Participant observation in the 21st century: How the digital dimension matters for all ethnographers

Introduction

Existing scholarship demonstrates a healthy interest in how to adapt ethnography for the digital era, but has produced a wildly ‘over-defined literature’ (Abidin and de Seta, 2020: 8) that encourages niche offshoots of ethnography, rather than rethinking ethnography at large (Duggan, 2017). ‘Virtual ethnography’ is conceptualized as ‘ethnography for the Internet’ (Hine, 2015: 1). ‘Digital ethnography’ describes methods that seek to ‘do ethnography as the digital unfolds as part of the world that we co-inhabit with the people who participate in our research’ (Pink et al., 2016: 2). ‘Netnography’ refers to ‘participant-observational research based in online fieldwork … [that] uses computer-mediated communications as a source of data to arrive at the ethnographic understanding and representation of a cultural or communal phenomenon’ (Kozinets, 2010: 60). The profusion of labels suggests a splintering off from conventional ethnography. Moreover, these frameworks’ utility is most often demonstrated in the context of studies that self-consciously orient toward digital technology not merely as a methodological tool but also as the core object of study. This sows doubt about their relevance for ethnographers whose research questions do not analytically foreground digital practices.

In this article, I push against viewing these frameworks as somehow divergent from ethnography's core thrust, affirming prior calls to more completely integrate these techniques into ethnography's mainstream (Duggan, 2017; Hallett and Barber, 2014). All ethnographers ought to integrate attention to digital practices into their studies of in-person processes. In line with previous scholarship, I emphasize the well-documented blurred boundaries between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ spheres; importantly, however, I ask researchers to consider how this convergence matters not only for the study of the Internet as embedded in the physical world, but also conversely for the study of physical social worlds, which are today embedded in global digital networks.

To help advance this reorientation, this article illuminates several ways that engaging with the digital dimension of a field site occasions deeper analytical and theoretical insights. Specifically, I argue that this approach bolsters ethnographic investigations by first, increasing the surface area of observable interaction; second, foregrounding extended networks and social linkages; and third, illuminating collaborative interpretive work and deep deliberation. These affordances are not exclusive to studies of digital culture; they emerge in a wide range of institutional and organizational settings where social processes occur through screens. Attending closely to digital infrastructures makes visible the labor through which people sustain connection, collaborate, and develop accounts of their experiences across distance. Ethnographers who engage with these infrastructures come to take part in these same practices, which enables deeper participation in and alignment with their participants’ realities.

The arguments presented here derive from my own experiences doing participant observation as part of a multiyear ethnographic study that commenced shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic and endured through and beyond the pandemic's most disruptive years. Crucially, even before the first pandemic lockdown necessitated a pivot to remote ethnography, I found that little of my in-person fieldwork actually involved traditional ‘face-to-face’ interactions. My research participants spent most of their time in front of screens, whether because they were retrieving client information, drafting legal documents, sending e-mails and messages, or joining teleconferences with other stakeholders around the country. I therefore spent long stretches of in-person fieldwork seated in front of a computer, peripherally aware of the fluttering keyboards of those around me. Accordingly, the changes catalyzed by the pandemic constituted a shift in degree rather than kind. While I initially registered all this time in front of screens largely as negative space within the broader frame of my observations, the pandemic forced me to engage these spaces in new ways. Over the course of over four years of fieldwork, I discovered that diving into online environments with curiosity generated valuable insights, including some that exclusively in-person fieldwork may not afford. Taking the digital dimension seriously as an ethnographic field felt different to in-person ethnography, but not more constrained. To the contrary, it enabled me to engage more authentically with how my participants actually spent much of their time.

Further, orienting more intentionally toward this aspect of my participants’ reality enabled me to make deeper theoretical connections. It both underscored links between my participants’ day-to-day experiences and important, higher-level dynamics within their professional field and highlighted striking parallels between my interpretive process and my participants’ own sensemaking. Since my research centers on immigration lawyers and their efforts to assist people navigating the U.S. asylum system, the epistemological insights I gathered through this technique centered around the emergent trends reshaping that particular legal bureaucracy. Concretely, paying closer attention to activity unfolding via digital platforms pushed me to reflect more critically on the rapid digitalization of the U.S. immigration legal system at large, the evolving (and expanding) geographies of immigration advocacy alongside immigration control, and the way text serves as a pivotal forum for power struggles between legal actors.

