Etnografia digital nos estudos da linguagem

Perspectivas críticas, práticas e desafios metodológicos

Abstract

The increasing presence of technology in our daily interactions leads to the need for critical analysis of the digital world in language studies. Thus, digital ethnography becomes an interesting methodological approach, due to its commitment to thick description, offering critical insights not only about how digital interactions occur, but also about how the digital environment has been designed and experienced. Given this scenario, this article discusses three aspects central to this fieldwork: 1) resources and conditions of digital environments in the 21st century; 2) online and offline contexts implied in the historicity of the digital world; and 3) possible routes throughout digital ethnographies. The discussions highlight that, to deal with the complexity of language and big data, we need to consider their links to social and political processes, especially regarding the unequal distribution of globalization infrastructures, which not only determines the possibilities and limitations of our actions in the internet – but actually produce the meaning of “internet” itself. Finally, we present some methodological implications and developments of this proposal, exploring some ethical horizons for digital ethnography, as a way of deconstructing common illusions about this field.