Making Meaning of the Meanings We Make Online: An Interview with Robert Kozinets (Part Three)

A key concern in ethnographic research over the past few decades has been with positionality. In what ways does it matter if an ethnographer (or here, netnographer) is a part of, a participant in, the culture they study. How would you address this in your work, especially as you try to bridge between qualitative and quantitative approaches to consumer research?

Well, I had my postmodern stage, my panicky crisis of representation phase, and got it out of my system pretty early. But I kept the hermeneutics of it close to heart. I think most everything I do now from a methodological perspective, and everything you now see in the most recent edition of the netnography book depicted as interpretive data operations, all of that comes from a place of hermeneutic and introspective practice that is fundamentality based on a phenomenological appreciation for researcher positionality. I think netnography is shot through now, especially since my second book, with genuine attempts at rhetorical reflectivity. The whole emphasis on “auto-netnography”, which people like Liz Howard, the education nursing scholar who been developing the method in her dissertation and subsequent work, is based in this, and it is growing. This is about netnographers not just being reflexive in some methodological sense, but taking that to the level of being reflective, being seriously and deeply contemplative an axiological, a moral, and an intellectual sense. 

            As I write in the third edition (Kozinets 2020, 44-5), I was influenced by your early online ethnographies, in which you describe online discussions “that occur without direct control or intervention by the researcher” (Jenkins 1995, 53). So, it was not necessary to get in the fray, as it were, with every discussion, in order to hear these conversations and appreciate them, perhaps even to fully understand them. Even in person, we weren’t necessarily participating in every conversation we heard, or leading every discussion we recorded in our fieldnotes. At a Star Trek convention, for instance, I was often more comfortable sitting back, observing, and recording what I heard others say rather than socializing or asking questions (although I did plenty of both). 

When you boil it down, the idea of participation as it lives in ethnographic representation is based upon having a vantage point and making it rhetorically apparent. In netnography, that means having a point of view on these communicative events that involve you in the social, in the wider social experience, rather than necessarily being physically or even discursively active in some particular social field as you are in a typical in-person ethnography. So, when you read a recent netnography of mine, like the Networks of Desire netnography about food porn and food image sharing generally that I wrote with Rachel Ashman and Tony Patterson, you see that we try to blend together a lot of different perspectives through the research, but our own food and food image sharing habits aren’t included in the study. Being deeply engaged in a netnography means you keep some sort of record, some kind of creation, some notes about what you did, why you did it, what you found, what it made you think about, and so on. Engagement with the social can happen in many ways—intellectual, emotional, in your dreams, through conversations with people in your family and social group, as you scribble your notes and play with ideas. Record it, call it an immersion journal, and you have the raw material to engage with your positionality. Your online data gathering becomes able to handle the structuring of an intersectional case study interpretation that we commonly link to high quality netnography. 

In describing the terminological shifts between ethnography and netnography, you suggest a shift from “participation” to “engagement.” What’s at stake for you in this terminological shift? I would have argued that part of what the online world allows are deeper forms of participation within the culture rather than the relatively superficial forms of engagement historically discussed in audience research. But you seem to put different valiances of these two terms. 

What is at stake for me is exhaustion. I am flat out tired of trying to extend in person metaphors for in-person social gatherings to the massive array of digital possibilities we have to socialize and be a part of the social. Technologically mediated forms of sociality are blooming, like a massive gender reveal party explosion that has burned up a lot of prior intellectual investment, including the word “participation”. In an in-person ethnography, we know what it means to participate. At Burning Man, they have a rule: no spectators. So, you have to wear or not wear or do or share, do something outlandish, something active at least, don’t just lean back and watch at a consumers’ social distance from others and at a pathological distance from your own creative empathy. I had to be careful in my interviews and observations to be a part of the festival, because of the no spectators rule. If I wasn’t doing something overtly participative, people would have confronted me as a “lookie loo”, a tourist who is just there to gape, to take: a typical consumer, rather than an active creator of my own and others’ experiences.

