Participant observation in the 21st century: How the digital dimension matters for all ethnographers

Abstract

Scholarship on participant observation in the digital era has produced a proliferation of labels—virtual ethnography, digital ethnography, and netnography, among others—that often position digitally attuned methods as specialized departures from ethnography's core. This framing risks obscuring the relevance of digital practices for ethnographers whose research questions do not centrally concern technology. The present article proposes that attention to the multifaceted digital dimensions of social life enhances participant observation even for those who study social processes whose center of gravity is offline. Drawing on a multiyear ethnographic study initiated shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, I emphasize that much ostensibly ‘in-person’ work unfolds through screens and digital infrastructures. Consciously engaging these environments expands ethnographic insight in three key ways: increasing the surface area of observable interaction, foregrounding participants’ extended social networks, and illuminating collaborative interpretive work among research participants.

Introduction

Existing scholarship demonstrates a healthy interest in how to adapt ethnography for the digital era, but has produced a wildly ‘over-defined literature’ (Abidin and de Seta, 2020: 8) that encourages niche offshoots of ethnography, rather than rethinking ethnography at large (Duggan, 2017). ‘Virtual ethnography’ is conceptualized as ‘ethnography for the Internet’ (Hine, 2015: 1). ‘Digital ethnography’ describes methods that seek to ‘do ethnography as the digital unfolds as part of the world that we co-inhabit with the people who participate in our research’ (Pink et al., 2016: 2). ‘Netnography’ refers to ‘participant-observational research based in online fieldwork … [that] uses computer-mediated communications as a source of data to arrive at the ethnographic understanding and representation of a cultural or communal phenomenon’ (Kozinets, 2010: 60). The profusion of labels suggests a splintering off from conventional ethnography. Moreover, these frameworks’ utility is most often demonstrated in the context of studies that self-consciously orient toward digital technology not merely as a methodological tool but also as the core object of study. This sows doubt about their relevance for ethnographers whose research questions do not analytically foreground digital practices.

In this article, I push against viewing these frameworks as somehow divergent from ethnography's core thrust, affirming prior calls to more completely integrate these techniques into ethnography's mainstream (Duggan, 2017; Hallett and Barber, 2014). All ethnographers ought to integrate attention to digital practices into their studies of in-person processes. In line with previous scholarship, I emphasize the well-documented blurred boundaries between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ spheres; importantly, however, I ask researchers to consider how this convergence matters not only for the study of the Internet as embedded in the physical world, but also conversely for the study of physical social worlds, which are today embedded in global digital networks.

To help advance this reorientation, this article illuminates several ways that engaging with the digital dimension of a field site occasions deeper analytical and theoretical insights. Specifically, I argue that this approach bolsters ethnographic investigations by first, increasing the surface area of observable interaction; second, foregrounding extended networks and social linkages; and third, illuminating collaborative interpretive work and deep deliberation. These affordances are not exclusive to studies of digital culture; they emerge in a wide range of institutional and organizational settings where social processes occur through screens. Attending closely to digital infrastructures makes visible the labor through which people sustain connection, collaborate, and develop accounts of their experiences across distance. Ethnographers who engage with these infrastructures come to take part in these same practices, which enables deeper participation in and alignment with their participants’ realities.

The arguments presented here derive from my own experiences doing participant observation as part of a multiyear ethnographic study that commenced shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic and endured through and beyond the pandemic's most disruptive years. Crucially, even before the first pandemic lockdown necessitated a pivot to remote ethnography, I found that little of my in-person fieldwork actually involved traditional ‘face-to-face’ interactions. My research participants spent most of their time in front of screens, whether because they were retrieving client information, drafting legal documents, sending e-mails and messages, or joining teleconferences with other stakeholders around the country. I therefore spent long stretches of in-person fieldwork seated in front of a computer, peripherally aware of the fluttering keyboards of those around me. Accordingly, the changes catalyzed by the pandemic constituted a shift in degree rather than kind. While I initially registered all this time in front of screens largely as negative space within the broader frame of my observations, the pandemic forced me to engage these spaces in new ways. Over the course of over four years of fieldwork, I discovered that diving into online environments with curiosity generated valuable insights, including some that exclusively in-person fieldwork may not afford. Taking the digital dimension seriously as an ethnographic field felt different to in-person ethnography, but not more constrained. To the contrary, it enabled me to engage more authentically with how my participants actually spent much of their time.

Further, orienting more intentionally toward this aspect of my participants’ reality enabled me to make deeper theoretical connections. It both underscored links between my participants’ day-to-day experiences and important, higher-level dynamics within their professional field and highlighted striking parallels between my interpretive process and my participants’ own sensemaking. Since my research centers on immigration lawyers and their efforts to assist people navigating the U.S. asylum system, the epistemological insights I gathered through this technique centered around the emergent trends reshaping that particular legal bureaucracy. Concretely, paying closer attention to activity unfolding via digital platforms pushed me to reflect more critically on the rapid digitalization of the U.S. immigration legal system at large, the evolving (and expanding) geographies of immigration advocacy alongside immigration control, and the way text serves as a pivotal forum for power struggles between legal actors.

