In terms of Ethnography, ethnography is the study and behaviours of people and the way they act in the environment /surroundings. The Oxford dictionary meaning of ethnography I the observation of a ‘scientific description of people and cultures with their customs, habits and mutual differences.’.
This is beneficial for interviews and focus groups and it tells the differences and similarities between people in societies.
On the 7th November, week 8 my class and I learnt ethnography, its similar to my view of ethnography it’s when a researcher living in a community observes and interprets the ways of life, beliefs and values.
Ethnography plays a role in media studies as it observes the way people use media on its daily basis. It observes the audience’s behaviours such the reactions people create at a cinema or event.
There are different kinds of ethnography, one is virtual digital ethnography, using this ethnography enables you to observe participants in a virtual environment as well as a digital one. For example, studying the way people are or act when playing games online.
We learnt that whenever we want to tie ethics into the equation, we must remind ourselves of the ethical ideals we must stick by.
First, we must try to avoid harming participations, secondly, we should produce positive research/information that would benefit us.
The values and decisions of research participants should be treated right and lastly people should be classified as equal.
The reading that we were told to read was a theorist account on what ethnography means to them. Lingel Jessa and Gray. Mary L said quote “ ethnography is well suited to addressing a specific tension between a push for objective neutrality in reporting human activity and a pull to produce ground research” they used this to work through a case study they were doing, “looking at the queer youth and media engagements”.
I extremely liked the lesson as it was interesting how we can use ethnography in nearly everything we do media related.
Bibliography:
Kackman, M. and Kearney, M. (2018). The craft of criticism. 1st ed. New York: Routledge, p.169.
Lexico Dictionaries | English. (2019). Ethnography | Definition of Ethnography by Lexico. [online] Available at: https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/ethnography [Accessed 9 Dec. 2019].
