Virtual Ethnography

Both terms come under the media ethnography approach which considers the digital technology as a subject of research, analysing the role and meaning of digital media in contemporary society (HSU,2014).

Virtual ethnography can be understood in the paper of Dr.Jones which I like, and I feel it speaks my mind. The paper used the virtual ethnography as a methodology to investigate the situation in Bahrain uprising. The article shows how social media was used in favour of government censorship (Jones, 2013). In order to approach this virtual ethnography was used and can defined as a collection that " involves the ethnographer participating, overtly or covertly in people's daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions – in fact, collecting whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of the research". (Hine, 2008: 259)

On the other hand, Hashtag ethnography can be understood in the paper of Banilla and Rosa,2015. The journal aims to investigate the role of the hashtag ethnography in a social movement. Hashtag ethnography is when people, for instance, during the death incident of unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown in the summer of 2014, people expressed their outrage on Twitter using the hashtag as a power to challenge this brutal incident. Thus, the paper explores how Twitter could be a field of study examining hashtags that used for activism, racial inequality and state violence. There was a problem in distinguishing between real hashtags, 80 million hashtags and in terms which they represent police, journalists or protestors.