What Is Netnography?

Netnography is ethnography adapted to online communities. The marketing researcher Robert Kozinets introduced the term in the 1990s to describe studying a community through the conversation it produces on the internet, in the way an ethnographer studies a village by living in it.

How it is done

A netnographer chooses a community: a forum, a subreddit, a fan group. They spend time in it, read what members write to each other, keep field notes, and interpret what they find in its cultural context. Some netnographers participate. Others only observe.

The result is what Clifford Geertz called thick description: an account of what people do and of what it means to them.

What it is good at

Netnography reads people where they were not asked anything. Nobody recruited the members of a forum, and nobody is paying them to talk. That removes the largest distortion in staged qualitative research, which is the presence of the researcher.

It is also deep. A good netnography understands one community from the inside.

Where it runs out

Depth in one place is also the limit. The researcher chooses the community, decides which threads matter and selects the quotes. A reader of the study cannot tell how much of the wider conversation was left out, or whether the chosen community is typical of anything.

This is the cherry-picking problem every qualitative method has. On the open web, where the material is effectively unlimited, it gets worse.

How social intelligence differs

We share netnography's starting point: unprompted conversation, read by people who interpret it. Three things are different.

• Coverage. We do not start from one community. We collect across the platforms where a category lives and read to saturation, the point where new sources stop producing new patterns.
• A map before the reading. The Reading Machine places the whole corpus in a semantic space. The analyst can see the centre of the conversation and its edges, and can show how much of it has been read. We wrote about this in Making Mushy Qual Mathematical.
• What it is for. A netnography usually ends in a description. Our discovery phase ends in an architecture of constructs, tensions and vocabulary that a survey can be built on.

The reading itself has not changed. It is still done by people.