Ethnography in digital spaces: Ethnography of virtual worlds, netnography, & digital ethnography

Abstract

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 possibilities 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 consumer 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 produced by consumers (Walsh 2011).