What’s this Chapter About?
This chapter is a philosophical essay on how digital ethnography can shed light upon hate and self-harm, especially when it brings people to death. To do so, we will find a (non-mathematical) common denominator, those few pivotal ideas the issue weighs around. Then, we’ll combine them in order to find easy principles that are usually obscured. To begin with, we’ll need accurate definitions for the key terms used and putting them in context as we found them in a way that highlights the importance of topics such as suicide, bioterrorism, and cyber-harassment.
Before anything else, the author will try to find a digital ethnography definition suitable for the rest of the chapter. Digital ethnography is an online, systematic and mostly qualitative research on the subjective cultural phenomena in the digital plane -it means ethnography by digital means. Digital ethnography is also known by many other names that may or may not imply a subtle variation regarding the author such as: ethnography, virtual ethnography, online ethnography, webnography, etc. Whatever the case may be, digital ethnography implies a hands-on approach that goes on people-building’s stage and raises questions about how these identities are negotiated and cultural practices enacted in a technologically mediated world (Kaur-Gill & Dutta, 2017). So much so that digital ethnography wraps itself. For example, Michael Wesch, who in 2009 was an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, received over a hundred applications for his graduate course in ‘digital ethnography’ from around the world, but his course didn’t exist: people following his YouTube channel wanted more and missed a work group with a course (Shaffner et al., 2017, p. iii). Social media, however, may unmake collective action if its logic is imposed on unready or reluctant organizations (Özkula, 2021).
Digital ethnography has appeared in a time in which telephones, televisions, computers, swatches, appliances and even streets are converging in the Internet while financiarism surges and the West declines, which means an existential change for the most people (Shaffner et al., 2017, p. iii; Han, 2015, 2020). On the other hand, not everything is breaking new. Digital ethnography shows, just like in the Pacific Islands regions’ case, that digitalization may happen on traditional human webs (Stiefvater, 2015). Come what may, new cultural phenomena get unlocked for digital ethnography research as the digital domain spreads up to the point that, for example, such a human activity as play can be now understood as a system of control and surveillance over millions of gamers around the globe (Shen, 2015).
Multi-screen life and having an online and offline identity became the new normal for most people in G20 countries during the 2010s and new countries everywhere have joined this list since then (Deniz, 2013). All this (human) Big Data requires humanistic disciplines such as digital ethnography and sociology to find its context, substance and meaning (Hobbs et al., 2014, p. 35). Thus, digital ethnography is, mainly, not a knowledge about the world but about how different cultures and subcultures produce, in turn, this knowledge (Hjorth et al., 2017). It leads us to the question of methodology, methods and uses of digital ethnography.