Understanding online communities in the age of digital boundaries: What is netnography?

Netnography, which has emerged in the last thirty years, is a qualitative research method that is widely used in the field of marketing and has recently spread to different disciplines. It has been widely used in the field of marketing and its field of activity has started to expand with the increase in technology-human interaction. With its ethnography-based starting point, Netnography traces the traces of the culture that people build collectively in the digital world. The fact that the culture shared in this online environment is becoming more and more widespread thanks to social media applications is the advantages that bring Netnography to the forefront. However, although it is a research field clustered in the field of marketing in terms of its emergence, Netnography has recently started to find a field of activity in different disciplines. Therefore, this study reconsiders Netnography as a contemporary qualitative research method rather than a tool used in marketing. It examines the brief history of netnography over time, its philosophical and methodological underpinnings, how it differs from ethnography, how it can be applied, and how it has been and will be used in some areas of business studies.