Reflexivity and Relationality in Media Ethnography from the Perspective of Transcendental Realism and Pragmatic Philosophy: Roy Bhaskar and George Herbert Mead

Abstract

As consequences of digitalization processes, a digital culture that individuals and society both create and get involved in necessitates new research methods and techniques in social sciences. One of the research techniques that has been used to meet this need has been media ethnography. The aim of this study is to discuss the question, “What kind of paradigm should be appropriate for intersubjective processes, daily life practices, digital culture, media culture, so in general, the object of research that media ethnography concerned with?”. For this purpose, especially in culture-based studies, it is pointed out that how to handle the research object is no longer dominated by the positivist paradigm, but rather shaped by phenomenology-based ethnomethodology, that is, hermeneutics in general, and following a path towards relationality. To make this emphasis and to discuss the role of reflexivity and relationality in media ethnography, how Roy Bhaskar, one of the pioneers of critical realism and George Herbert Mead, one of the important names of symbolic interactionism and pragmatic philosophy, but who is generally discussed with the hermeneutic tradition, contribute to critical realism are described. In this paper, it is thought how these two important names can be thought together, especially based on relational ethnography as Davies suggests, and new questions are raised about the meaning, risks, and limits of media ethnography in digital societies.