Digital ethnography: The next wave in understanding the consumer experience

Design Management Journal, Spring 2003 by Masten, Davis L, Plowman, Tim M P

One complaint frequently heard about the potential of Digital Ethno is that the bandwidth is too narrow and thus, researchers miss the critical aural, gestural, and kinesthetic cues of face-to-face interaction. As the price of remote sensing devices has fallen, so too will the barriers to getting at content-rich data. And this will happen sooner in commercial ethnography than in academic ethnography. The innovations that are occurring on the data-gathering end are equally present in terms of deliverables:

The potential for integrating visual and written media within the same technological environment carries significant implications. It allows ethnographers to make the step from thinking of the visual merely as illustrative of argumentation spelled out through the printed word, to seeing it as itself constitutive of meaning. This is an observation that visual ethnographers have been trying to press home for years.... In fact, we need to consider seriously what hypermedia can do that a well-illustrated book or a well-produced film cannot. There are potential gains to be derived from exploring how ethnographic representation can simultaneously be a verbal and a pictorial, a visual and an aural activity.3

While the above paragraph focuses on academic ethnography as product, there is no reason why similar innovations cannot take place with regard to data gathering for commercial purposes. The market is awash with software and shareware that lends itself to the process (MacroMedia, NVivo, Shockwave, PhotoShop, Media Maker, Director, iMovie, CoolEdit, and so forth).

Valentine's Day: A case study

In February 2000, Cheskin piloted the first nonproprietary Digital Ethno project that was done for public consumption. The project focused on Valentine's Day-a common cultural event, one shared by North Americans throughout the United States and yet often hotly contested in its cultural meanings and personal significance. In order to test the method, we selected eight people from the San Francisco Bay Area-six involved in relationships and two unattached-in order to digitally observe their Valentine's Day preparations and practices. In particular, we focused on participants' attitudes toward and behaviors associated with contemporary Valentine's Day icons: hearts, candy, flowers, and kisses.

The team included two ethnographers. We used a wide variety of techniques including email, cell phones, digital cameras, chatrooms, online questionnaires, and digitized audio diaries, among others to gather the data. While such a study would have been highly appropriate for Tokyo or Rio de Janeiro, where distance and time differences are major components, we decided to keep the complexity to a minimum and scaled the project accordingly. A week before Valentine's Day, we asked the respondents to fill out an online questionnaire gauging their reactions to the four icons. We then sent them prompts via email over the course of the next week that asked them to engage in numerous activities documenting their Valentine's Day experience.