But there is no analog like this that is practical in the online world of social media. Not everyone can be posting on every site, conversing with a particular crowd in public, because most people who go to those platforms or sites do not converse at all. What do you do when conversation is not allowed, or when it’s a blog dominated by the voice of the blogger? We aren’t in the socially flatter world of the bulletin board or forum any more. So, what is participation in this context? I prefer simple words native to the online realm, like engagement. What is at stake with that move is that people might confuse this new notion of engagement with the social media influencers’ engagement and reach. That’s not it. Engagement is about contextually appropriate types of participation, of course. I don’t mean to disrespect the word, or certainly leave out the ideas of participatory culture. But I do want to defamiliarize the term a bit in terms as we move the process of netnography further and further away from the old travelogue view of ethnography. It’s moving away from anthropology, towards computer science, towards communication, toward social psychology, it has been for years. 

            Certainly, hanging out online with a particular group, whether they are coffee aficionados, Lower Decks fans, or Pilipino European immigrants, learning their language, posting messages, participating with them regularly, is a very useful type of netnography. But, I don’t think that is the only way to do a netnography. There are plenty of great netnographies, like your own online work, where the authors describe it as “observational”. It’s a big tent, netnography. There’s room for lots of stuff, as long as it builds on prior methodological work, learns from it, extends it in specific and useful ways, and maintains the focus on empathy. I think the absolute key is to emphasize positionality, researcher reflectivity, this interpretation of your own involvement and how it shapes your work. You can even engage spread out among the social nodes online. You can engage emotionally only, in your own body, and reflect on that, like Annette Markham does in Life Online when she describes her wrist and neck adjusting to the supposed disembodiment of the online world, and the physicality of cybersex. It’s about the quality of the qualitative inquiry, not just one particular technique or set of them that you use to get there.

You write in the book, “I must make a request. If you want to follow guidelines that revisit netnography’s ethical rules and empathetic stance on the study of sensitive research topics, then please do not call your work a netnography. Because netnography is defined by its adherence to general and agreed-upon procedures., a netnography revisited in this matter is definitely not a netnography. It is something else entirely. Ethical procedures are at the very heart of what a netnography is and what it does.” (185) So, how would you characterize the ethical stance that guides netnography. Are current IRB standards adequate for promoting those ethical commitments?

That statement was a reaction to some damaging research that tried to dial back ethical procedures on netnography by claiming it was just the same as any other content analysis. As for your question, I mean, it completely depends upon the IRB. A particular IRB is only as good as its members and its guiding institution and sometimes the researcher, who might just be a PhD student asking for approval of their first piece of research or their dissertation, needs to engage with them and educate them. There’s a lot of diversity out there, but in general, if you are asking whether a typical IRB can handle a typical netnography It think the answer is absolutely, they are doing it around the world at a very regular rate now. We do it here at USC all the time and they have made it a pretty seamless process almost from the very beginning. And my books are there to help all of the stakeholders navigate the complexities of the process. The first edition of the netnography text by SAGE included a lengthy guide to informed consent, a sample form, and advice for IRB approval. The second developed a very detailed ethical research section with even more detail about representational choices. The current edition goes much further and puts it all into an easy-to-follow flowchart that helps the researcher navigate the procedures needed to be compliant. It covers ethical challenges and how to respond to them in detailed tables of terms, linked to definitions, intermixed with the research procedures, from site selection through to research publication, and the ethics flow is now a part of the procedures from start to finish. Any of this is available for researchers to use, and for IRB and Human Subjects Ethics Review Committees to consult and interpret. It’s intended to make the rule of qualitative social media research ethics comprehensible and straightforward to follow. It shouldn’t be a philosophical minefield to conduct humane human subjects research. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to clarify what the standards are and how even beginners to this kind of research can follow them. So, yes, if someone chooses to go their own way on ethics, say by revealing sensitive person data or deceiving people, then please do not call it a netnography. Following the book’s ethics guidelines, along with the other things I have spoken about in this interview, is a big part of what I think makes a particular piece of research a netnography and not something else.