How can ethnography in a digital world capture culturally embedded practices and discourses that are specific to communities that are no longer place-based? What are the future routes for a field that has been traditionally rooted to a bounded sense of place? How do we identity not only when our field work begins, but where? I try to provide some preliminary answers in this field paper. 

I argue that several often-cited theorists of digital culture provide insufficient and misleading directions for conducting ethnography in a digitally mediated world. These theorists end up producing a dichotomy that assigns culture to place and ICTs (along with capital) to space. David Harvey, Paul Virilio, and Manuel Castells (to name a few) are exemplary of this type of theory building. They create a dichotomy where culture is tied to the local and the bounded, while capital is associated with global and the mobile.

The consequences of assigning the local to the immobile is that this leads to a divided ethnography—an ethnography of spatial flows versus an ethnography of fixed places. Working within this typology means the an ethnographer of marginalized communities has already pegged their field site as part of the invisible, oppressed, and fixed locales that exist in contrast to the global elite. This dichotomy forces ethnographers into a methodological cul-de-sac that is buttressed by theories that already support its outcomes—theories that reify spatially bounded and marginalized locales. What Appadurai (1996) had urged for ethnographers to avoid is being repeated—bounding culture to local places. Except for this time, global flows of technology are attacking local culture.  

But these theories depend on a binary of digital haves and have-nots. The haves are always the elites located in space of flows and the have-nots are always located in fixed places. Castells and Harvey do not attend to the complexity of a digital world where affordable access to digital tools is less of a problem than access to information. In Harvey’s “space-time compression,” Castells’ “space of flows” and Virilio’s “universal time”, capital’s global and technical flows obliterate the poor, the technology have-nots, and the local. The marginalized are located outside of these new global flows of capital and power that are facilitated by technology precisely because they do not have access to these technologies . 

I review several ethnographies of marginalized technology users that resist this type of divided  ethnography. I distinguish two different types of ethnographies: 1.) those that embrace  offline and  online field sites, and 2.) those that have restricted their field sites to only the online or the offline. Ethnographies of the former locate internet-related practices as embedded in a larger matrix of practices. Where as ethnographies of the latter treat digital-related practices as a wholly unique and bounded world. This difference in theoretical positioning had radical implications for how a researcher identifies a field site and uses ethnography (Hine 1998: 140).

Ethnographers can be attentive to the unproductive conceptualization of digital users that I have identified. I suggest that we examine Michael Peter Smith’s (2002) and Jenna Burrell’s (2009) methodological proposals for an updated version of multi-sited fieldwork and the emergence of the mobilities paradigm. I then close the paper with a reflection on why ethnography still matters. I explain that ethnography is needed for grounded theory building and to give a face to techno-utopic accounts of technology use that tends to discount marginalized communities. Ethnography reveals social processes that come along with ICTs that would otherwise be difficult to understand. I end the paper with Paul Willis’s discussion on the ethnographic imagination.

list of citations

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I’ve been writing up my field exams over the last few months, trying to cram what should be 1-2 years of reading and writing into a matter of 3 months. Field exams (or what others call oral exams) are part of the long process of getting your phd in the US. Prior to defending your prospectus (which grants you the permission to do dissertation field work), you have to pass the field exams. This process is different in every department.

For me, I  had to essentially write two thesis on two relevant fields to my dissertation research. I chose ethnography and urban sociology. The abstract above is from my ethnography paper. I plan on fleshing out some of the ideas from this paper for my prospectus and eventual dissertation. But that would suck if anyone has to wait that long to read it! So I’ll be posting different parts of my ethnography paper into several blog posts over the next few weeks. 

The next step is preparation for the orals exams. This is where I “defend” these field papers in front of my committee. They ask lots of questions - I try to answer…they ask more - and yes that goes on for a few hours. AFTEr I pass my oral defense, then I spend a few more weeks writing my prospectus in preparation for my prospectus defense. The prospectus is where you outline your field work plans. THEN I’ll be off to china! 

Here’s a link to the abstracts from my ethnography and urban field papers with a full list of citations for both papers. 

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As an aside - being new to academia, I thought that my department would just rationally waive this step considering that I’ve done more years of fieldwork and presentations around the world than most graduate students. But apparently 4 years of being in the field does not excuse me from the rules! I think that they still thought I was joking when I asked if I really had to do this. 

I’m happy to say that I’m finally done! I’ve been on a strict 15 hours/day 5,000 words/day schedule for the last 3 months. It’s now over. Thanks to a special writing buddy, a lovely coffee shop down the street from me, a great doggy, and friends who took care of me and came all the way to see in brooklyn - I was able to get these done! I am proud to say that I didn’t leave my neighborhood for these few months - didn’t even buy a metro card! 

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Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press.

Burrell, Jenna. 2009. “The Field Site as a Network: A Strategy for Locating Ethnographic Research.” Field Methods 21:181-199.

Castells, Manuel. 2000. The rise of the network society. Oxford ; Malden, {MA}.

Harvey, David. 1991. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Reprint. Wiley-Blackwell.

Smith, Michael Peter. 2002. “Power in Place: Retheorizing the Local and the Global.” Pp. 111-130 in Understanding the city: contemporary and future perspectives. Oxford, UK; Malden, MA.

Virilio, Paul. 2007. Speed and politics. Semiotext(e).

Willis, Paul. 2000. The Ethnographic Imagination. Polity.