Television Practices : Ethnography, Television and User Practices

Abstract: This thesis explores television practices in a time when new technology has made it possible to interact with and create your own TV content. The work is focused on how user practices need to be understood in a context of chan- ging technology. The practices studied also show the relevance of ethno- graphic methods, and especially the wide spectrum of these different meth- ods within the field of Human-Computer Interaction. We distinguish be- tween sociologically informed ethnography and anthropological ethnogra- phy. Two questions are addressed: how can new forms of television practices be understood by means of different ethnographic methods, and, on a wider level, what method can we use for analysing methods in ethnographic re- search? Because ethnographic methods are qualitative, we have also chosen to use an open and qualitative approach when analysing them. Through comparing our different methods – their data and findings on one specific topic – we have discovered the differences between the methodological ap- proaches.