How can digital communication tools extend research? Digital Ethnography is a catchy idea for doing cheap ethnography where rather than embedding the researcher into the community, the participants use digital cameras, cell phones, and the web to document and send in their impressions. The idea, as described by Davis Masten and Tim Plowman of Cheskin
Strategic Consulting and Market Research, seems half fulfilled. The real potential of digital communication is for communities to understand themselves through ethnography. Suppose volunteers in a community documents facets of their experience AND interpreted it together?