ABSTRACT
A serious threat to the rigor and legitimacy of digital anthropology is when online researchers claim to have ‘done an ethnography’ when they conducted interviews in isolation, paired at most with the analysis of blogs and other texts. Digital anthropology as a framework can provide tools to avoid this conceptual culde-sac—via a theoretical attention to the indexical relationships that link the online and offline through similitude and difference and by a methodological focus on participant observation. Apocalyptic language of fusion undermines the project of digital anthropology; it is an eschatological narrative, invoking an end times when the virtual will cease to be. This recalls how some scholars of the online seem unable to stop referring to the physical as the ‘real’, even though such inaccurate phrasing implies that the online is unreal—delegitimizing their field of study and ignoring how the virtual is immanent to the human. The persistence of such misrepresentations underscores the urgent need for rethinking digital anthropology.
