NETNOCON25: Netnography from a Scientific Point of View with Robert Kozinets

Digital technologies have become deeply intertwined with almost every aspect of human social life: how we learn, buy, love, protest, entertain ourselves and define who we are. The field of netnography offers social scientists and marketing researchers and others a way to study this critical intertwining in a serious, ethical and immersive way - which is of particular relevance to our association conference industry. Many academics had already expressed an interest in this phenomenon and were interested in its potential. However, there were far fewer people actively practising it and able to teach it, to work together as a methodological community.

NETNOCON was born to unite this group, taking its first steps in 2023 at the University of Salford with a clear sense of need and opportunity, and extending this year to Marseille where it welcomed hundreds of delegates for a truly disruptive event. Our magazine manager Manuel Fernandes spoke to the conference chairman, Robert Kozinets, about what Netnography is all about.

Netnography is a fairly new and recent disciplinary concept for most people. From what I understand, it is based on the "ethnographic" understanding in the digital age, that is, human behavior in social groups on the internet. How would you describe it to our readers? How can netnography explain the world we live in today and Networked Communication Societies?

Netnography is grounded in ethnography, but it was developed specifically to address the unique conditions of digital life. When I first introduced it in the mid-1990s, we were already seeing that the internet was becoming a vital social space, a type of cultural force. Since then, the transformation has been nothing short of dramatic. Digital technologies are not something separate from human social existence or structures, but now they are deeply interlinked with nearly every aspect of human social life: how we learn, shop, organise, love, grieve, protest, entertain ourselves, and define who we are.

Netnography offers social scientists, marketing researchers, and others a way to study this critical entanglement seriously, ethically, immersively, and rigorously. It is not just focused on online content, but on contexts, meanings, discourses, and behaviors — how people create and inhabit culture through digital interaction. Whether it's a livestream, a meme, a fan community, a product review, or a WhatsApp group, in netnography these digital traces are treated as windows into the symbolic, emotional, and collective dimensions of everyday life in a digital age.

What distinguishes netnography is the researcher’s immersion and reflexivity, and thus their sensitivity to the sociotechnical contexts that shape digital participation. It is a way for people to gain cultural understanding using their own humanity as the focal point, not a technique for scraping data or measuring trends. It is a method for understanding how people live through and with media today. In a world increasingly powered by technologies like AI, it reveals our humanity in the face of platforms that mediate our relationships, identities, dreams, resistance, and our power. In that sense, netnography helps us explain not just the digital world, but our entire world.

From what I could gather, your book 'Netnography: Redefined' merged the idea of ​​arts-based research with the analysis and representation of qualitative data in netnography, suggesting new techniques and creative approaches to understanding social and artistic intervention in a new era. What are these intersections and innovations that the Internet, technology and data have brought to the artistic, media and cultural world?

In Netnography: Redefined, I emphasised the need to treat analysis and representation as creative practices in their own right, with the phrase “Artifying” building these processes into the analysis of digital data. I see artifying as a generative space where individual and human meaning can take shape. Especially in this era of ubiquitous media and participatory platforms, we need methods that can engage with our own innate human complexity, richness, and emotional texture. Many academics are actually quite talented artists. Art is a lifelong passion of mine.

Creativity today has moved beyond the lone genius model and become both more collective and more routine — a key part of the everyday performance of identity. People remix, edit, narrate, filter, and publish constantly. They use templates, apps, and algorithms to shape how they are seen. The internet has made this sort of production accessible to nearly everyone. In a sense, we are all creators now and we are also part of a new kind of participatory culture that is based on algorithmic reinforcement.

There’s an enormous volume of content circulating, and a lot of it is superficial, amateurish, and thin. AI has been intensifying this pattern, creating what some have called an enshittification of our culture, one that turns art into crap. What counts as creativity now can often feel indistinguishable from mindless repetition. And the structures that once filtered, curated, or judged quality have fallen way behind. The crap keeps piling up and choking out the quality, similar to how Andrew Keen predicted it would many years ago.
 

"The relationship that exists between human and machine, person and system is saturated with meaning, emotion, projection, and power relations."

So what are the big challenges for this transition in thinking and cultural grounding?

For ethnographers working in and with these conditions, the challenge is to identify the value and cultural resonance amid all this noise. How do we distinguish meaningful expression from the simple push-button production of massified crap that AI brings? Netnography helps by grounding analysis in human experience and in the contexts, communities, and cultural systems where these expressions circulate. And it also welcomes and motivated new forms of representation that echo the multimodal, emotionally layered environments we study.

