What is Cyber or Digital Autoethnography?

Abstract

<jats:p> Because of rapid developments in new media technologies and digital platforms, we live in a media-driven and highly digitalized society. Most of our everyday experiences are either highly mediated or digitalized. Hence, we live in a complex and multidimensional cyberculture. In order to understand and make sense of our experiences and identities within this culture, as scholars, we require fresh, new methods; hence, I propose cyber or digital autoethnography. In this essay, I define cyber or digital autoethnography and making a case for their importance. I will also outline cyber or digital autoethnography’s potentiality. </jats:p>

Weaving Different Discourses to Understand the Field: Mystory as an Analytical Tool

“…For me, struggling to deal with the overwhelm of fieldwork and voices from social media, and popular culture, mystory offered a way to legitimize popular and personal knowledge alongside the kinds of disciplinary knowledge traditionally privileged as authoritative. In the shift to electracy and digital life, mystory and autoethnography also offer a way to make sense of not just who we are, but how we cultivate different identities online for a myriad of purposes (Atay, 2020).…”

“…Considering how autoethnographic practices expand and change over time, there are also other approaches to autoethnography that overlap with the mystory approach, for example, Atay’s (2020) advocacy for cyber or digital autoethnography (also see Iosefo et al, 2021). Just as Ulmer (2003) turns to hypertext to encourage the production of mystories that use multimedia as a form of electracy, Atay argues that there is a need for a form of autoethnography that acknowledges our digital lives.…”

“…They argue that “our identities and realities are becoming increasingly mediated and digitalized. Hence, our autoethnographies need to take into account the more fragmentary self that social media facilitates, whereby identities are patched together and are a mixture of (cyber)experiences, (cyber)stories, and (cyber/mediated) representations” (Atay, 2020, p. 272).…”

Using the internet for data collection in business research

“…Finally, non-survey Web-based techniques for data collection, such as observing social networks, monitoring internet browsing behaviours and applications for gathering data in mobile devices, can provide researchers with relevant information but require further understanding. Ethnographic studies on digital and social networks, known as digital ethnography and cyber ethnography (Atay, 2020;Lester, 2020) or netnography (Kozinets, 2019) may imply obtaining data from digital social networks or the Web environment. This practice, in general, leads to conducting behaviour analyses without asking any questions.…”

The Future of Autoethnographic Criteria

“…As Kouhia (2015) noted about her short film Crafts in My Life , “In autoethnographic film-making the protagonists-makers themselves contextualize, frame, perform, and voice their own practice, hence pointing the camera at themselves in order to exhibit and express the sanctity of the meanings of the making” (p. 280). Of course, the many forms of autoethnography are spreading to digital spaces providing more expressions and possibilities (Atay, 2020; Boylorn, 2021; Wilde, 2020).…”