Dana Cetojevic

What Is My Media Niche?

This week we had a thorough look into Qualitative Research and Ethnographic Skills. This got me thinking a lot about my consumption of media and content I enjoy watching, as well as how it relates to my personal interests. This week brought skills to my attention, skills in thinking like an ethnographer. These skill sets such as.

• Perspective
• Problematising
• Approaching
• Conceptualising
• Mapping
• Including
• Comparing
• Sensitivity

As a growing researcher, It was refreshing to review these methods of skills so that I can approach my ethnographic research with authentic credibility.

As I reflect on my consumption of media, I will admit that I enjoy many niche’s and genres. However, I most enjoy watching professional photographers on YouTube such as Lizzie Peirce, Jessica Kobeissi, Faizal Westcott and many more channels to note. These particular content creators I watch are predominantly based on the social platform YouTube. I also enjoy reviewing their work/content and final products on their Instagram profiles as well.

The ethnography of content these creators are niched towards, essentially the style of photography that they pursue is an editorial style of photography. Editorial photography is heavily based on images that run alongside text in publications to help tell a story or educate readers.

I am personally very interested in the fashion and modelling photography culture. Specifically on Instagram and TikTok. I love to read magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and a personal favourite, GQ.

Alongside photography I also really enjoy food. Specifically the SBS food channel. Except maybe from mum’s advice, I really enjoy watching the cooking tips and cooking shows the SBS food channel produces. Some of the shows I mostly enjoy are: Gourmet Farmer, Eat and cook like an Italian, Inside Heston’s World, Nigella Bites and many more!

Alongside the SBS channel, I also enjoy viewing a lot of food content on social media. such as TikTok and Instagram.

However as I reflect even more on my consumption, of food on media. I rather enjoy Meat dishes and BBQ recipes, tips and tricks. This interest I have in meat is definitely stemmed from my professional background in working in the meat industry personally.

Now that I’ve established my niches, I want to begin my research by establishing a digital artefact as my foundation of ethnographic research.

For my digital artefact, I will be observing the using the platforms Instagram to publish my work on meat photography!

This probably seems like a very unusual concept but I think there is definitely an audience out there for meat culture. Meat and livestock have played so fundamental a role in human societies that meat production and consumption are often seen as being the natural way of things and hence taken for granted, much like contemporary differences between men and women are often seen as a reflection of core biological dissimilarities. Butchery is also a very old craft that I want to explore as well.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Airoldi, Massimo 2018. ‘Ethnography and the digital fields of social media’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 21:6, 661 -673.

Burrell, Jenna 2009. ‘The Field Site as a Network: A Strategy for Locating Ethnographic Research’, Field Methods,  21:2, 181–199

Lawson, Caitlin 2020. ‘Skin deep: Callout strategies, influencers, and racism in the online beauty community,’ New Media & Society, Online Version, 1–17.

Elam, Jessica and Taylor Nick 2020. ‘Above the Action: The Cultural Politics of Watching Dota 2; Communication, Culture & Critique, Online Version, 1 – 18.