Images, female trappers, and Instagram. Slow-cooked nethnographical reflections

Abstract

Visual experiences, eclecticism and social media platforms create new challenges for critical sociology and anthropology. The aim of this article is to reflect on the potential of Nethnography as an appropriate methodological tool with which to analyze the impact of digital structures on everyday social practices. To do so, this article takes a ‘behind-the-scenes’ look at the development of analytic categories in a case study on the impact of the design of the Instagram platform on the style of a sample of young female ‘trappers’. The nethnography’s structural-type analysis led to the establishment of three dimensions based on the uses the young trappers made of the different visual functionalities – or affordances – of the Instagram platform. In discussing how these dimensions were established, the article provides a technical analysis of this method as a way to investigate social changes and to establish analytic categories that emerge from digital environments themselves, and therefore avoids reproducing the logics and categories of traditional social research methods. As an approach, this method offers an alternative to the predominant logics of digital research based on Big Data.