Digital and Multi-Sited Ethnography

George Marcus, in his 1995 essay "Ethnography in/of the World System," argued that global processes can't be seen from one village and that ethnographers should follow their object of study across sites.

Follow the people, the thing, the metaphor, the plot/story, the life or biography, and the conflict.

Matsutake mushrooms from Oregon forests (picked by Hmong and Lao refugees), through middlemen, into Japanese luxury gift markets — the mushroom stitches the sites together.

Loss of depth — 'ethnography by air miles,' a series of thin visits instead of Geertzian thick description. The fix is selectivity: go deep in one or two anchor sites and use others to trace connections.

Chinese business elites holding multiple passports who treat nation-states as a portfolio of options rather than a single belonging.

He conducted two years of participant observation as an avatar (Tom Bukowski), insisting informants' online lives were culturally real on their own terms.

Across nine field sites with 15 months of fieldwork each, what social media 'does' varies by context — aspiration and escape in a Chinese factory town, extended gossip and visibility in Trinidad. The platform is the same; the culture isn't.

Reading 10,000 posts is content analysis; ethnography means participating — posting, being corrected, learning emoji norms, inside jokes, and moderation politics.

Terms of service, moderation queues, recommendation algorithms, and bans shape the social world much like village land tenure rules do.

Supplementing text-based online data with voice calls, video, in-person meetups, or offline contexts so the research isn't limited to screen traces.