Equivalent insights are likely to emerge in other research contexts where this approach is mobilized because the environment I encountered at my field site represents a fairly standard interactive environment today. Most settings—not only workplaces, but also schools, museums, courts, and other institutions—harbor a community of individuals plugged into screens, advancing shared goals, exchanging ideas, negotiating conflict, and building camaraderie through a conduit of interconnected devices. Attending to these underlying infrastructures therefore proves productive in a broad range of spaces, helping to illuminate the potentially subtle ways digitalization transforms or ‘displaces’ institutional norms (Orlikowski and Scott, 2023). Importantly, this approach holds utility under routine conditions and not only when physical copresence with participants unexpectedly becomes difficult (Eggeling, 2023)—whether due to a pandemic or to geopolitical factors, conflict, natural disasters, or lack of funding (Walton, 2018)—although its value will certainly become more obvious in certain moments of crisis.

This paper proceeds by first synthesizing key insights and limitations within existing debates on ethnography in the 21st century. A brief Research Context section then elaborates on the conditions under which I conducted my ethnographic fieldwork. In the analytical portion of the paper, I highlight three central ways that centering interactions that unfold through ubiquitous technologies—in this case, teleconference meetings, e-mail interactions, chat/instant messaging platforms, and social media—offer unique value to the ethnographer. The Discussion consolidates these contributions and expands further on this approach's broad utility.

Rethinking ethnography for the 21st century

Leveraging digital platforms in the course of ethnographic research is crucial because our social worlds increasingly root themselves in virtual spaces (Beer and Burrows, 2007; Beneito-Montagut, 2011; Beneito-Montagut et al., 2017; Garcia et al., 2009; Murthy, 2008). No longer contained to the margins of our daily lives, ‘online community and technological mediation … has passed … into the realm of the status quo, the way that our society simply is’ (Kozinets, 2010: 67–68). Thus, although ethnography's authority is conventionally understood to be grounded in the idea of ‘travel, experience and [face-to-face] interaction’ (Hine, 2000: 44; see also Forsey et al., 2015; Markham, 2013; Postill, 2017), habitually gravitating to in-person participant observation over digitally mediated participant observation throws ethnographers out of sync with an era that has thoroughly normalized digital connections and virtual copresence. In a context ‘[w]here mediated communications are a significant part of what people do … it should be self-evident that the ethnographer needs to take part in those mediated communications alongside whatever face-to-face interactions may occur…’ (Hine, 2015: 3).

In short, although ethnography is fundamentally about proximity, this proximity derives more from shared experience—which can be achieved through mediated communications—than from physical copresence (Hine, 2015: 21). This framing encourages an emphasis on relational and processual connections over physical place (Ardévol and Gómez-Cruz, 2013). On this view, ‘[i]f culture and community are not self-evidently located in place, then neither is ethnography. The object of ethnographic enquiry can usefully be reshaped by concentrating on flow and connectivity rather than location and boundary as the organizing principle’ (Hine, 2000: 64; see also Burrell, 2009), prioritizing ‘a topic and not a location’ (Hine, 2000: 67; see also Garcia et al., 2009) and refocusing from a given social world's physical ‘emplacement’ (Pink et al., 2009, X) to focus instead on the nonspatial boundaries and traits that define that world. Relatedly, existing scholarship has frequently invoked the logic of multisited ethnography (Marcus, 1995), arguing that to move with participants requires pivoting between online and offline orientations (Hallett and Barber, 2014).

