The Concept Of Narcissism And Its Elements - 2720 Words

Chapter 3: Methodology This qualitative research has taken an analytical approach, aiming to reduce the concept of narcissism to its elements and to study in detail how one’s own image construction is represented in a digital environment, incorporating the phenomenon of the selfie culture. Qualitative research, being rich, multi- dimensional and complex (Alasuutari, P., 1995) allows the in- depth exploration of the rhetoric of the self and the self- constructs in a technoculture and makes sense of the phenomenon of the human- machine connection and the creation of virtual realities that bears problematical ideas of digital narcissism. The position that this research has taken is a constructivist epistemological as it provides an adaptive,†¦show more content†¦The field of Internet studies, a rapidly- developing area, requires rethinking of the research methods. By the use of qualitative online ethnography the experiences and the reality that lead to the creation of particular subjectivitie s through constructing oneself online as opposed to others was examined. In itself this project is a qualitative research about self- disinhibition and self- construction in a digital environment and selfie culture and therefore the attention needs to be put on a multitude of grounded ideas, meanings, symbols and social practices, which digital ethnography can provide (Hine C. 2000). By answering the questions, how do social media affects the organisation of social relationships and what are the implications for authenticity, authority and representation as well as how identities are performed and experienced would help for the full understanding of the phenomenon of the alienation of the human and the problematic relationship with technology. Digital, virtual methods as opposed to more traditional methods can also make a distinction between the online and the offline and validate any possible boundaries between the two, which is what this project was aiming to do. In a nutshell, the applied netnography is: â€Å"participant- observational research based in online fieldwork. It uses computer- mediated communication as a source of data to arrive at the ethnographic understanding and representation of a cultural