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

You take us step by step through different media platforms, from Reddit to Tumblr, and discuss the different traditions for writing about them. How important is platform specificity to doing Netnographic work? What are the implications of platform specificity for the ability to compare “online traces” across multiple online locations?

It’s incredibly important. In the same way you can’t really understand a particular human culture without understanding the constraints and influence of things like geography, climate, and technical skills, you need to understand the techno-social situation that surrounds online socialities. I think we are at a very early stage of conceptualizing this kind of comprehension. We’ve had quite a few Facebook and Twitter netnographies already, and it would be enormously interesting to me if someone were to look back at them as a group and track how the development of the particular affordances of the sites helped to create the types of cultural experiences and behaviors that were noted over time. I touch on it a little in the book, leaning on José van Dijck’s (2013) very useful Culture of Connectivitybook. But there’s much more that could be done. Peter Lugosi and Sarah Quinton coined the nice term “more-than-human netnography” to capture the idea that algorithms, platform affordances, AI, and other non-human actors and agencies should be included into netnographies. This work is also at a very early, but promising and exciting, stage. 

The second part of your question asks about whether and how we can compare traces about related topic and peoples across different platforms. It’s potentially very valuable to think about how context creates content online, or how medium influences message. Most netnographic research still rather unproblematically scoops up online traces from multiple platforms and then analyzes their content and meaning without much attention to the various contexts that created those traces—platform-specific, but also cultural, subcultural, socio-economic, historical. Those comparisons of circulations between what Mirca Madianou and Danny Miller call polymedia, the confederated bricolaged conglomerations of various platforms that people use in their panoply of communications and socialities with one another, are another very rich area for future investigation. Like many things, we are still beginning to ask the right questions and build our own understanding of the substantive and methodological implications of things like platform specificity and its impacts. 

So much industry work on the consumers of products or media properties assumes individual and autonomous decision-makers. Yet, you stress your borrowings from Cultural Studies which has historically concerned itself with collective behavoir. So, how do you explain to the industry why the social and cultural relations amongst consumers matter?

Look at the research I was involved with at both ESPN Zone and at The American Girl Place, both on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago, a few blocks from where I was teaching in the Kellogg School of Management’s Marketing program at the time. When John Sherry, Nina Diamond, Mary Ann McGrath, Adam Duhachek, Diana Storm, Benét DeBerry-Spence, Stefania Borghini, Al Muniz, and Krittinee Nuttavuthisit and I conducted that ethnographic retail research over several years, we were emphasizing the role of people’s imaginations, their fantasy lives, and the role that Disney branded cable channel celebrity, and sport cultures, and female perspective historical fiction and Mattel doll culture, played. Men might be ostensibly sitting in gigantic armchairs eating burgers and trying to watch 21 screens of sports at once, but they also were consuming sports narratives of history and heroism in which they were very active imaginative players. The same thing was true of young girls, their moms and grandmothers dining in the American Girl Store’s restaurants with their dolls. They were consuming notions of civility, of morality, of being grounded in history and traditions that meant something and in which they, themselves, were actively imagining and building that history.

My chosen field is consumer research, which is dominated by psychologists and economists and their paradigms and methodologies, but somewhat open to new approaches if they can deliver insights that business people find valuable. So we had a pioneers in our fields of consumer cultural research like Sidney Levy who were way ahead of the crowd in explaining brands, perhaps even inventing the word in its modern usage, according to Philip Kotler. They argued and still argue against the idea that consumers were somehow rational or autonomous in their decisions, rather than the super-social cultural critters we mostly know ourselves to be. 

After the internet become mainstream, it became a lot easier for me to explain to MBA students and business people what the meso level of analysis is and why it matters to them. The notion of brand communities identified a real feeling in the world of brand managers, that there was a chance to fully insert brands into people’s socialities. This expanded imaginative real estate really opened a lot of managers eyes and got them salivating. The business research world knew about it as soon as there were social monitoring services and software to automate the data as it became more voluminous and towards big data handling capacities.