Indeed, this reconceptualization of the ethnographic project allows for fuller recognition of the ways that social phenomena increasingly encompass both online and offline environments (de Souza e Silva, 2006; Garcia et al., 2009; Przybylski, 2021; Wilson, 2006). The two ‘are not discrete entities’ (Gajjala, 2009: 61) since ‘communication forms and activities flow through the online/offline divide’ (Bakardjieva, 2009: 58; see also Beneito-Montagut, 2011; Bluteau, 2021). Accordingly, scholars advocate for an expansive approach to ethnography that permits the ethnographer to traverse both physical and online spaces, as appropriate (Hine, 2015; Numerato, 2016; Przybylski, 2021). Research online often plays a secondary or complementary role to in-person research, and vice versa (Kozinets, 2010: 65). In either case, ethnographers must recognize that they operate in a reality ‘in which fully online and fully offline methodologies offer useful—but not sufficient—tools’ (Przybylski, 2021) and must adapt by practicing mobility between methodologies (Postill and Pink, 2012).

As the above synthesis shows, ethnography's suitability for the hybridized 21st century is well-theorized; however, a close review of the relevant literature suggests that it has nevertheless largely failed to establish itself as integral to what is considered mainstream ethnographic practice. More specifically, its commentaries typically emerge from the work of scholars whose research questions directly center—substantively or theoretically—on the role of digital technology in social life. This common conflation between topic and method unnecessarily siloes these strategies, creating the impression that they are primarily, if not only, relevant when applied to studies that analytically foreground digital worlds or tools. Perhaps as a result, few ‘traditional ethnographers’ deeply contemplate digital environments as they build their research designs, ‘ultimately excluding a method of data collection that is epistemologically salient’ (Hallett and Barber, 2014: 308; see also Garcia et al., 2009; Przybylski, 2021).

This undue segregation is particularly pronounced in the literature on participant observation. By way of contrast, existing scholarship has effectively made the case for integrating digital techniques into qualitative methods such as interviewing, focus groups, and textual analysis. For example, researchers have lauded the value of folding social media analysis and e-mail interviewing into the study of play-based teaching in kindergartens (Lynch and Mah, 2018), the possibilities that Skype holds for qualitative interviewing (Deakin and Wakefield, 2014; Hanna, 2012; Seitz, 2016), the utility of WhatsApp for facilitating focus groups among activists in Kenya (Colom, 2022), the value of collecting ‘thick’ digital data to complement Big Data (Latzko-Toth et al., 2017), and the potential of written asynchronous online communications as an alternative to conventional oral interviews (Schiek and Ullrich, 2017).

Meanwhile, scholarship on the execution of participant observation online remains largely focused either on settings that are native to the Internet (such as virtual reality environments (Boellstorff, 2015; Williams, 2007: 2) and dark-web and hard-to-reach online communities (Barratt and Maddox, 2016; Kaufmann and Tzanetakis, 2020)) or on research topics that directly orient toward the Internet, such as participants’ social media use (Beneito-Montagut et al., 2017), the role of emotions in online interpersonal connections (Beneito-Montagut, 2011), the influence of built-in platform metrics on the evaluation of software developers’ work performances (Ritter, 2022), and the reliance on digital devices for distanced social connection during the COVID-19 pandemic (Watson et al., 2021). In other words, even when participant observation studies intentionally attend to both the online and offline modalities of a field, they typically leverage this analysis to analytically center the digital technologies at play. Efforts such as that to distinguish ‘internet-related ethnography’—conceptualized as ‘ethnography that engages with internet practices and content directly, but not exclusively’ (Postill and Pink, 2012: 125)—from pure internet ethnography usefully underscore the coimplications of digital and material environments (Id.), but ultimately affirm their own marginality so long as they address themselves to a niche audience comprised of ‘social media ethnographer[s]’ (Id.: 132).

