Netnography, digital habitus, and technocultural capital

Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s interrelated notions of field, habitus and cultural capital, this chapter offers a critical reflection on netnography as a research method that allows researchers to ‘qualify’ current digital habitus. Positioning the method in the field of intersectionality, this chapter demonstrates how netnography adheres to the cultural norms of digital habitus while dialoging with the dominant cultures constitutive of current technoculture. The chapter then discusses the significant challenges that the dominant technocultures present to cultural research. These challenges require netnographers to continuously alter and adapt in order to mobilize technocultural capital and keep up with the rapidly evolving pace of change in technomediated social space. This work advances our conceptual understanding of netnography as a research method that pushes forward the relational approach to social science. In fact, netnography explores social media as a system of human and non-human interactions in order to provide an empirical understanding of its cultural norms and meanings. In so doing, netnography offers the occasion to reboot Bourdieu’s relational notions of habitus and cultural capital by revealing how these notions have evolved to fit with the new sociotechnical and cultural affordances of contemporary technoculture.