Equivalent insights are likely to emerge in other research contexts where this approach is mobilized because the environment I encountered at my field site represents a fairly standard interactive environment today. Most settings—not only workplaces, but also schools, museums, courts, and other institutions—harbor a community of individuals plugged into screens, advancing shared goals, exchanging ideas, negotiating conflict, and building camaraderie through a conduit of interconnected devices. Attending to these underlying infrastructures therefore proves productive in a broad range of spaces, helping to illuminate the potentially subtle ways digitalization transforms or ‘displaces’ institutional norms (Orlikowski and Scott, 2023). Importantly, this approach holds utility under routine conditions and not only when physical copresence with participants unexpectedly becomes difficult (Eggeling, 2023)—whether due to a pandemic or to geopolitical factors, conflict, natural disasters, or lack of funding (Walton, 2018)—although its value will certainly become more obvious in certain moments of crisis.

This paper proceeds by first synthesizing key insights and limitations within existing debates on ethnography in the 21st century. A brief Research Context section then elaborates on the conditions under which I conducted my ethnographic fieldwork. In the analytical portion of the paper, I highlight three central ways that centering interactions that unfold through ubiquitous technologies—in this case, teleconference meetings, e-mail interactions, chat/instant messaging platforms, and social media—offer unique value to the ethnographer. The Discussion consolidates these contributions and expands further on this approach's broad utility.

Rethinking ethnography for the 21st century

Leveraging digital platforms in the course of ethnographic research is crucial because our social worlds increasingly root themselves in virtual spaces (Beer and Burrows, 2007; Beneito-Montagut, 2011; Beneito-Montagut et al., 2017; Garcia et al., 2009; Murthy, 2008). No longer contained to the margins of our daily lives, ‘online community and technological mediation … has passed … into the realm of the status quo, the way that our society simply is’ (Kozinets, 2010: 67–68). Thus, although ethnography's authority is conventionally understood to be grounded in the idea of ‘travel, experience and [face-to-face] interaction’ (Hine, 2000: 44; see also Forsey et al., 2015; Markham, 2013; Postill, 2017), habitually gravitating to in-person participant observation over digitally mediated participant observation throws ethnographers out of sync with an era that has thoroughly normalized digital connections and virtual copresence. In a context ‘[w]here mediated communications are a significant part of what people do … it should be self-evident that the ethnographer needs to take part in those mediated communications alongside whatever face-to-face interactions may occur…’ (Hine, 2015: 3).

In short, although ethnography is fundamentally about proximity, this proximity derives more from shared experience—which can be achieved through mediated communications—than from physical copresence (Hine, 2015: 21). This framing encourages an emphasis on relational and processual connections over physical place (Ardévol and Gómez-Cruz, 2013). On this view, ‘[i]f culture and community are not self-evidently located in place, then neither is ethnography. The object of ethnographic enquiry can usefully be reshaped by concentrating on flow and connectivity rather than location and boundary as the organizing principle’ (Hine, 2000: 64; see also Burrell, 2009), prioritizing ‘a topic and not a location’ (Hine, 2000: 67; see also Garcia et al., 2009) and refocusing from a given social world's physical ‘emplacement’ (Pink et al., 2009, X) to focus instead on the nonspatial boundaries and traits that define that world. Relatedly, existing scholarship has frequently invoked the logic of multisited ethnography (Marcus, 1995), arguing that to move with participants requires pivoting between online and offline orientations (Hallett and Barber, 2014).

Indeed, this reconceptualization of the ethnographic project allows for fuller recognition of the ways that social phenomena increasingly encompass both online and offline environments (de Souza e Silva, 2006; Garcia et al., 2009; Przybylski, 2021; Wilson, 2006). The two ‘are not discrete entities’ (Gajjala, 2009: 61) since ‘communication forms and activities flow through the online/offline divide’ (Bakardjieva, 2009: 58; see also Beneito-Montagut, 2011; Bluteau, 2021). Accordingly, scholars advocate for an expansive approach to ethnography that permits the ethnographer to traverse both physical and online spaces, as appropriate (Hine, 2015; Numerato, 2016; Przybylski, 2021). Research online often plays a secondary or complementary role to in-person research, and vice versa (Kozinets, 2010: 65). In either case, ethnographers must recognize that they operate in a reality ‘in which fully online and fully offline methodologies offer useful—but not sufficient—tools’ (Przybylski, 2021) and must adapt by practicing mobility between methodologies (Postill and Pink, 2012).

As the above synthesis shows, ethnography's suitability for the hybridized 21st century is well-theorized; however, a close review of the relevant literature suggests that it has nevertheless largely failed to establish itself as integral to what is considered mainstream ethnographic practice. More specifically, its commentaries typically emerge from the work of scholars whose research questions directly center—substantively or theoretically—on the role of digital technology in social life. This common conflation between topic and method unnecessarily siloes these strategies, creating the impression that they are primarily, if not only, relevant when applied to studies that analytically foreground digital worlds or tools. Perhaps as a result, few ‘traditional ethnographers’ deeply contemplate digital environments as they build their research designs, ‘ultimately excluding a method of data collection that is epistemologically salient’ (Hallett and Barber, 2014: 308; see also Garcia et al., 2009; Przybylski, 2021).

This undue segregation is particularly pronounced in the literature on participant observation. By way of contrast, existing scholarship has effectively made the case for integrating digital techniques into qualitative methods such as interviewing, focus groups, and textual analysis. For example, researchers have lauded the value of folding social media analysis and e-mail interviewing into the study of play-based teaching in kindergartens (Lynch and Mah, 2018), the possibilities that Skype holds for qualitative interviewing (Deakin and Wakefield, 2014; Hanna, 2012; Seitz, 2016), the utility of WhatsApp for facilitating focus groups among activists in Kenya (Colom, 2022), the value of collecting ‘thick’ digital data to complement Big Data (Latzko-Toth et al., 2017), and the potential of written asynchronous online communications as an alternative to conventional oral interviews (Schiek and Ullrich, 2017).

