Digital Ethnography in an Age of Information Warfare: Notes from the Field

Abstract

In this article we engage the nature and role of the Internet in ethnographic research and reflect on how ethnographic methodologies may be adapted when researching digital forms of communication. We further consider how recent shifts in both the production and dissemination of textual discourse in networked media environments complicates conventional approaches to digital ethnography. Drawing on examples from our field research, our principal objective is to apply a Foucauldian structural perspective to David Altheide’s ethnographic content analysis to better contextualize the study of digital communiqué in a cultural moment where discourses are increasingly surveilled, modified, censored and weaponized.