Abstract

Media have long shaped identities linked to place. Just as print media helped foster nationally imagined communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, emerging digital and social media are implicated in global and transnational networks in the twentieth. Yet new communication technologies, from mobile phones to the Internet, are not necessarily engendering the global world once predicted; instead, multiple social worlds and experiences of place proliferate. Ethnographic approaches provide insight into shifting configurations of identity, selfhood, and place through a critical empiricism that makes possible research across diverse sites and contexts, digital or otherwise.