Digital ethnography in COVID-19: improvisation and intimacy

Journal article

COVID-19's uncertainties have reminded researchers of how improvisation is both an inherent and a limiting aspect of ethnographic practice. The pandemic also generated a rise in highly improvised digital ethnographic research, producing fresh questions on the domain's relative ability to realize social intimacy with participants. I reflect on both pre-fieldwork and fieldwork experiences between November 2019 and September 2021, while considering what it means to fail and succeed with improvisation during the outbreak. By extension, I ask when improvisational practice should be abandoned to balance a researcher's affective survivance in the field. I additionally explore several challenges and advantages found through improvising to digital ethnography. Focusing on material affordances and digital ecology, I review some of the benefits its mediation yielded over everyday community dynamics, while considering digital life as relatively complex and resource dependent. Nonetheless, with COVID-19 further shrinking the analog-digital divide in everyday life, I suggest a greater urgency for ethnographers to treat digital intimacies as equally legitimate and insightful as their analog counterparts. Ke

Authors: Shah, A

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Anthropological Society of Oxford
• Journal: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford Online
• Volume: 15
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 178-193
• Publication date: 2023-12-19
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-e95bem8r9
• ISSN: 2040-1876
• Language: English
• Keywords: ethnography; digital-mediation; intimacy; JASO; improvisation; COVID-19