This is where arts-based research becomes especially relevant. Ethnographic representation does not need to be confined to academic prose. In my work, I’ve used and combined videography, poetry, comic book formats, speculative or science fiction, collage and the visual arts with research work. My colleagues at Netnocon used Reddit data to create a play about how people discuss the future online. These new representation forms present us with novel ways to imagine, understand and see events in the digital world.

So what we’re seeing is a moment of both decay and expansion. The tools of creation are widely available, but they produce a lot of junk. Platforms encourage constant expression, creating the tension and need to produce more junk. The good quality work gets lost in a sea of superficial, insignificant, repackaged creative junk. For researchers, the task is to develop practices that can move through this environment and find the human signal in the machine buzz. That’s what netnography — and particularly this new and more creatively attuned, artistically enhanced, and performatively sensitised turn —aims to offer.
 

Ethnographic research and Artificial Intelligence are redefining how societies and businesses understand and predict human behaviour. I imagine that as ‘Internet anthropologists,’ the revolution across the board that AI is instilling at all levels of society deserves special interest from a qualitative analysis point of view by your community. As an academic, how can netnography help us predict the breakthroughs and evolutionary steps of AI? At a time when video, photo and image generative AI processes are still very rudimentary (albeit believable), how reliable is a netnographic approach to a universe as chameleonic as AI?

I think part of the confusion comes from imagining netnography as a tool to verify or decode what is “real” in digital life. But it is important to recognise that netnography does not function like that at all. It does not set out to strip away the surface of interaction to find some truth behind it. Its purpose is not to fact-check a chatbot or expose the artificiality of an AI image that someone posts as if it was their real image, or a simulated post by a human being who uses an AI tool to help them render their thoughts in a foreign language. Rather, it is designed to help us understand the meanings and experiences that emerge in those interactions, no matter what their ontological status.

In that sense, netnography is particularly well-suited to studying AI not as a fixed technological category, but as a technosocial and technocultural phenomenon that simply exists all around use. We can study how people relate to AI, how they anthropomorphise it, fear it, depend on it, fantasise about it, or reject it. The relationship that exists between human and machine, person and system is saturated with meaning, emotion, projection, and power relations. And of course, those relationships are not something we can just observe in others. In netnography, we seek to understand first through our own immersed human experience within these digital tides.

When I or others conduct a netnographic study of an AI companion like Replika, for example, we are not pretending it is human. But we do start by taking the interaction seriously and we record as data the way it is experienced by us, as trained human observers. We pay close attention to how we and other people respond, what is disclosed, how the exchange is framed, how the relationships and everything they bring are incorporated into our identities and lives. We might reflect on how the AI seems to “learn,” or how it fails. But we are just as concerned with how we, as researchers and users, change in relation to it. That is the core ethnographic insight here: that we are completely entangled within and not separate from the complex sociotechnical digital world we are studying. Ultimately, we are studying ourselves — ontological ground zero.
 

"What netnography does very well is capture the meanings that people attach to their travel experiences, in context (many times as they are experiencing things) and in their own words."

So the question is not really about the reliability of netnography in a chameleonic environment, but rather the ability of a researcher to grasp meaning as it is lived and constructed in these constantly shifting digital spaces.

Exactly. Netnography can help us anticipate cultural responses, anxieties, myths, and norms that will shape everything about AI. That interpretive work is vitally important to understanding how technologies succeed or fail in social and cultural terms.

We are living in a moment of unstable boundaries between machinic and human consciousness. Netnography allows us to study those interactions without needing to resolve the metaphysical questions behind them. We do not need to know if the person who posted the post we just read is “real.” We study the environment, the interaction, what they mean, what they do, how they reconfigure, and how they reveal the systems we are embedded within. In that way, it is a bit like Blade Runner. But the role of the netnographer is not Deckard hunting for the replicant. It is closer to Decker finding the origami unicorn and wondering if he is, in fact, a replicant who should be hunting himself.

Typically, ethnography deals with three methods of data collection and analysis: data collected directly from individuals, through observation of the communicational interactions of the individuals under study, and data collected from private interviews with group members. However, it has also raised a number of ethical debates. As a researcher, what are the most sensitive points in the ethics domain and invasion of privacy that you have dealt with in data management and social media analytics? What are the procedural dilemmas faced in detailing the netnographic methodology?