Meanwhile, scholarship on the execution of participant observation online remains largely focused either on settings that are native to the Internet (such as virtual reality environments (Boellstorff, 2015; Williams, 2007: 2) and dark-web and hard-to-reach online communities (Barratt and Maddox, 2016; Kaufmann and Tzanetakis, 2020)) or on research topics that directly orient toward the Internet, such as participants’ social media use (Beneito-Montagut et al., 2017), the role of emotions in online interpersonal connections (Beneito-Montagut, 2011), the influence of built-in platform metrics on the evaluation of software developers’ work performances (Ritter, 2022), and the reliance on digital devices for distanced social connection during the COVID-19 pandemic (Watson et al., 2021). In other words, even when participant observation studies intentionally attend to both the online and offline modalities of a field, they typically leverage this analysis to analytically center the digital technologies at play. Efforts such as that to distinguish ‘internet-related ethnography’—conceptualized as ‘ethnography that engages with internet practices and content directly, but not exclusively’ (Postill and Pink, 2012: 125)—from pure internet ethnography usefully underscore the coimplications of digital and material environments (Id.), but ultimately affirm their own marginality so long as they address themselves to a niche audience comprised of ‘social media ethnographer[s]’ (Id.: 132).

This article instead aspires to speak to researchers who do not consciously see themselves to practice internet-related ethnography, let alone internet ethnography. It illuminates the ‘messy fieldwork environment that crosses online and offline worlds’ (Id.: 126) as these ethnographers might encounter it, inviting more rigorous reflection on how researchers can effectively apply Internet-centric methods to research questions that are not Internet-centric (or even Internet-adjacent). In this way it inverts the orientation that currently dominates the field and advances more widespread—and more proactive, intentional, and self-aware—engagement with hybrid approaches, which ‘traditional’ ethnographers have at times only stumbled into inadvertently after discovering the Internet's central role within an environment they previously conceived of as physical (Hallett and Barber, 2014; Przybylski, 2021; Wilson, 2006). This article affirms that instead of leaving attention to digital spaces to the seemingly niche modalities of ‘digital ethnography,’ ‘virtual ethnography,’ ‘netnography,’ ‘Internet ethnography,’ and their myriad cousins, ethnographers must recognize that attending to technological infrastructures is important for most ethnographic projects in the 21st century (Duggan, 2017). To this end, the article identifies and elaborates three meaningful ways that engaging with digital spaces holds analytical purchase for research agendas that are not on their face digitally oriented.

Research context

This article derives from broader ethnographic research I undertook to study the evolving challenges of U.S. immigration lawyering from the perspective of public interest attorneys. Specifically, I sought to understand how Los Angeles-based lawyers providing legal aid to people seeking asylum adapt to the tumultuous law and policy changes enacted by the U.S. government. To do so, I gained access as a legal volunteer to a nonprofit organization focused on providing pro bono assistance to people seeking asylum in and around Los Angeles. The organization also participated in broader, coalition-based policy advocacy to defend the collective rights of people seeking asylum. Using participant observation to study these lawyers’ experiences at work enabled me to witness—and, to an extent, directly experience—how the shifting landscape of U.S. immigration law impacted attorneys’ practices on a daily basis and over extended periods of time.

I started ethnographic fieldwork in early February 2020, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic upended life globally. My original research plan envisioned in-person data collection. For around six weeks, I followed this plan. I commuted to my primary field site—the office where my research participants worked—two to three days per week. I made myself at home with the other interns, attended staff meetings in the boardroom, built trust with my participants over lunch in the neighborhood, and spontaneously interfaced with clients who appeared in the reception area. I physically carried a conspicuous teal notebook around the office, taking shorthand ethnographic notes during and after interactions; later, at home, I typed up and fleshed out my handwritten scribbles with additional reflections.

Yet as a participant—as a legal volunteer, managing assignments in between meetings—I found that I spent most of my time in the field sitting at a desk. That the interns’ desk sat in a public, central, and open-plan part of the office, in the way of considerable foot traffic, precluded physical isolation. But the spontaneous small talk that bubbled up as someone passed by en route to the kitchen did not outweigh the reality that most of the activity I and others undertook each day entailed effort at the individual level—typically enacted in front of a screen, in silence. As I settled into fieldwork, this troubled me. How could I draw ethnographically from the many hours I spent working alone in front of a computer?

Moreover, I struggled in practice to clearly define the edges of my field site. So much of my participants’ everyday practices relied on dialog and collaboration with people physically based in other places. My participants’ use of technology made it hard to distinguish between ‘here’ and ‘there.’ Observing staff meetings attended only by LA-based staff seemed straightforward, but how should I approach larger meetings in which LA-based lawyers connected via video teleconference to other lawyers across the country?

