ABSTRACT
Media anthropology mirrors this expansiveness; it has and will continue to grow, to push into ever more domains of human experience and activity. In pursuing, then, the full range of its potential topics, questions, and study sites, media anthropology must be in dialogue with an equally broad range of other research literatures. Fortunately, ethnographic methods, participant observation, in-depth interviewing, and the other techniques of media anthropology are attuned to capturing all this detail. It is exactly with such methods that we can get at the nuances and contingencies, the differences that make a difference in media worlds. Quite naturally, many of the chapters here give attention to the newer digital, social, and mobile media and communicative activities of online life. Appropriately many of them use a methodological approach, digital ethnography, that had no name because it hardly existed 20 years ago. It had to be developed to fit the situation under study.
