This article is a reflexive account of an ethnographer’s foray into digital anthropology, necessitating the formulation of collaborative research strategies. The information presented comes from yearlong fieldwork among blogshop owners and commercial bloggers in Singapore. This paper is part of an ongoing doctoral dissertation that looks into narratives of self-creation, boundaries of privacy, and vicarious consumption, and is the groundwork for the continuation of more extensive and in-depth research. The exploration between August 2011 and December 2012 reveals the need for anthropologists to assess their digital community before entering the field in order to access the community with tact. It further shows some defining features of this digital community that contributed to the shaping of the research methodology. I also analyse three points of contention born out of bringing online communications and relationships into a physical space offline. They are the ambiguous transference of intimacy, verbalizing cyber lingo, and the place of online media in face-to-face communication. Collaboration is a defining feature of this digital ethnography’s methodology given the extent of networks and partnerships across a vast array of locations, vocations, and demographics throughout the community.

The article was published in 2012 in the journal Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy.”Social media practices and technologies are often part of how ethnographic research participants navigate their wider social, material and technological worlds, and are equally part of ethnographic practice. This creates the need to consider how emergent forms of social media-driven ethnographic practice might be understood theoretically and methodologically. In this article, we respond critically to existing literatures concerning the nature of the internet as an ethnographic site by suggesting how concepts of routine, movement and sociality enable us to understand the making of social media ethnography knowledge and places.

This classic work by American researcher Annette Markham is committed to the analysis of metaphors used to conceptualize the internet in various discourses, ranging from user-oriented to media and technological ones. It explores the internet as a tool, a place, and a mode of existence. Despite the fact that the article was first published two decades ago, Markham’s idea that methaphorics not only helps describe and make sense of technology but also shapes our interaction with it remains relevant as we continue to describe the internet as a space of action, a channel of communication, a data repository, and a place of memory. This variability in the metaphorical framing of the internet and the associated political decisions and actions are especially important in constructing the internet as a research field and digital ethnography.

Anthropologist Daniel Miller and his colleagues from different countries have conducted several major researches on how people interact with social media and mobile platforms. Polina Kolozaridi and her colleagues from the Club for Internet and Society Enthusiasts worked on translating an online course based on the survey “Why We Post”, which took place in the 2010s. After that, Miller and his team began studying applications for health and elderly users. In this conversation, the participants draw on materials from an ongoing research project. However, these materials already raise questions about the extent to which theories and phones consist of metaphors, and whether ethnography should be trusted.

Nick Seaver is an assistant professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, where he teaches in the program on Science, Technology, and Society. His research examines the cultural theorizing of technical experts, particularly in fields related to machine learning. He has published on topics including commercial theories of context, the anthropology of trapping, and ethnographic methodologies for studying algorithmic systems. His forthcoming book, Computing Taste, explores how the developers of algorithmic music recommender systems understand and justify their work. He is the co-editor of Towards an Anthropology of Data (2021) and former co-chair of the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing. His current research explores the use of attention as a value and virtue in machine learning worlds.

The current article is a description of development processes of a geolocation game in a big Russian financial corporation. As intended, the game should encourage corporate clients to pay via QR codes provided by partner companies and branches of the bank. Basically, the corporation invests into promoting a new technology — QR payments — very popular in Asian countries but still relatively unknown to the Russian public. The main focus of the research is comprehension of the factors that define what the final version of the game app will look like.

The research is based on participant observation data gathered in September–December 2019 during collaborative work on the app’s game mechanics, as well as on seven semi-structured interviews with developers.

Developers are required to make the game “interesting”, that is, to immerse the users into the game mechanics of the app to the largest extent possible, while encouraging them to follow the intended financial pattern — to make QR payments. This leads to impossible choices also known as paradoxes, and we highlight three of those: 1) lack of understanding who are the target audience of the app, 2) necessity to camouflage the core gaming mechanic of the game — making QR payments, 3) necessity to protect clients’ data. All the three paradoxes have no unambiguously correct answer, therefore the developers need to overcome them by making controversial decisions with high degree of uncertainty. All in all, we intend to demonstrate that a significant technological transition that introducing of QR payments in Russia depends not only on the decisions made by the developers but also on a multi-level context within which the development process takes place, on resistance of already existing payment practices and on how competition on QR payments market will unfold. 

