The Digital Mess of a Digital Ethnography

Abstract

Digital ethnographers acknowledge that online spaces are always co-produced within the social, political, material and sensory – never distinct from what we may think of as ‘offline’. However, in documenting our fieldwork (e.g. fieldnotes, screenshots and recordings) and representing our findings in research outputs, scholars tend to draw more firm boundaries around our object of study. The excess, the digital life on the margins of digital ethnography often entangled with the fieldwork site, is cut away to present a neatened case study that can be analysed. In this chapter, I examine the excess and ‘unrelated’ screenshots I took during a digital ethnography project in 2020 to explore what these ‘offcuts’ can offer in contextualising my encounters with the short-form video app TikTok. Over nine months in 2020, I observed healthcare workers using the app to share health information and analyse their content. At the same time, with the pandemic unfolding across the world, I was scrolling through the news on Twitter, watching press conferences from health authorities, sharing funny TikToks with friends and receiving information in a family group chat. This layering of everyday experiences of the pandemic forms part of how I sensed and experienced TikTok content during my digital ethnography. I examine these ‘excess’ screenshots to think through the always more-than-digital boundaries of digital ethnographic fieldwork. I reflect on the messy entanglement of digital ethnography, where my own digital practices – intensified by COVID-19 lockdown conditions – and the broader conditions they emerged from, became inevitably enmeshed with my research practice.

Citation

Southerton, C. (2024), "The Digital Mess of a Digital Ethnography", Hendry, N.A. and Richardson, I. (Ed.) Data Excess in Digital Media Research, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 39-53. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80455-944-420241004