Digital Ethnography: Theories, Model and Case Studies

The ethnography is a non-standard methodology utilized to study the culture and the interactions of social actors in a cultural context. With the development of the Web were born the first ethnographic applications to the cyberspace and currently this methodology has not yet defined a methodological framework and has taken different labels: Virtual Ethnography, Ethnography Network, Ethnography digital (Murthy, Sociology 42:837–855, 2008) and Netnography (Kosinets, Netnography: The Marketer’s Secret Weapon. How Social Media Understanding Drives Innovation, 2010). The aim of this chapter is to define the boundaries of digital ethnography. Finally, with the help of the comparison between empirical cases we will try to understand which are critical points, limits and research prospects for digital ethnographers.