This article instead aspires to speak to researchers who do not consciously see themselves to practice internet-related ethnography, let alone internet ethnography. It illuminates the ‘messy fieldwork environment that crosses online and offline worlds’ (Id.: 126) as these ethnographers might encounter it, inviting more rigorous reflection on how researchers can effectively apply Internet-centric methods to research questions that are not Internet-centric (or even Internet-adjacent). In this way it inverts the orientation that currently dominates the field and advances more widespread—and more proactive, intentional, and self-aware—engagement with hybrid approaches, which ‘traditional’ ethnographers have at times only stumbled into inadvertently after discovering the Internet's central role within an environment they previously conceived of as physical (Hallett and Barber, 2014; Przybylski, 2021; Wilson, 2006). This article affirms that instead of leaving attention to digital spaces to the seemingly niche modalities of ‘digital ethnography,’ ‘virtual ethnography,’ ‘netnography,’ ‘Internet ethnography,’ and their myriad cousins, ethnographers must recognize that attending to technological infrastructures is important for most ethnographic projects in the 21st century (Duggan, 2017). To this end, the article identifies and elaborates three meaningful ways that engaging with digital spaces holds analytical purchase for research agendas that are not on their face digitally oriented.

Research context

This article derives from broader ethnographic research I undertook to study the evolving challenges of U.S. immigration lawyering from the perspective of public interest attorneys. Specifically, I sought to understand how Los Angeles-based lawyers providing legal aid to people seeking asylum adapt to the tumultuous law and policy changes enacted by the U.S. government. To do so, I gained access as a legal volunteer to a nonprofit organization focused on providing pro bono assistance to people seeking asylum in and around Los Angeles. The organization also participated in broader, coalition-based policy advocacy to defend the collective rights of people seeking asylum. Using participant observation to study these lawyers’ experiences at work enabled me to witness—and, to an extent, directly experience—how the shifting landscape of U.S. immigration law impacted attorneys’ practices on a daily basis and over extended periods of time.

I started ethnographic fieldwork in early February 2020, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic upended life globally. My original research plan envisioned in-person data collection. For around six weeks, I followed this plan. I commuted to my primary field site—the office where my research participants worked—two to three days per week. I made myself at home with the other interns, attended staff meetings in the boardroom, built trust with my participants over lunch in the neighborhood, and spontaneously interfaced with clients who appeared in the reception area. I physically carried a conspicuous teal notebook around the office, taking shorthand ethnographic notes during and after interactions; later, at home, I typed up and fleshed out my handwritten scribbles with additional reflections.

Yet as a participant—as a legal volunteer, managing assignments in between meetings—I found that I spent most of my time in the field sitting at a desk. That the interns’ desk sat in a public, central, and open-plan part of the office, in the way of considerable foot traffic, precluded physical isolation. But the spontaneous small talk that bubbled up as someone passed by en route to the kitchen did not outweigh the reality that most of the activity I and others undertook each day entailed effort at the individual level—typically enacted in front of a screen, in silence. As I settled into fieldwork, this troubled me. How could I draw ethnographically from the many hours I spent working alone in front of a computer?

Moreover, I struggled in practice to clearly define the edges of my field site. So much of my participants’ everyday practices relied on dialog and collaboration with people physically based in other places. My participants’ use of technology made it hard to distinguish between ‘here’ and ‘there.’ Observing staff meetings attended only by LA-based staff seemed straightforward, but how should I approach larger meetings in which LA-based lawyers connected via video teleconference to other lawyers across the country?

In short, the prototype of a physically conceived field site as the singular stage for real-time, readily observable social interaction failed to adequately fit the world of my participants. This mismatch made it challenging to meet immigration lawyers where they actually were; it placed my ability to fully participate in their world at odds with my ability to ethnographically observe it. That lawyers sometimes worked across great geographic distance to provide remote legal assistance to people trapped at or beyond the U.S. border underscored the weight of the conundrum, as did the fact that U.S. judges and U.S. agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used remote technologies to process the cases of detained immigrants. Surely, studies of legal services and procedures that operated remotely could not rely only on in-person approaches to ethnography. Given that, how could I adapt my research practices to the reality that so much of lawyering work occurs on computers, by phone, and via email and shared cloud drives?

In mid-March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted my in-person fieldwork and pushed me to consider these questions with greater urgency. Precisely because so many of my participants’ practices relied on technology, my participants transitioned relatively seamlessly to a fully remote model. I too continued to successfully participate in meetings as well as substantive tasks by logging in from home. Of course, the context of the pandemic meant that certain things became difficult, impossible, or ethically proscribed: for months, neither my participants nor I attended immigration hearings, visited detention facilities, conducted in-person client meetings, traveled to the border, or partook in spontaneous water cooler talk. But the elimination of these physical contexts of interaction pushed me to dig more deeply into the ethnographic value of social interaction occurring digitally. Whereas time spent in front of a screen previously registered as relatively impenetrable negative space within the course of fieldwork, this mode of interaction gradually opened up as a useful alternative vantage point—in its own right—into the experiences, habits, and worldviews of asylum lawyers.

