Digital ethnography opens up more opportunities and enables researchers to understand participants behavior with qualitative online data in more ways than before. Ethnography is not a method, it is the written product of a set of methods combine elicitation methods such as interviews and focus groups with participant observation, which, as a method not predicated on elicitation, allows us to study the differences between what people say they do and what they do （Boellstorff，2012:54）. Boellstorff (2012) argues that participant observation is the core method of any ethnographic research project. As Leach said, the essential core of social anthropology is fieldwork (Leach in Boellstorff, 2012:42). Leach emphasized that anthropologists must attend to the ‘principles’ shaping everyday life. For example, Boellstorff uses his own research for participating into the virtual world ‘Second Life’ to argue that amidst the analysis of virtual communities, the use of elicitation methods alone such as interviews or focus groups does not allow the research enough scope for a successful analysis (Boellstorff, 2012:54). What interviews and other elicitation methods can never reveal are the things we cannot articulate, even to ourselves.
Digital ethnography also takes time to do the research. There is no way the researcher could have become known to a community and participated in its everyday practices in such a compressed time frame (Boellstorff, 2012:55). Boellstorff spent three years in the virtual world ‘Second Life’ for his research. Time is necessity for digital ethnography. In order to get to know people’s practices, struggles and their own views on the world, researchers should spend their time trying to fit the facts of the objective world into the framework of a set of concepts which have been developed a priori instead of from oversation (Leach in Boellstorff, 2012:56).
Reference: Boellstorff, Tom. 2012. “Rethinking Digital Anthropology.” In Digital Anthropology, ed by. Heather A. Horst and Daniel Miller. 1st ed. 39-60. Bloomsbury Academic. <http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~tboellst/bio/Rethinking.pdf>.
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