But when speech is presented in writing, perhaps “like” and “’cause” aren’t always evaluated according to the norms of speech. I went back and changed “’cause” to “because”, and took out a whole bunch of “like”s.

Although transcription is sometimes regarded as trivial, it can be a kind of analysis, and can carry many of the risks and uncertainties of translation between different languages. For researchers working with communication via relatively new text-based media, questions of orthography can become both simpler and more complicated. Maybe a text message could be thought of as a kind of self-transcription? People composing text online choose how they will be represented orthographically, but taken out of its intended setting, a text may read differently, and need some recontextualization and translation.

Wikipedia conversations are asynchronous (sometimes with whole weeks or months between replies among editors) and it has proven extremely complicated to work out who said what when, let alone contact and to have live conversations with the editors. I’m beginning to realise how much physical presence is a part of the trust building exercise. If I want to connect with a particular Wikipedia editor, I can only email them or write a message on their talk page, and I often don’t have a lot to go on when I’m doing these things. I often don’t know where they’re from or where they live or who they really are beyond the clues they give me on their profile pages.

So far the picture of the field of residential affairs I have painted is one of the Giddensian routinisation and recursivity -the predictable cycles of modern agents as they go about coordinating their activities and (re) producing their practices in real clock-and-calendar time (Postill 2002). But to complete the picture we also need to consider the irregular, often unpredictable patterns of social action that disrupt the regular schedules of a field of practice. (…) Borrowing form Turner, I define a “field arena” as ” a bounded spatial unit in which precise, visible antagonists, individual or corporate, contend with one another for prizes and/or honour (1974: 132-33). Field arenas are “explicit frames” in which leading practitioners take major decisions in public view and “nothing is left merely implied” (1974: 134). Arenas are often stations that have temporarily morphed from being convivial settings to sites of conflict in which individual leaders must state clearly where they stand in an unresolved dispute. It is common for these disputes to centre on a leader’s perceived breach of the field’s existing moral order, a type of political turmoil knohwn as a “sociall drama” that will only be solved after appropiate “redressive action” has been taken by the offending party (Turner 1974, Eyermen 2008). Private doubts about a leader’s ability or commitment to a residential cause may surface onto the public realm in these increasingly digitally mediated arenas, e.g., through SMS texts to the leader demanding that they declare their unambbiguous, public support for a given cause via a campaign blog (see Chapter 6 and Arnold et al. 2008).

Academics frequently criticize corporate ethnography simply as “too short.” But this is just as shallow an insight as is the idea that culture=consumerism. Academics, of all people, should know that culture drives practice. The rapid pace of contemporary corporate life clearly and reasonably demands shorter time horizons for any research project. It is more than obvious that time differs in academia. Time is what Kluckhohn (1953) calls a fundamental “value orientation,” or a universal feature of all cultures. A culture can be past oriented, meaning it reveres the past through symbolic gestures and everyday behaviours. A culture can be present oriented, by focusing on what is immediately temporally present.

Academia is a past-oriented society, with its obsession with paying homage to past greats of the literature and constant “reviews” of what others have previously found. The private sector, by contrast, worships the present (though it may portray itself as future-oriented, this is often stymied by a relentless focus on the near future). Both “cultures” mark time differently, making it completely natural to do rapid research in the private sector, and perfectly ethnocentric for academics to criticize such research based on normative assumptions of “appropriate” time frames. Symbols of time in academia are typically longer, not “better.”

Kozinets, al definir su idea sobre que sería la netnografía se refiere a «un tipo de etnografía online, o en Internet, que provee de guía para la adaptación de la observación participante —planificación del trabajo de campo, entrada cultural en el mismo, recolección de datos, aseguramiento de una interpretación de los datos de alto nivel y garantía de adhesión estricta a los estándares éticos— de las singularidades y contingencias de la cultura de la comunidad online a través de la comunicación mediada por ordenadores.» (Kozinets, 2010, 191), o en otro lugar que «la netnografía es una investigación participante y observacional en el trabajo de campo online.» (Kozinets, 2010, 60), (…)
El error de Kozinets podría ser reducir la netnografía a la observación participante (Kozinets, 2010:191) pero que ésta y/o las conversaciones más o menos informales sean una de las principales y recurrentes técnicas etnográficas no presupone que sea la única ni que deba ser utilizada siempre; o sugiere introducir entre los vastos métodos de investigación netnográfica incluso las encuestas (Kozinets, 2010, 43) o los focus groups (Kozinets, 2010, 48); o acaso la solo aparente superficialidad en el conocimiento de las bases históricas, intelectuales y metodológicas de la etnografía (Kozinets, 2010, 58); o podría ser el de seguir centrando en gran medida la atención en la CMC y no en los usos y prácticas sociales en el ciberespacio que crean las ciberculturas o subciberculturas; o en un alarde sintético difícil de comprender —e imposible de compartir— el error sería reducir si no simplificar la pluralidad social a la segmentación de las personas —tan propia del marketing— como newbies, minglers, devotees o insiders (Kozinets, 2010, 33); o incluso el decantarse por estos dos últimos como los más importantes como fuente de datos para la investigación; o ¿por qué su error sería la crispante falta de brillantez al reducir la multiplicidad de las tipologías de interacciones entre personas en las comunidades online a: geeking, building, crusing y bonding (sic) (Kozinets, 2010, 35); o que se trate en definitiva de que su propuesta etnográfica esté, de verdad, restringida y focalizada en identificar las preferencias de consumo.

No obstante, el desconcertante error de Kozinets es, en mi opinión, por decirlo de una forma, algo áspera aunque no imprecisa, el reducir el rol principal de las personas, incluso como ciudadanos, al rol de meros consumidores.