The Potential of Digital Ethnography for Sensitive Topics and Hidden Population

In this paper we investigate the potential of digital research when the digital is both the topic and the instrument of research. The digital is an interesting topic of social research when technology intersect society, that is in those fields where technology give new rise to some social issues directly impacting mainstream social problems (such as identity and sexuality). In the case of sexuality, for example, the digital offers discursive spaces to legitimate sexual minorities identities, especially when their sexual models do not conform to social norms. For these topics digital ethnography may be a distinctive method to study social change deriving from the digital. It seems to be particularly appropriate to study phenomena born digital and to investigate generative and productive (and not just reflective) digital identities and cultures avoiding the contrived situation of an interviewer asking people direct questions and allowing to document the performative use of language. In other words, it gives access to sensitive topics and hidden population which would otherwise be less visible. By using the case of sexuality and providing a typology of the main topics in sexuality research investigated through digital ethnography, the paper demonstrates that the digital is associated with a variety of social transformations and presents several important dimensions of sociological inquiry which cannot be framed uncritically positive but are fundamentally marked by normative ambivalence (bad and good dimensions)