Research at a click away

Josh Jarrett, Digital Cultures Research Centre, @Joshua_Jarrett

What am I doing?• Multiplayer Online Battle Arena as a genre laden in bottom up playful

creativity, top down control and divergent stakeholders.

• My research centres around an online critical ethnographic approach that draws on data collected from: - Auto-ethnographic in-game experiences- Player interviews- Participant observations and online open discussions

Limitations of an open Reddit discussion methodology • ‘Hive mind’ of Reddit can make it resistant to research.• Voting system can ‘bury’ many alternative and insightful responses (provides another

insightful window on responses as well).• Search engines can always locate responses from participants calling into question the

definition of public / private.• Data is often richly dense and can be time consuming to synthesise. Qualitative

‘weight of volume’.• Demographic of participants is often difficult to identify as the use of pseudonyms is

normalised. Asking for this information changes the mode of address significantly and gets a much different response. • Research in Reddit spaces sometimes leads to hostile response (especially in gaming

cultures right now).

Ethical challenges moving forward• How do we define ‘public’ - especially in relation to search engines? • How does this definition of ‘public’ impact issues of consent when

looking at existing discussions (that are often impossible to replicate on a site such as Reddit)? • How far does re-contextualising a discussion alter its form and power

relations? Context differs between digital platform.• ‘Connective’ (Dijck, 2013) approach towards ethics is required. Every

platform is a micro-system that constitutes a larger connective ecology. Digital platforms overlap and co-construct each others forms and functions. I.E. Ethical solutions can not be read in isolation.

Thank you for your time• Boellstorff, T. Nardi, B. Pearce, C. and Taylor, T, L. (2012) Ethnography and

Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method, Oxford: Princeton University Press. • Dijck, V, J. (2013) Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media,

New York: Oxford University Press. • Kozinets, V, R. (2010) Netnography: Doing Ethnography Research Online,

London: Sage.• Markham, A. and Buchanan, E. (2012) ‘Ethical Decision-Making and

Internet Research Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee (Version 2.0)’, AOIR 2012 report. Available at: http://aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf