The research papers which follow are by students in ANT4133 Ethnography of New Media, taught by Professor Meg Stalcup at the University of Ottawa. Our course explores new media as a topic and as tools.

The term ‘new media’ would seem to point inevitably to a process of obsolescence. After all, how long can something remain new? But (as noted elsewhere) it is better thought of as a moving label, with newness, at least in part, a quality of the renewability of media in general. ‘Writing at a distance,’ for example, has moved from letters to the telegraph to computers. Our premise is that new media, now and yet-to-be, must be distinguished not in terms of novelty or as some set of devices, but by the relation between technical capabilities, and social and subjectifying characteristics. They present ‘modes of mediation that entail the technological’, as Hirschkind et al. write, ‘but are not reducible to it’.

The ethnography of new media is not only, or even predominantly, the domain of anthropologists. Nor, as we will see, is it the writing (-graphy) of an ethnos. As part of our collaborative inquiry, we read books and articles by anthropologists, philosophers, computer scientists, and others, which both push us to interrogate the world around us and offer conceptual tools for doing so. At the same time, students began research projects of their own. They are asked to first observe and then participate in an online venue of their choice. In this process, they needed to produce a visual archive: a screenshot of the landing page from their field site, or a still from a video game encounter, for instance. Documenting the ways that people interact in and with online spaces, as the students do, relies on internet techniques, which are, today, common practices of fieldwork adapted to blend online and offline, much as they are blended in people’s lives. A list, which can only ever be partial, includes: maintaining, and making, relationships through social networking services and mobile instant messengers; observing the ways that people interact in and with online spaces; participating in wholly or partially online groups; learning skills for and in these milieus; the digitally mediated asking of questions (whether formally in arranged interviews or not); and the many ways that all of this can be recorded and archived.

Technology can be the focus of their research, but is not necessarily. Internet techniques come into play because digital technologies are part of people’s lives. Their addition to anthropology’s toolbox has come about as computer-mediating assemblages have become ordinary for many research subjects. Algorithms, the big data and machine learning producing artificial intelligence (AI), access and lack of access to the internet, and other aspects of the digital are all significant shapers of existence (human and non-human) today. To the extent that lives involve these technologies, anthropological inquiry will too.

These techniques and experimentation with a range of computational social science platforms serve as the empirical basis for a semester-long research project. As you will see, the result is work that is original and richly observed. In the construction of identities, virtual communities, and emerging forms of political and social participation, they capture what are still little-studied aspects of new media and mediation. In addition to substantive documentation, they bring to these topics historical context, and astute reflection on how this research challenged their previous knowledge and understanding of contemporary lives and the internet, as it will, perhaps, your own.