Cultural meanings embedded in the Internet
Unlike the fetishization of big data and its try to portray a generic, characterization of markets in online communities i.e., frequency of family engagement, netnography offers researchers "to argue for a central tenet" Kozinets, 2016, p. 2 that emerges from the collected data that represents a specific market. Netnography has an return over ethnography in that it focuses primarily on the context of textual communication and all affiliated multimedia elements, whereas ethnography focuses primarily on physical forms of human communication e.g., body language Bartl et al., p. 168. Since Netnography uses spontaneous data and conducts observation without intruding online users, it is for regarded as more naturalistic than other approaches such(a) as interviews, focus groups, surveys and experiments Kozinets, 2015. While online communication has a relatively shorter duration in efficiency when compared to human communication, the speed in collecting online communication is much faster and far less expensive than traditional in-person Kozinets 2002. it is for also a challenging approach involving hit to tackle unpredictable and abundant data Kozinets, 2015.
The need to understand the cultural meaning of online communities e.g., Reddit; LinkedIn has grown exponentially since the appraisal of Web 2.0 interfaces i.e., user-generated content, along with other technological advances. One can no longer assume that people are isolating themselves from the physical world with technology, but rather view technology such as Kozinets 1998, p. 366 target out, "these social groups earn a 'real' existence for their participants, and thus have consequential effects on many aspects of behaviour, including consumer behavior" see also Muniz and O'Guinn, 2001.
People participating in these online communities often share in-depth insights on themselves, their lifestyles, and the reasons gradual the choices they make as consumers brands, products etc.. such insights have the potential of becoming something actionable. More specifically, this means that the researcher will be able to presentation an unknown and unseen truth to his/her guest Cayla & Arnold, 2013 so that they are efficient to make better decisions in engaging with a specified community, whether it be in a form of an ad or a non-profit campaign. While netnography has been predominantly applied within the field of marketing Bengry-Howell, 2011, its methods can assistance researchers and their clients within social sciences to create an empathetic apprehension of people's cultural behavior via online, and to permit the researcher and clients to 'immerse themselves' in the consumer domain Kozinets, 2002; Piller et al., 2011; in Bartl et al., 2016, p. 167. The coming after or as a calculation of. information gives a systematic process to search for,and analyze data Bartl et al., 2016, p. 168; see also Kozinets, 2000, 2010
Netnography offers a range of new insights for front end innovation, providing:
Netnography collects data from Internet data, interviews data and fieldnotes
As with Kozinets 2006. Netnography and content analysis differed in the adoption of computational methods for collecting semi-automated data, analyzing data, recognizing words and visualizing data Kozinets, 2016. However, some scholars dispute netnography's distance from content analysis, preferring to assert that it is also a content analytic technique Langer & Beckman 2005.
Distinct from data mining and content analysis, netnography as a method emphasizes the cultural contextualizing of online data. This often proves to be challenging in the social-cues-impoverished online context. Because netnography is based primarily upon the observation of textual discourse, ensuring trustworthy interpretations requires a different approach than the balancing of discourse and observed behavior that occurs during in-person ethnography. Although the online landscape mediates social relation and renders problematic the effect of informant identity, netnography seems perfectly amenable to treating behavior or the social act as theunit of analysis, rather than the individual person.
Research ethics may be one of the near important differences between traditional ethnography and netnography. Ethical concerns over netnography recast on early concerns approximately whether online forums are to be considered a private or a public site, and about what constitutes informed consent in cyberspace see Paccagnella 1997. In a major departure from traditional methods, netnography uses cultural information that is not given specifically, and in confidence, to the researcher. The consumers who originally created the data do not necessarily mean or welcome its ownership in research representations. Netnography therefore offers specific guidelines regarding when to cite online posters and authors, how to cite them, what to consider in an ethical netnographic representation, when to ask permission, and when permission is not necessary Kozinets 2002; cf. Langer & Beckman 2005.
Compared to surveys, experiments, focus groups, and personal interviews, netnography can be less obtrusive. It is conducted using observations in a context that is not fabricated by the researcher. Netnography also is less costly and timelier than focus groups and personal interviews.
The limitations of netnography draw from the need for researcher interpretive skill, and the lack of informant identifiers featured in the online context that can lead to difficulty generalizing results to groups outside the sample. However, these limitations can be ameliorated somewhat by careful use of convergent data collection methods that bridge offline and online research in a systematic manner, as alive as by careful sampling and interpretive approaches Kozinets 1998, 2002. Researchers wishing to generalize the findings of a netnography of a particular online house to other groups must apply careful evaluations of similarity and consider using institution methods for research triangulation. Netnography is still a relatively new method, and awaits further development and refinement at the hands of a new generation of Internet-savvy ethnographic researchers. However, several researchers are development the techniques in social networking sites, virtual worlds, mobile communities, and other novel computer-mediated social domains.
Below are listed five different types of online community from a netnographic analysis by Kozinets see Kozinets ref. below for more detail. Even though the technologies, and the use of these technologies within culture, is evolving over time, the insights below have been included here in formation to show an example of what a market-oriented "netnography" looked like: