WLAN can be key components in the task of data gathering and analysis. An extranet, for example, can serve as a place to download and upload data quickly and easily and provide a virtual locale and repository for the project at hand.