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Digital Ethnography Redux: Interpreting Drone Cultures and Microtargeting in an era of Digital Transformation

This paper affirms and demonstrates the application of digital ethnography methodologies to two digitally transformative phenomena that are fundamentally enmeshed in the public sphere: personal drones and microtargeting. We review recent methodological studies on digital ethnography that can be delineated into three forms: research that is online or remote by necessity because of physical distance between researcher and participants; research that uses natively digital tools to study phenomena (Rogers 2013; Fish 2019) and research focused on digital cultures (Markham 2020). Our application of digital ethnography is further informed by qualitative ethnographic research undertaken by Horst, Pink, Postill and Hjorth (Horst, et al., 2016); and Manovich’s work on the application of digital ethnography to examine automation and big data (Manovich & Arielli, 2022). Beesley (forthcoming) utilises longitudinal visual ethnography as a lens to understand consumer drone cultures and disentangle the multiple narratives surrounding these disruptive technologies. Mount (2020), utilised digital ethnography to review two decades of microtargeting activities, employed by Strategic Communication Laboratories and Cambridge Analytica, to influence electoral behaviour. This methodological research will be combined with our conceptual swarm hermeneutics framework (Mount & Beesley, 2022) to develop scenario based simulations that will further evaluate interpretive schemas and behaviours.