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Netnography is an approach to studying online communities and cultures to arrive at an ethnographic understanding. Drawing on our own experiences and methodological choices in a netnography of a multi-site online community of practice of English language teachers, known as Webheads in Action, this article illustrates how ethnographic fieldwork practices change when carried out with communities that exist primarily online. Focusing on illustrative examples from our 10-month netnographic fieldwork data, we argue that concepts of ‘the field, participant observation, interviews, and researcher survival skills’ are experienced in fundamentally different ways in netnography as opposed to in-person ethnography, which calls for reconceptualisation of fieldwork practices in online communities because of the dynamics of online environments and the use of web-based technologies.
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Kulavuz‐Onal et al. (2013) studied this question.
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