It was evident from the COVID-19 pandemic that the real learning of the research method begins outside the classroom during fieldwork. Pandemic induced physical as well as social distancing and public safety measures did not only disrupt regular access to physical field-sites but also compelled ethnographers to restrict themselves to virtual interactions using digital technologies, rendering conventional academic training in sustained field engagement, embodied experience, and rapport-building insufficient to navigate the new terrain. Thus, it raises a series of theoretical and methodological challenges in making sense of the continuously changing social environment and developing new methodologies to deal with it. It also highlights multiple forms of anxiety for researchers, such as navigating their own positionalities and reflecting on the ‘co-presence’ between offline and online contexts during ethnographic research. This paper foregrounds the debate on the possibility of modified, upgraded, and new methodology which can theories the experiences emerging on the intersection of the online space and offline space.
It also explores the renewed emphasis on ‘distance’ and its dialectical relationship with closeness during participant observation in an increasingly technogenic world while doing onlife ethnography. It concentrates on how the epistemological challenges of ethnographic research are reconstituted by digital culture’s spatial proximity. It also focuses on the methodological and empirical imbrication between online and offline environments, and its implication for ethnographic relationships. A closer examination of the ethnographic relationships in the digital spaces is pivotal in arguing that not only are ethnographic methods susceptible to change, but so too are the perspectives on ethnography.
