Collaborative Ethnography

According to Lassiter (2005), Collaborative Ethnography is to “literally working together, especially on intellectual effort”. The research has a team of researchers sharing their experiences based on their ethnographic observation.

I think collaborative media ethnography brings out more ideas than just practising one-way ethnography where the ethnographer asks, and the interlocutors discuss according to the direction of the pre-set questions. There are more collaborators involved as there would be more ideas flowing.

However, with that being said, there might be some challenges on the way such as the conflict among Ethnographers but to avoid such conflict all the involved Ethnographers have to make sure that they are not biased and respect the ethical values of conducting the study. 

For example, we all have experienced the collaborative ethnography in of the BCM240 class activity during the tutorial where we had to get in groups and interview our classmates on their experience of using the internet. I say it’s a collaborative ethnography because we all were involved in this activity. This activity gave a chance to interview my classmates about their first experience using the internet and how they felt at that moment. 

It was really interesting to see that some of my classmates have the same experience as I do of using the Internet for the first time and fighting with the sibling for the remote and stuff like makes the conversation more relatable. Unlike quantitative research with just plain numerical analysis collaborative ethnography gives you a chance to share your experience and share a story. With more classmates involved, I got more opinions, which meant more opinions to work with resulting in more work. Which is why collaborative media ethnography may be a little difficult to work with.

Reference: 

• Lassiter, L. E. (n.d.). Collaborative Ethnography. Retrieved May 26, 2020, from https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/468909.html