Conducting participant observation in the remote workplace

Making participant observation work remotely requires paying attention to the overlooked infrastructure of technology that so often facilitates communication and copresence today—certainly in many workplaces but also in other settings, such as schools, courts, homes, and cultural and recreational centers. Hours spent before a screen in the course of fieldwork need not be solitary, nor silent, nor devoid of ethnographic data. Digital platforms make meaningful researcher participation and rich observations possible; in fact, they can add deeper dimensionality to the insights that emerge from sharing physical space with research participants.

To highlight clearly the digital infrastructure that most ethnographers have at their disposal, it is helpful to describe by way of example the form it took within my field site and the purchase that it held for studying immigration law practice. The physical reality of my field site coexisted with a digital environment that structured my participants’ daily habits, interactions, interpersonal relationships, workflow, and use of physical space. In my capacity as a legal volunteer, when I received an assignment related to a particular asylum case, I went immediately to the client's record in the organization's cloud-based case management software. This record not only captured the foundational substantive details of the case but also served as a dynamic collaborative hub. It indicated which members of the team had played a role in the case to date and tracked any actions they took in relation to the case, interactions they had with the client, and concerns or observations that they felt compelled to flag to colleagues. Similarly, when I drafted a report following an intake interview with a prospective client, I saved it in a collectively accessible folder on the organization's cloud-based shared drive. From here, my supervisor subsequently pulled it up on her screen and entered edits, comments, and queries directly into the Word document. Microsoft Office automatically pushed each of my supervisor's comments into my volunteer e-mail inbox as a notification, prompting the two of us—if I had my volunteer inbox open at that moment—to slide into a live conversation about the prospective client's claim. (Importantly, however, even when collaboration unfolded asynchronously, it afforded rich insights into how my participants made sense of their professional world).

The COVID-19 pandemic helpfully incentivized me to explore this aspect of my field site more intentionally. In the initial weeks of the first lockdown, I paid closer analytical attention to the organization's digital infrastructure. I requested to join its Slack workspace as well as several popular immigration-related e-mail listservs external to the organization. I obtained Zoom invitations to as many internal and external advocacy-related meetings as possible. I initiated a weekly practice of checking the professional social media accounts of both my participants and other full-time public interest immigration attorneys. Ultimately, the digital spaces that previously seemed too intangible or diffuse to be a priority for data collection proved themselves uniquely positioned to enrich my understanding of LA asylum attorneys’ practices. In what follows, I describe three central ways that paying close attention to the digital dimension potentially holds distinct analytic value.

Discussion

The digital environment offers a distinct perch from which to observe the world. Taking it into consideration may affect how the researcher initially gains entrée into a community, navigates their own inclusion and participation in the community, makes observations, writes field notes, and settles ethical doubts (Kozinets, 2010: 5). Yet as I learned over the course of more than four years of fieldwork, these adaptations are worth making because paying attention to the digital dimensions of a field site creates possibilities that focusing exclusively on in-person physicality cannot. In this final synthesis, I expand on the utility of proceeding in this manner, clarifying how exactly, and in which research contexts, this approach holds purchase. In short, attention to digital modes of interaction is crucial because technology lies at the heart of so many social processes today: it is now a central means through which people strive to establish closeness with one another despite the distances, isolations, and alienations that define our world (and that, ironically, often stem from hyperdigitalization). For ethnographers, engaging with these digitally mediated practices deepens our ability to participate in, and more fully understand, our interlocutors’ worlds. It does so, first, by offering new access points into everyday life and, second, by allowing researchers to inhabit relational environments alongside participants as they themselves rely on technology to cultivate connection and make meaning.