This is obviously a very important question and concern. In netnography, ethics is absolutely central to the method’s development and its detail and clarity on these points is a feature that distinguishes it from all other online qualitative works. Every chapter of Netnography: The Essential Guide to Qualitative Social Media Research is shaped by ethical reflection and contains detailed ethical procedures. In digital research, the boundaries between public and private, safe and exposed, are constantly shifting. These are issues that the netnographer is constantly confronting and they demand very practical decisions while collecting, analysing, and presenting data.

One of the most delicate areas involves perceptions of visibility. Just because something is posted online does not mean the author expects it to be quoted in an academic journal. So, I have developed specific procedures: we cloak usernames and pseudonyms, modify phrasing to prevent backwards tracing, strip metadata, and in many cases, choose not to use a post at all, even if it is technically public. That kind of discretion, as I say, is built into the method and it becomes especially important when we are studying sensitive topics or vulnerable populations.

Informed consent is certainly important, especially in interactive or immersive phases of the research. But even with publicly accessible material, one of the lasting challenges lies in representation. We have specific procedures in place that guide our research on how to balance the integrity of a post with the responsibility to protect the poster. The dilemmas are not always straightforward. A single tweet can be ethically benign in one context and problematic in another. That’s why netnography requires judgment and reflexivity, and not just compliance. For thirty years, the strong ethical orientation and clear ethical demarcations have been what gives netnography such an authority in this area.
 

"In a sense, we are all creators now and we are also part of a new kind of participatory culture that is based on algorithmic reinforcement."

Your book also deepens the practice of netnography through participatory involvement, physical VS digital interactions, alternative representations and a new humanist matrix of relationship with the environment. It can, for example, open up ways of understanding younger generations, how they communicate, and how they react to different stimuli in the digital age. In your opinion, Robert, how can netnography help to unveil the conference of the future and shed light on an industry as dependent on this type of human interaction as that of events and meetings?

I think that netnography gives us a very useful vantage point on how people talk about and process their experiences with events and conferences, particularly in digital and social media spaces. In the post-COVID era, what becomes clear again and again is a growing hunger for real human connection that takes place during conferences. The more mediated our lives become, the more valued these intense and focused face-to-face encounters seem to be.

We see people using platforms not just to comment on conferences, but to extend and rework the experience. This is perhaps especially true for younger participants who are fluent in integrating digital communication into every part of their lives. They tend to use more platforms and to integrate them in deeper ways than others. Netnography helps us observe how those practices unfold across time, and how people narrate the meaning of the event, before, during, and long after the closing remarks.
 

Finally, the perception of social networks, destination marketing and tourism will also be important focuses for the European Commission from now on. Although quantitative research design represents a standard research method in the fields of hospitality and tourism, qualitative approaches remain largely sidelined. I therefore believe that Netnography as a discipline will also be more present in this field. What is the emerging potential of netnography for tourism and hospitality studies? How could it open up new avenues for better performance in these sectors among cutting-edge research methods?

As a matter of fact, netnography has already proven itself as a valuable tool in tourism and hospitality studies in academia. I agree with you that it still holds enormous potential beyond that. Over the past two decades, researchers have used netnography to explore a wide range of topics in this field, including in destination branding, travel experience sharing, smart tourism systems, sustainability discourses, the emotional afterlives of trips, people traveling with disabilities like dementia or with wheelchairs, and even the performative nature of online travel reviews. Sites like TripAdvisor, Airbnb, Couchsurfing, Booking.com, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok have become rich sites of netnographic investigation. Those inquiries have revealed a lot about how people imagine, judge, and remember places and they often are much more revealing that what people say to us in interviews or surveys.

What netnography does very well is capture the meanings that people attach to their travel experiences, in context (many times as they are experiencing things) and in their own words. Certainly, it reveals to us what travelers do and what they buy, but it also goes well beyond that to show us how they are making decisions, how they are evaluating, how they narrate, what they value and what they hope for, and them how those meanings circulate socially and digitally. In the age of e-tourism and algorithmic recommendation, where peer-to-peer credibility often outweighs official marketing, those insights can be much more valuable than the same-old research results one gets in a survey or focus group.

The field has made great strides, with excellent work done on crisis communication in tourism, co-creation of hospitality experiences, digital heritage interpretation, travel dreams during COVID, revenge travel after COVID, and many more fascinating contributions. Yet, as you suggest, qualitative research often plays second fiddle to standardised quantitative methods. That is a huge, missed opportunity. Netnography complements quantitative methods, but it also challenges them. I can certainly see how, as hospitality and tourism continue to evolve through platforms and technologies, netnography will become an increasingly important key to understanding them.
 

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