In short, the prototype of a physically conceived field site as the singular stage for real-time, readily observable social interaction failed to adequately fit the world of my participants. This mismatch made it challenging to meet immigration lawyers where they actually were; it placed my ability to fully participate in their world at odds with my ability to ethnographically observe it. That lawyers sometimes worked across great geographic distance to provide remote legal assistance to people trapped at or beyond the U.S. border underscored the weight of the conundrum, as did the fact that U.S. judges and U.S. agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used remote technologies to process the cases of detained immigrants. Surely, studies of legal services and procedures that operated remotely could not rely only on in-person approaches to ethnography. Given that, how could I adapt my research practices to the reality that so much of lawyering work occurs on computers, by phone, and via email and shared cloud drives?

In mid-March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted my in-person fieldwork and pushed me to consider these questions with greater urgency. Precisely because so many of my participants’ practices relied on technology, my participants transitioned relatively seamlessly to a fully remote model. I too continued to successfully participate in meetings as well as substantive tasks by logging in from home. Of course, the context of the pandemic meant that certain things became difficult, impossible, or ethically proscribed: for months, neither my participants nor I attended immigration hearings, visited detention facilities, conducted in-person client meetings, traveled to the border, or partook in spontaneous water cooler talk. But the elimination of these physical contexts of interaction pushed me to dig more deeply into the ethnographic value of social interaction occurring digitally. Whereas time spent in front of a screen previously registered as relatively impenetrable negative space within the course of fieldwork, this mode of interaction gradually opened up as a useful alternative vantage point—in its own right—into the experiences, habits, and worldviews of asylum lawyers.

Conducting participant observation in the remote workplace

Making participant observation work remotely requires paying attention to the overlooked infrastructure of technology that so often facilitates communication and copresence today—certainly in many workplaces but also in other settings, such as schools, courts, homes, and cultural and recreational centers. Hours spent before a screen in the course of fieldwork need not be solitary, nor silent, nor devoid of ethnographic data. Digital platforms make meaningful researcher participation and rich observations possible; in fact, they can add deeper dimensionality to the insights that emerge from sharing physical space with research participants.

To highlight clearly the digital infrastructure that most ethnographers have at their disposal, it is helpful to describe by way of example the form it took within my field site and the purchase that it held for studying immigration law practice. The physical reality of my field site coexisted with a digital environment that structured my participants’ daily habits, interactions, interpersonal relationships, workflow, and use of physical space. In my capacity as a legal volunteer, when I received an assignment related to a particular asylum case, I went immediately to the client's record in the organization's cloud-based case management software. This record not only captured the foundational substantive details of the case but also served as a dynamic collaborative hub. It indicated which members of the team had played a role in the case to date and tracked any actions they took in relation to the case, interactions they had with the client, and concerns or observations that they felt compelled to flag to colleagues. Similarly, when I drafted a report following an intake interview with a prospective client, I saved it in a collectively accessible folder on the organization's cloud-based shared drive. From here, my supervisor subsequently pulled it up on her screen and entered edits, comments, and queries directly into the Word document. Microsoft Office automatically pushed each of my supervisor's comments into my volunteer e-mail inbox as a notification, prompting the two of us—if I had my volunteer inbox open at that moment—to slide into a live conversation about the prospective client's claim. (Importantly, however, even when collaboration unfolded asynchronously, it afforded rich insights into how my participants made sense of their professional world).

The COVID-19 pandemic helpfully incentivized me to explore this aspect of my field site more intentionally. In the initial weeks of the first lockdown, I paid closer analytical attention to the organization's digital infrastructure. I requested to join its Slack workspace as well as several popular immigration-related e-mail listservs external to the organization. I obtained Zoom invitations to as many internal and external advocacy-related meetings as possible. I initiated a weekly practice of checking the professional social media accounts of both my participants and other full-time public interest immigration attorneys. Ultimately, the digital spaces that previously seemed too intangible or diffuse to be a priority for data collection proved themselves uniquely positioned to enrich my understanding of LA asylum attorneys’ practices. In what follows, I describe three central ways that paying close attention to the digital dimension potentially holds distinct analytic value.

Increasing the surface area of observable interaction

In recent years, novel applications of technology have reshaped international migration, establishing a ‘new digital passage for movement’ (Latonero and Kift, 2018) and tangibly reconfiguring the infrastructure through which mobility occurs. A controversial example of this trend is the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) One app, which the U.S. DHS rolled out in January 2023 as the designated means for people seeking asylum at the southwest border to schedule appointments to have their requests for entry considered. Advocates and academics alike have argued that CBP One produces technological barriers to asylum (Kocher, 2023), problematically pushes U.S. border control functions into Mexico, and restricts access to a statutorily prescribed procedure, thus violating due process (Noll, 2024). Another striking example is the increasingly widespread use of remote adjudication within immigration courts. Researchers point to the ways that hearings conducted via video teleconference may interfere with effective interpretation (Grieshofer, 2023), facilitate misconstruals of petitioners’ demeanors (Bradley and Farber, 2022), diminish litigants’ engagement with the adversarial process (Eagly, 2015), hinder public participation in court proceedings (Boulanger-Bonnelly, 2022), and otherwise obstruct due process (American Immigration Lawyers Association and American Immigration Council, 2022).

Yet for every alarm sounded about the ways technology may undermine access to justice, there is an optimistic theory about how technology could enhance access to justice, particularly through improved access to counsel and immigration legal services (Jordan, 2017; Kocher, 2023; Marouf and Herrera, 2020). Though rich with critiques, the commentary surrounding the explosion of technology in migration processes is fundamentally ambivalent, probing ‘whether, and to what extent, technology is capable of substantively improving humanitarian protections for migrants, or whether technology will be subsumed under militant border restrictionism and the proliferation of policies that limit access to asylum’ (Kocher, 2023: 1).