What all that data said to managers was—here is an opportunity to study your consumers, to model their behavior in order to predict and nudge, test, experiment, predict and nudge again. The goal was the same thing it always has been for companies, to manage the customer experience. Industries and governance institutions, regulatory bodies, they were all about regulating human experience by placing it into the context of consumers, their needs, and consumption. What happened is that these was an assumption that the behaviors of unruly consumer tribes could be managed by invoking the C-word: community. So at the same time things were seeming a bit out of control with the internet, there were countervailing discourses in business academe which were saying that people were being brought together by brands, that they loved brands, that their mutual adoration and devotion to brands was bringing society itself together. If you are a brand manager who has been taught in your business school that building the sociocultural and motivational architecture of consumers’ demand-based mentalities is part of what marketers do, then this is music to your ears. 

So much of today’s social media assumes and facilitates transnational communication, yet markets have historically been understood within national boundaries. What can you tell us about the tension between global media circulation and national specificities in doing netnographic research?

Almost from the start, people started doing netnography wherever they were. The technologies were well in place around 2005 when a few academics in a few fields mostly from the North America, Western Europe, and Oceania began to get their netnographies published in good journals. Pretty quickly, there were people doing netnography as consumer culture research type projects in tourism, then game studies, then sociology, then nursing, in a variety of countries and regions. It grew throughout marketing and consumer research scholarship worldwide, in a bunch of different languages and in many different online contexts. The netnographic record is like global digital archaeology. And its global nature reflects a whole bunch of complex flows of energy, messages, ideologies, identities and sanctioned actions. 

University of Chicago anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s notion of scapes captures the kind of complex and underdetermined interrelationship of these complex cultural flows that many of us observe in online world today. I think Appadurai kind of nails it for the ages, for me at least, with mediascapes, technoscapes, ethnoscapes, idioscapes, finanscapes, and the rest of them. So, if you wanted to talk about media circulation, I’d point to those two things. That Appadurai draws our attention to the varieties of flows among and within those nations. There are probably more similarities to people living in big cities today around the world than there are with people in big cities and small towns or remote regions within the countries they live in today, and that is because they get similar flows of media, finance, technologies, and because of the directionality of some of these flows. That we can both maintain the complexity in rich description, but also abstract to important guiding elements and tendencies—this is what Appadurai’s work suggests, at least for me. 

And the last thing I would point out is the global nature of netnography and its research, almost from the beginning. The very early work of people like Eileen Fischer, Hope Schau, Cele Othnes, Michelle Neilson, Pauline Maclaran, Andrea Hemetsberger, Kristine de Valck, Ingeborg Kleppe, Marylouise Caldwell, Rachel Ashman, Mina Askit, Daiane Scaraboto, Richard Kedzior, Jonnas Rokka and the massive involvement of other Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Brazilians, Australians, Turkish people, British, and Europeans of many stripes and feathers. Netnography has only recently spread to The New World of medical research and the Far East. Many of those applications are partnerships, teamwork between people doing netnographic kinds of interpretation in their own countries, on local data, and building it into projects, presentations, and articles. 

From my vantage point, the medium of research, the medium of netnography, is bringing people together. I still believe that some forms of technology unite us, and when we collectively cohabitate the many forms of storyworld we do, then we form alliances. When I do netnographic research, when I detect “real people” are talking on social media, there is lots of sincere public communication out there than seems authentic. And I often see them doing good things for each other, and mostly acting as good humans. We all have our faults, and there are huge massive problems with the infrastructure itself, the systems of manipulation around them, all of the stuff that communication and cultural studies tells us is locked into the system. But most people, that I see in my netnography research still have some of that sociality we saw in different kinds of fan communities. There are gifts of different kinds being exchanged almost constantly. And for me, this says a lot about the current state of the world—on the whole, people are good, but the systems built up to manage them are unfair, unwieldy, and often retrogressive in their intent.