Tracing the Everyday 'Sitings' of Adolescents on the Internet: a strategic adaptation of ethnography across online and offline spaces

This article argues for the need to move beyond place-based ethnography and develop ethnographic methodologies that follow the moving, traveling practices of adolescents online and offline. In the first part of the article, challenges to traditional ethnographic constructs such as place, identity, and participant obervation, and the ways in which these constructs are further destabilized in research online are reviewed. Secondly, at the center of the discussion, a common misconception of the Internet as somehow radically separate from everyday life is critiqued. Thirdly, possible interpretive methodologies are discussed for following connections and circulations in research that travels, with adolescents, across online and offline spaces. These methodologies include tracing the flows of objects, texts, and bodies, analyzing the construction of boundaries within and around texts, and focusing upon the remarkable ways in which texts represent and embed multiple contexts.