https://doi.org/10.23858/EP68.2024.3743
This article explores the consequences of the digitalization of ethnographic studies during the COVID-19 pandemic, questioning whether qualitative social sciences experienced a quiet “digital turn” due to researchers’ growing interest in remote and digital research methods, as well as the generally increased use of digital media during that time. To address this question, the author provides an overview of how ethnographies were adapted to the pandemic’s “new normal,” with parts or all of the fieldwork moving online or shifting to remote interviewing. Next, to discuss what it means to conduct digital ethnography and what digitalized fieldwork entails, the author reviews the development of digital qualitative research methods, introducing an original differentiation into ethnographies of the Internet (1), on the Internet (2), and through the Internet (3). Building on this, the author concludes that a digital turn in ethnography did indeed take place during the pandemic, bringing digital methods to the forefront of the ethnographic toolkit and pushing the digital into the mainstream of anthropological interest.
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