For the purposes of this article, it is essential to appreciate that the shifting technological landscape of mobility transforms not only migration processes themselves but also the nature of doing ethnographic research within that landscape. Consequently, where there is an increasingly lively discourse on the digitization of migration, ethnographers must also engage in a more self-reflexive unpacking of the possibilities and pitfalls produced for research when technology suffuses the field. These debates mirror each other in their ambivalence. Just as technological innovation may harm or help access to justice, leveraging digital platforms in the course of data collection may positively or negatively affect the capacity for ethnographic insight. At its heart, this methodological conundrum likewise centers around the question of how technology impacts access. Thus, ethnographers who consciously reflect on this puzzle not only increase the rigor of their own methodological approach, but also situate themselves in closer alignment with participants pushed to grapple with parallel contradictions.

Just as it holds the potential to improve access to justice, the digital dimension can enrich researchers’ access to the worlds they study. More specifically, the communication software that dominates today's social worlds increases the surface area of the spaces ethnographers can observe and engage. These platforms enable ethnographers to be in multiple places at once—albeit not physically present, able to witness and participate in many more simultaneous (if not synchronous) conversations. Moreover, these platforms facilitate the observation of exchanges that are more multidimensional than exchanges that could occur in person.

Whereas in-person meetings can generally accommodate no more than one coherent conversation at a time, teleconference software enables multiple adjacent conversations to flourish simultaneously. Users communicate not only via audio and video, but also through the chat feature nested within each call. This second layer of interaction holds value for the ethnographer in that it affords participants a space in which to supplement, modify, query, or contest the interpretations set forth by others in the primary (audio) discussion. This secondary commentary sometimes remains sporadic, taking the form of intermittent reactions or addendums to the primary conversation; however, it may also generate its own momentum, spurring parallel textual dialogs that ultimately complicate, impose on, and inform the primary conversation. In both cases, it affords the ethnographer a second, complementary stream of relevant data, in which participants elaborate on the central discussion in real-time, often revealing what they consider most salient.

By way of example, in one well-attended Zoom call with a range of allied attorneys from within and beyond the organization where I conducted fieldwork, I witnessed an evolving chat exchange that deepened the main dialog and exposed points of tension that would otherwise be suppressed in an in-person setting where generally only one person can be heard at a time. The call occurred in July 2021, as immigration attorneys scrutinized the Biden-Harris Administration's policies at the U.S.–Mexico border. At times the chat functioned as a space to swiftly disperse key data points relevant to the overarching discussion, such as when one advocate messaged the news that U.S. CBP had recently canceled appointments in Tijuana with less than 24 hours’ notice to NGOs. Later, as the primary discussion turned to talk about how CBP practices unduly externalized labor onto NGOs, the chat transformed into a supplementary zone of practical strategy. One attendee used the chat to raise the possibility of a sign-on letter as an actionable advocacy response and others responded with support and suggestions about who else to draw into the effort; next steps quickly materialized even as the broader spoken conversation moved on to other topics. Still later, activity in the chat picked up in intensity as attendees homed in on the effects of CBP One. After someone verbalized (over audio) doubts about whether CBP One would entrench CBP's continued overreliance on NGOs and thus problematically position NGOs as gatekeepers of the U.S. border, the chat erupted with overlapping concerns. One person emphasized the need to ensure that people could still seek protection at the border without using the app; numerous others expressed support for this view. One person instead identified the core problem as the persistence of delays and queuing at the border; another argued that the only way to avoid queuing is through appointment systems like that facilitated by CBP One; and a third directed the group to reflect again on how to avoid a situation where the app became the only means to request asylum. All of these perspectives emerged even as the primary conversation progressed.

In short, Zoom's format permitted a chaos that enabled new layers of the conversation to emerge and added depth to my ethnographic observations. It cast off the artificial neatness to which in-person conversations adhere: in-person conversations tend to be more focused and streamlined—and, if they are not, become more difficult for the ethnographer to document satisfactorily. And it revealed to me additional information about what attendees considered relevant and important to the topics at hand, how they converted concerns into action, and where they converged or diverged in their understandings of their world. In sum, the digital forum here in many ways boosted my access, rather than degrading my ability to participate.

Foregrounding extended networks and social linkages

The geography of international migration is in flux, not only as a result of how people move across borders but also as a result of how borders and bordering practices move across space. In some cases, as discussed above in reference to the CBP One app, digital technology enables these moves: ‘[m]igrants enter a virtual world of Big Data, interconnected databases, satellite-communications networks, and artificial intelligence, in which they no longer interact with a single border but with the amorphous and mobile “borders” of dozens of states simultaneously, obscuring border/immigration decision-making and accountability for those decisions’ (Saunders and Sager, 2023: 276). But technology is only one tool in states’ arsenal as they seek to strategically manipulate borders. Through techniques like third-party cooperation agreements and extraterritorial interceptions, states actively block the pathways that would enable migrants to access them legally (FitzGerald, 2020). Moreover, borders have crept inwards as well as being pushed outwards (Menjívar, 2014): ‘the spatialized condition of “illegality” reproduces the physical borders of nation-states in the everyday life of innumerable places throughout the interiors of the migrant-receiving states’ (De Genova, 2002: 439).

