ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a few key themes: the possibilities for data collection and research design afforded by contemporary digital devices; the ethnographic study of digital environments and virtual worlds; and the implications of digital environments for the presentation and writing of ethnographies themselves. It describes the continuities between digital and more traditional ways of doing ethnography, while acknowledging possibilities for innovation. While ethnography has always been essentially multimodal, digital recording makes possible a more overtly and self-consciously multimodal approach. The chapter discusses a complementary strategy for thinking about data in a digital environment, based on hypertext and hypermedia functions. It shows that some of the possibilities engage with contemporary forms of social life and social action in ways that are more significant – and more positive – than the so-called postmodern approaches advocated in some quarters, with their recommendation of textual experimentation; sometimes, it seems, largely for its own sake.
