Writing the Relationship: Ethnographer‐Informant Interactions in the New Media Era

Abstract

With the ever‐increasing accessibility of new communications media, there has been growing discussion among ethnographers about how new media data such as e‐mails, SMS/texts, blogs, news article comment sections, or community group websites have impacted the practice of ethnography. Generally, questions center around the characteristics of the data itself. Less often discussed is the effect of new communications media on relationships between ethnographers and members of the communities they study.This article explores what happens when social media becomes a channel through which researchers interact with informants both during fieldwork and between fieldsite visits. I examine how new formats of quick and often casual written communication influence the development of ethnographer–informant relationships over time. These technologies make contact with some informants (but not others) easier and more frequent, and, particularly because they bring written language into a relationship that often privileges spoken interaction, they may allow different facets of identity to emerge, reconfigure a researcher's network of relationships in the fieldsite, or change the personal‐professional divide.