Yet as the geography of immigration control evolves, so too does the geography of immigration advocacy—and attending to the digital dimension of advocates’ worlds illuminates these shifts. The dynamic structural pressures that immigration lawyers face demand adaptation, catalyzing innovative lawyering strategies (see, e.g. Cimini and Smith, 2021; Rabin, 2021), including those that innovatively traverse and build new connections across space to amplify resources. Because they facilitate cooperation across physical distance, digital platforms uniquely afford the opportunity to observe more intimately the social linkages that matter most for participants as they navigate and produce new geographies. This expands the scope of the ethnographer's vision with regard to who matters to participants and how, as well as with regard to how collaborations proceed in the course of daily practices.

At a time when so much social interaction entails intimate connections between people situated thousands of miles apart, prioritizing in-person dialog over digitally mediated conversations risks obscuring the ways that participants understand themselves to fit within emergent regional or global networks. Before I tuned in to the digital dimension of my field site, I felt tempted to ground my attention in the experiences of the lawyers with whom I was physically copresent. I did not ignore their counterparts who appeared on screens, but I deemed actors or events arising virtually as two-dimensional and secondary to my immediate in-person surroundings—I attended mainly to how my in-person participants responded to those seemingly external elements. Against this orientation, an approach to ethnography that takes virtual copresence seriously reveals a more sweeping, bird's eye view of the full field of participants’ activity. Once I embraced Zoom as an ethnographic resource, it illuminated the geographic complexity of the field in which LA-based asylum lawyers operate and, in particular, how advocates’ experiences, needs, and challenges varied by region and locale—as well as how advocates collectively managed that variability. This corrected how I framed my ethnographic agenda, helping me to see that a project purporting to study asylum lawyering in Los Angeles would necessarily reflect the ways that asylum lawyers in Los Angeles continually reposition themselves, presenting at times as local, city-level actors, but just as often identifying as regional (‘southwest’ or ‘border’), national, or transnational actors.

Social media served a parallel function for my research, albeit in a more public sphere. Ethnographers have an opportunity to examine more readily how their participants’ activity on social media interacts with that of their counterparts, allies, and other stakeholders within the public domain. In the course of fieldwork, I focused my attention on Twitter, where immigration lawyers from around the country frequently interact. Hashtags help ethnographers navigate social media interactions efficiently: for the purposes of my project, hashtags such as #ImmigrationTwitter, #FreeThemAll, and #WelcomeWithDignity enabled me to follow timely conversations within the immigration law community, the detention reform and abolition movements, and among those seeking policy reform at the U.S. border. Seeing which tweets gained pickup through retweets gave me signal as to which issues resonated with broad swaths of the advocacy community; on the other hand, commentary offered via reply tweets or quoted tweets illuminated variability of experience, perspective, and opinion within that community.

Social media also affords researchers insight into the cocreated culture of an extended community, which may not be so readily identifiable within the frame of a single, physical field site. In particular, the time I spent on Twitter illuminated the inside jokes and pointed sense of humor that immigration attorneys shared—something I witnessed at my field site but may have largely overlooked had I not encountered it repeatedly in tweets. Popular memes, satirical social media accounts (such as the ‘Fake Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR)’ Twitter account, which mocks the bureaucratic mayhem of the Department of Justice's EOIR), and other digitally native instances of humor hold enormous value for ethnographers because they often illuminate what people collectively find wrong, exemplary, or notable about a given institution.

From the perspective of someone undertaking participant observation, even the most basic technical aspects of a digital tool can hold significant potential for the ability to study field sites as relational, networked, and connected. For example, Zoom's interface makes it significantly easier than it would be in person to assess who is present in a crowded ‘room.’ Although users may need to swipe through Zoom's interface multiple times to see all attendees, and thus lose the ability to take in the whole audience at once (though whether such a perspective is actually achievable in-person is doubtful), researchers gain immediate access to a roster of who is present. This may include not only attendee names but also organizational affiliations and preferred pronouns—data points that would not necessarily be available at such a scale when entering a physical space. This makes it possible for the ethnographer to map more extensively and more quickly the relational networks that underpin participants’ worlds—and in particular to identify secondary and tertiary rings of participants’ extended communities. In the context of my research, embracing this information meant that I more readily understood which external stakeholders operated in close alignment with my participants, which functioned as close allies but with distinctly different roles to play than that of my participants, and which straddled the line between ally and obstruction. Parsing these kinds of relationships is a prerequisite to mapping the fluctuating flows of information, exchange, and allegiance that participants maintain through their daily activity.

Illuminating collaborative interpretative work and deep deliberation

The textuality of many Internet-based tools is a key resource for ethnographers. Written communication that occurs between members of a community—whether colleagues, coconspirators, allies, legal opponents, neighbors, friends, or relatives—can capture extended, well-developed reflections on how people make sense of their world. Though written communication may be less spontaneous and more curated, these very qualities enable it to tell the ethnographer something about how the writer (or publisher) wishes to present externally. And the back-and-forth interactions that written communication can comprise in the digital era illuminate how participants collectively move toward—or away from—shared understandings, as well as how they coproduce and disseminate those understandings within and beyond their immediate network. Importantly, it is in reference to these kinds of collaborative negotiations that the digital dimension may open itself up to analyses of how materiality matters in the 21st century. When participants deliberate over words (or images, for that matter), it is often in the context of producing things that they deem important—whether publications, videos, products, laws, or other content.

