Digital Anthropology: How Ethnography Can Improve Online Research

Ray Pettit

As the concept of "listening to" and "understanding" people in their "natural" environment occupies a larger portion of marketing and advertising research thinking, it seems appropriate that techniques and methods from anthropology would blossom.

Digital Anthropology: How Ethnography Can Improve Online Research

Ray Pettit

The Advertising Research Foundation

As the concept of “listening to” and “understanding”people in their “natural” environment occupies a larger portion of marketing and advertising research thinking, it seems appropriate that techniques and methods from anthropology would blossom. Robert V. Kozinets captures a powerful facet of this in Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online.

Kozinets, a professor of marketing at Toronto’s York University, has pulled together an impressive textbook that presents—in a clear, straightforward manner—how the methods and techniques of ethnography can be applied to the study of...

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