Digital ethnography: Possibility or reality?

Abstract

Digital ethnography has adherents and opponents; however, we currently live in a reality where the material and the digital are undeniably part of the same environment in which we constantly move and through which we find new forms and spaces of socialization. So, is it valid, real and possible to use a research method such as digital ethnography in rigorous scientific research? We believe it is; furthermore, we highlight that as it occurs with other digital studies when they happen to approach objects of study constituted in online social environments; there is clearly a valuable opportunity, not only to implement innovative methods and to question traditional conceptual and analytical categories, but also, to experience a new way of executing the role of the researcher, navigating in a Cyberspace full of human social manifestations, but which requires developing very particular skills to be accepted in it and most importantly to gradually understand its functioning throughout digital investigative praxis.

Keywords: Ethnography; Cyberspace; Digital Ethnography.