The significance of textual material is further heightened within legal settings. Sociolegal scholars reference ‘law's archeology’ to describe ‘the layering of documents, statutes, court cases, notices, and records that take form at particular historical moments’ (Coutin, 2011: 571). Law's archeology materializes through ‘entextualization’: the process of repurposing excerpts of text from existing legal materials within new legal contexts (Coutin, 2011: 572). Crucially, paying attention to law's archeology illuminates the specificity of exclusionary practices within legal systems like the U.S. immigration regime. As Coutin explains, ‘understanding how advocates and asylum seekers negotiate the meaning of political asylum … requires attending to the possibilities created by law's history, the potential to double-back and to carry forward, and the ways in which the identification of particular individuals or groups as “exceptional” creates bases for future actions’ (Coutin, 2011: 573). In short, ‘law's form facilitates innovation while also making it difficult to leave prior moments entirely behind’ (Id: 573).

Within settings like the U.S. immigration system, these dynamic qualities render legal text fertile ground for power struggles between the state, on the one hand, and people seeking to make state institutions work for them, on the other. Since writing is a central way that the state exercises its administrative power, ‘documents—the tangible evidence of bureaucratic inscription—constitute a particularly useful site at which to analyze the power relationship between migrants and the state’ (Horton, 2020: 4). The evolving legal interpretations operating within legal texts may in themselves function as a technique of state control and bordering practices, such that ‘legal definitions are not a static backdrop against which other forms of bordering work occurs’ but are instead ‘dynamic sites that both respond to and produce socio-spatial relations, delineating the threshold of humanitarian categories and thus the meaning and consequences of cross-border movement for specific groups of people’ (Gorman, 2017: 44). At the same time, immigrant advocates also employ strategies of ‘document reclamation’ (Gomberg-Muñoz, 2020: 186) to generate ‘documentary paper trails that are different from the government's bureaucratic records, but that interface with and contest governmental paper trails used to apprehend and entrap U.S. immigrants’ (Id. 187). These documents may include reports, fact sheets, PowerPoint slides, posters, flyers, checklists, copies of forms and applications, and other materials.

Close attention to participants’ interpretation, discussion, production, and dissemination of documents thus affords ethnographic insight into the deeper strivings for influence that unfold within text. At my field site, e-mail constituted the primary shared platform through which advocates delved deeply into the collective information-sharing, reflecting, strategizing, and deliberating that often initially sparked during Zoom teleconferences. My participants typically used e-mail listservs to flag for collective scrutiny novel, far-reaching laws and policies, which often first appeared on advocates’ radars as cryptic language issued by U.S. government agencies. New e-mail threads frequently started with a brief message sharing a copied and pasted excerpt from a new legal rule and either offering a one-line synopsis of the perceived practical implications or inviting others to weigh in on making sense of opaque language. Over the course of one or several days, a cascade of e-mailed interpretations pushed the community toward consensus about the impacts of emerging law. Thus, e-mail offered a window into how lawyers actively made sense of—and critiqued—the external structures and norms that informed their own actions.

Just as often, my participants relied on e-mail to navigate ambiguities regarding their own internal norms. Immigration advocates use e-mail to actively workshop collaborative materials such as sign-on letters (letters to decisionmakers urging a particular course of action, cosigned by a range of stakeholders and/or community members). A single organization typically produced the draft language for such sign-on letters and then shared it widely via e-mail, inviting other allied organizations to contribute input and ultimately support it with their signatures. Via e-mail, my participants routinely unpacked the language of proposed sign-on letters to discuss whether and why they should endorse a particular letter as written. If anyone felt hesitation, they tended to go back and forth over e-mail as to why certain phrases within the letter gave them pause, commonly offering suggested revisions that—from my perspective as a researcher—helped elucidate how their understandings of what mattered most diverged from those of others within the field.

The gravity of textual interpretation within legal practice renders e-mail a particularly rich environment for asynchronous communication within a legal services organization; however, regardless of institutional context, e-mail by virtue of its design universally holds the capacity to facilitate negotiations of meaning and purpose, whether in regard to deliverables, real-world events, or media. Among my participants, e-mail enabled deep analysis of non-legal language appearing in their own press releases, reports, fact sheets, and other written materials. Paying attention to these written discussions revealed far more than disputes over grammar: it helped me understand why my participants told stories in particular ways, how they made narrative choices, and how—from fact-finding to framing—they produced expertise on U.S. asylum law.

When participants use e-mail to debate the implications of current events, changes in the status quo, and other dynamic phenomena, the relative permanence of e-mail also affords the ethnographer the opportunity to more readily assess the evolution of interpretations or tactics over time. That e-mails are automatically time-stamped and stored for extended periods produces an instant, built-in archive of participants’ collectively determined responses to significant moments or points of transition within the wider world. To extend the metaphor of law's archeology, this amounts to a kind of cross-sectioning of the textual layers of the ethnographic field, making it possible for the researcher to engage in ethnographic stratigraphy.

Like e-mail, chat and instant messaging platforms also automatically produced a textual archive, making visible the peaks and lulls of chatter around particular topics as well as the genesis of new phases, trends, or concerns within the world of asylum lawyering. The existence of ‘channels’ enriched the interpretive value of this archive. Because Slack employs user-labeled channels to arrange thread topics thematically, my field site's Slack platform served as an abbreviated outline of what mattered most to my participants. I experienced the creation of new Slack channels as a kind of analytical pre-coding undertaken by my participants, since it required them to mark out and categorize emergent issues of interest.

