Doing Field Projects

17 Digital Ethnography (1) Social Media

This project examines social media in a broad way. Social media encompass various apps, platforms, techniques (visual and verbal), and styles. You have the opportunity to choose which of these many approaches you wish to examine, or you may conduct a number of different exercises. You can also choose between numerous possibilities within the social media world, such as cancel culture, influencers, online communities, selfie culture, and more. The emphasis in these exercises is on contributing an ethnographic perspective on the “social” nature of social media.

Learning Goals

1. Understand the precise social nature of social mediaExplore ways to document these media ethnographically.

All media are social insofar as media communicate or express something somewhere. And by media, we include not only mass media or the Internet, but other technologies and aesthetic expressions that mediate our relationships with one another and the world. The social theorist Raymond Williams (1983 [1976]) considers the history and etymology of the word “media” in his entry of the same name in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. The use of “medium” predates “media.” A medium is “an intervening substance or agency.” Language, then, is a medium. So, too, is Fountain, the readymade created by Marcel Duchamp in 1917 that represented a new form of artistic expression and changed the Western art world in incalculable ways. Now let’s jump forward – a lot ...