Centering connection and, further, recognizing social connection as a phenomenon that may not derive from physicality aligns especially well with research agendas that speak to the significance of globalization and long-distance relational networks, allegiances, and dependencies. This means that it holds tremendous promise for the sociological study of workplaces, organizations, and institutions that operate between locales or transnationally. Its value is also especially compelling for the study of social movements, activism, and other collective efforts that may take a geographically dispersed form. Importantly, however, it is relevant even when participants share physical proximity, since so many people integrate e-mail, teleconference, messaging, and other digital platforms into their daily interactions even with those with whom they share a home, office, or neighborhood. In the course of studying immigration lawyers, it became readily apparent that mediated means of fostering connection mattered profoundly for participants because the immigration law landscape is both increasingly permeated by technology (as when advocates devise new ways of maintaining client relationships virtually) and increasingly reconfigured to play out across new spaces (pushing Los Angeles-based advocates to, for example, coordinate more proactively with advocates south of the U.S. border). By orienting towards my field site's digital infrastructure, I both gained greater visibility into these aspects of my participants’ reality and also seized an opportunity to directly engage in the communicative strategies that my participants used to sustain their work.

Although this model pushes researchers to focus on how connectivity and shared experience—rather than physical copresence—produce proximity, it does not render place invisible. To the contrary, it can make the implications of place more salient. Over the course of my fieldwork, although the COVID-19 pandemic caused me to lose visibility into some of the sensory dimensions of physical setting, I became more sensitive to the full geographic scope of my participants’ professional lives through attuning to the flows of interaction between people and institutions situated in separate places. Rather than conceptualizing my field site as a single physical location, I came to appreciate it as a point in a web of well-trodden pathways, habitual journeys, and movements (whether literal or virtual) that produce a cartography of social practice. The places that matter to people—and how they matter—are highly visible in how they talk, message, and e-mail about their practices.

This helps mitigate the risk that the ethnographer who prioritizes attention to digital platforms will overlook people, places, and problems that do not carry such a thick trace in the digital world. Ethnographers must take this risk seriously: technology marginalizes, and inequities in digital access will make themselves felt in qualitative research that leverages digital tools. Without keeping a critical eye on this, ethnographers will reproduce harmful invisibilities. But accounting for Internet-driven practices affords space to better understand what these inequities and limitations practically mean to people in their everyday lives—for example, how participants manage moments at which the integration between online and offline fails or how they pursue intimacy despite (or through) gaps in the digital infrastructure. During my pandemic-era fieldwork, my ability to perceive lawyers’ activity stood in stark contrast to their and my exacerbated inability to engage with people in detention, whose incarceration largely excluded them from the digital grid. Yet in experiencing this directly myself while also witnessing attorneys’ struggles with how to meaningfully ‘be there’ for their detained clients, I more deeply internalized the extent to which immigration attorneys must daily cultivate proximity with practices of solidarity, loyalty, and attention that transcend physical copresence.

Even as this approach to ethnography reflects the double-edged qualities of technology—its ability to include and exclude—it is also worth noting that it will almost always make qualitative research more accessible for scholars. Researchers are likely to have more consistent online access than they have time or funding for their in-person fieldwork. To be clear, attention to digital domains should not replace attention to physical environments. But for researchers with limited time or other resources, it may open up the possibility of more extensive periods ‘in’ the field, or of getting ‘into’ the field sooner. This modality offers ‘useful efficiencies,’ being ‘less time consuming and resource intensive’ (Kozinets, 2010). Just as remote learning, though imperfect, makes it possible for students to participate in courses held at schools in other cities or even on other continents, remote ethnography makes it easier for ethnographers to get a foot in the door with qualitative research.

The exciting possibilities foregrounded here gesture towards some of the undeniable challenges of using digital technology to enrich participant observation. While a comprehensive examination of these and other challenges is beyond the scope of this article, ethnographers should meet these challenges with engagement rather than aversion. Any ethnographic approach comes with its own practical limitations, ethical dilemmas, and peculiarities in terms of how it shapes data. Thoughtfully navigating that complex terrain is a crucial part of bringing participant observation into alignment with today's world.