With the increase of digital and networked media in everyday life, researchers have increasingly turned their gaze to the symbolic and cultural elements of technologies. From studying online game communities, locative and social media to YouTube and mobile media, ethnographic approaches to digital and networked media have helped to elucidate the dynamic cultural and social dimensions of media practice. The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, and conceptually cutting-edge guide to this emergent and diverse area.
Features include:
- a comprehensive history of computers and digitization in anthropology;
- exploration of various ethnographic methods in the context of digital tools and network relations;
- consideration of social networking and communication technologies on a local and global scale;
Table of Contents
Part I – Debating Digital Ethnography
1. Computers in/and anthropology: the poetics and politics of digitization
2. From virtual ethnography to the embedded, embodied, everyday Internet
3. Vectors for fieldwork: computational thinking and new modes of ethnography
4. A performative digital ethnography: data, design, and speculation
5. The fieldsite as a network: a strategy for locating ethnographic research
6. Remote ethnography: studying digital politics in Spain and Indonesia from afar
7. Mixing it: digital ethnography and online research methods—a tale of two global digital music genres
Part II – Relationships
8. Small places turned inside out: social networking in small communities
9. "Doing family" at a distance: transnational family practices in polymedia environments
10. Researching death online
11. Relational labor, fans, and collaborations in professional rock climbing
Part III – Visibility and Voice
12. "Our media"? Microblogging and the elusiveness of voice in China
13. Participatory complications in interactive, video-sharing environments
14. Influencer extravaganza: a decade of commercial "lifestyle" microcelebrities in Singapore
15. Nah Leavin’ Trinidad: the place of digital music production among amateur musicians in Trinidad
Part IV – Place and Co-Presence
16. Locating emerging media: ethnographic reflections on culture, selfhood, and place
17. Making "ournet not the Internet": an ethnography of homebrew high-tech practices in suburban Australia
18. Locative mobile media and the development of unplanned, fleeting encounters with pseudonymous strangers, and virtual acqu