Discussion

The digital environment offers a distinct perch from which to observe the world. Taking it into consideration may affect how the researcher initially gains entrée into a community, navigates their own inclusion and participation in the community, makes observations, writes field notes, and settles ethical doubts (Kozinets, 2010: 5). Yet as I learned over the course of more than four years of fieldwork, these adaptations are worth making because paying attention to the digital dimensions of a field site creates possibilities that focusing exclusively on in-person physicality cannot. In this final synthesis, I expand on the utility of proceeding in this manner, clarifying how exactly, and in which research contexts, this approach holds purchase. In short, attention to digital modes of interaction is crucial because technology lies at the heart of so many social processes today: it is now a central means through which people strive to establish closeness with one another despite the distances, isolations, and alienations that define our world (and that, ironically, often stem from hyperdigitalization). For ethnographers, engaging with these digitally mediated practices deepens our ability to participate in, and more fully understand, our interlocutors’ worlds. It does so, first, by offering new access points into everyday life and, second, by allowing researchers to inhabit relational environments alongside participants as they themselves rely on technology to cultivate connection and make meaning.

Centering connection and, further, recognizing social connection as a phenomenon that may not derive from physicality aligns especially well with research agendas that speak to the significance of globalization and long-distance relational networks, allegiances, and dependencies. This means that it holds tremendous promise for the sociological study of workplaces, organizations, and institutions that operate between locales or transnationally. Its value is also especially compelling for the study of social movements, activism, and other collective efforts that may take a geographically dispersed form. Importantly, however, it is relevant even when participants share physical proximity, since so many people integrate e-mail, teleconference, messaging, and other digital platforms into their daily interactions even with those with whom they share a home, office, or neighborhood. In the course of studying immigration lawyers, it became readily apparent that mediated means of fostering connection mattered profoundly for participants because the immigration law landscape is both increasingly permeated by technology (as when advocates devise new ways of maintaining client relationships virtually) and increasingly reconfigured to play out across new spaces (pushing Los Angeles-based advocates to, for example, coordinate more proactively with advocates south of the U.S. border). By orienting towards my field site's digital infrastructure, I both gained greater visibility into these aspects of my participants’ reality and also seized an opportunity to directly engage in the communicative strategies that my participants used to sustain their work.

Although this model pushes researchers to focus on how connectivity and shared experience—rather than physical copresence—produce proximity, it does not render place invisible. To the contrary, it can make the implications of place more salient. Over the course of my fieldwork, although the COVID-19 pandemic caused me to lose visibility into some of the sensory dimensions of physical setting, I became more sensitive to the full geographic scope of my participants’ professional lives through attuning to the flows of interaction between people and institutions situated in separate places. Rather than conceptualizing my field site as a single physical location, I came to appreciate it as a point in a web of well-trodden pathways, habitual journeys, and movements (whether literal or virtual) that produce a cartography of social practice. The places that matter to people—and how they matter—are highly visible in how they talk, message, and e-mail about their practices.

This helps mitigate the risk that the ethnographer who prioritizes attention to digital platforms will overlook people, places, and problems that do not carry such a thick trace in the digital world. Ethnographers must take this risk seriously: technology marginalizes, and inequities in digital access will make themselves felt in qualitative research that leverages digital tools. Without keeping a critical eye on this, ethnographers will reproduce harmful invisibilities. But accounting for Internet-driven practices affords space to better understand what these inequities and limitations practically mean to people in their everyday lives—for example, how participants manage moments at which the integration between online and offline fails or how they pursue intimacy despite (or through) gaps in the digital infrastructure. During my pandemic-era fieldwork, my ability to perceive lawyers’ activity stood in stark contrast to their and my exacerbated inability to engage with people in detention, whose incarceration largely excluded them from the digital grid. Yet in experiencing this directly myself while also witnessing attorneys’ struggles with how to meaningfully ‘be there’ for their detained clients, I more deeply internalized the extent to which immigration attorneys must daily cultivate proximity with practices of solidarity, loyalty, and attention that transcend physical copresence.

Even as this approach to ethnography reflects the double-edged qualities of technology—its ability to include and exclude—it is also worth noting that it will almost always make qualitative research more accessible for scholars. Researchers are likely to have more consistent online access than they have time or funding for their in-person fieldwork. To be clear, attention to digital domains should not replace attention to physical environments. But for researchers with limited time or other resources, it may open up the possibility of more extensive periods ‘in’ the field, or of getting ‘into’ the field sooner. This modality offers ‘useful efficiencies,’ being ‘less time consuming and resource intensive’ (Kozinets, 2010). Just as remote learning, though imperfect, makes it possible for students to participate in courses held at schools in other cities or even on other continents, remote ethnography makes it easier for ethnographers to get a foot in the door with qualitative research.

The exciting possibilities foregrounded here gesture towards some of the undeniable challenges of using digital technology to enrich participant observation. While a comprehensive examination of these and other challenges is beyond the scope of this article, ethnographers should meet these challenges with engagement rather than aversion. Any ethnographic approach comes with its own practical limitations, ethical dilemmas, and peculiarities in terms of how it shapes data. Thoughtfully navigating that complex terrain is a crucial part of bringing participant observation into alignment with today's world.