This paper focuses on teamwork during video game streams on the Twitch service. Using Urry’s “affective community” term, the authors try to describe how the streamer and its audience build emotional bonds, strengthening community boundaries or conflicting on some issues. Having conducted a series of interviews with streamers, as well as several observations, we derive a number of categories defining the structure of communication between the streamer and its viewers. Metaphorically, we call this structure “salon”, where the streamer is not always a central figure, but rather a moderator. Streaming is interpreted as an online form of offline mass gathering, the specifics of which is more about the horizontal structure of the community — as opposed to YouTube or Instagram* practices where the blogger takes the center stage, and the community is based on an opposition between the blogger and their audience. The article demonstrates the stability of streaming communities. Due to their all-permeating structure (messengers, social networks, message boards, etc.), on the one hand, and due to emotional bond generated via experiencing affectus of involvement, on the other hand, such communities are platform-independent associations of people who are capable of migration between platform, of economic and emotional solidarity, and of stability against prolonged hiatuses in nominal activity of the community-building streamer.

In this study, online communities dedicated to Moscow are ethnographically examined. The aim is to describe the strategies of representation and consumption of urban memory, as well as to analyze the media environment. Two Facebook* groups are compared with each other and with a retro image-oriented platform — Pastvu.com.

The concepts of emotional work and digital enthusiasm are shown to be applicable to the comparison of online groups. The results of the empirical analysis show different patterns and directions of emotional work and digital enthusiasm in the two Facebook* groups. The Pastvu.com platform represents a “different species” in the media ecology. Although Facebook* groups are inevitably familiar with Pastvu.com, their permanent proximity is undesirable. Pastvu.com has no equivalents and represents a technological innovation in the field of memory ecology.

The selection is an original perspective on the early internet in Russia explored through the practice of writing on the websites that the latter were under construction. Such verbalizations are not only a reminder of the contrast between the web of the 2000s and the contemporary Internet, but they also signify a specific approach to the Internet through the metaphor of collaborative construction. The selection consists of textual variations of the “under construction” phrasing found on the websites of Tomsk and Arzamas, the cities that have some of the most extensive early web archives available to researchers in Russia. The materials were collected during the expeditions of the Club for Internet and Society Enthusiasts, conducted to research the history of the internet in Russia.

This publication presents field material from a project dedicated to the professionalization of PR in Russia. The compilation includes quotes from interviews related to the computerization of the Russian PR positions in the 1990s, and author’s comments providing context and conveying impressions of the entire corpus of interviews. The quotes are divided into four sections: mobile and other communication, computerization, mastering the internet, and the current attitude towards mediated and personal conversation.

The development of sex education in Russia has been rather dramatic. Temporary liberalization has been replaced by conservative attitudes several times, both in professional areas (education and medicine) and in the public sphere. Now there is free access to information about sexuality and sex on open Internet resources available virtually without any age or territorial restrictions. Social networks and bloggers have become a major source of expertise. Therefore, it is especially significant to notice and describe examples of Russian sex blogs on Instagram as a phenomenon. This article which was written in 2021 is an attempt to delineate content strategies (strategies for using text, photo, video and hybrid content) used by sex blog authors. Additionally, I offer some focal points that are important for continuing and deepening the analysis in future sociological, anthropological and Internet research.

In this article, I rely on the methods used by internet researchers working with digital ethnography. I investigate the blogs using long-term participant observation (about two years in total) and description of content elements in sex blogs. I describe blogs, illustrate them using screenshots and citations, analyze and classify the content of Russian sex blogs on Instagram. I also highlight the most notable problematic topics: the boundaries of public and private in sex blogs and methods of self-presentation.

As a result, I assume that certain approaches have developed for balancing authenticity and expertise. I suggest that sex bloggers have special and fluid content strategies that allow authors to speak out on sensitive and socially significant topics of sex and sexuality and to broadcast their own identity on the Internet at the same time, regulating the borders of public and private.