Published: May 16, 2025

In a world where much of our social interaction, identity formation, and information exchange happens online, social media ethnography has emerged as a powerful method for exploring how people live, relate, and make sense of the world in virtual spaces. At its core, social media ethnography is the adaptation of traditional ethnographic practices—long-term observation, immersion in communities, and rich, qualitative description—to online platforms like TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). Rather than entering a physical village or institution, the researcher steps into a hashtag community, a fandom group, or a forum thread, observing how participants communicate, collaborate, and construct meaning. It’s not just about what people post or share—it’s about understanding the context, motivations, and social norms behind those actions.

Robert Kozinets, who coined the term “netnography,” defines it as “a specialized form of ethnography adapted to the unique computer-mediated contingencies of today’s social worlds” (Kozinets, 2015, p. 80). Through this approach, researchers can generate insights that go beyond surface-level metrics like likes and shares. Instead, they uncover the deeper stories of how information travels, how communities police their boundaries, and how users navigate issues like privacy, authenticity, and misinformation.

For LIS researchers, social media ethnography enables the study of everyday information practices in naturalistic yet richly layered settings. Consider, for example, how teens use TikTok to share study tips, discuss mental health, or spread book recommendations—behaviors that mirror traditional library functions but play out in entirely new formats. Or how communities of color create and curate digital knowledge around health, politics, or cultural memory on platforms like YouTube and Instagram. These are all forms of information engagement that LIS scholars can be investigating.

Conducting social media ethnography in LIS often begins with identifying a relevant community or practice. For example, a researcher might focus on “BookTok,” a vibrant TikTok subcommunity where readers share reviews, fan art, and themed book lists. The next steps involve immersing oneself in that digital space—observing interactions, taking detailed fieldnotes, and collecting posts or comments as data. Crucially, ethical considerations must remain front and center. Scholars like Markham and Buchanan (2012) have emphasized that not all publicly accessible content is ethically available for research. The researcher’s visibility, the expectations of the community, and the potential for harm all demand careful, ongoing reflection.

Methodologically, this work can be slow, messy, and iterative. Social media platforms are in constant flux, shaped by algorithmic tweaks, platform governance, and user migration. Yet this instability is also what makes them such rich sites for research inquiry. Through social media ethnography, researchers can trace how digital literacies are developed, how trust is built or broken in online environments, and how marginalized voices use digital tools to speak, organize, and resist.

Perhaps most importantly, this method bridges academic research with lived experience. By engaging directly with users in their online environments, LIS researchers can ground their work in the real-world complexities of how people interact with information—not in the abstract, but in the everyday. Whether it’s a fan community creating elaborate metadata for their favorite show, or an activist group sharing guides to fight book bans, these interactions are full of insight for anyone invested in the future of information.

References

Kozinets, R. V. (2015). Netnography: Redefined. Sage.

Markham, A., & Buchanan, E. (2012). Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research: Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee. https://aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf