Changed Conditions of the Social. A Methodological View on Digital Anthropology/Digital Ethnography

This paper presents a synopsis of the most important methodological strands, focal points and positions in scholarly discussions on Digital Anthropology, Virtual Ethnography or Internet Ethnography, as they have been used since the 1990s in the international field of Cultural Anthropology and a little later also in the German-language field of Kulturanthropologie/Europaeische Ethnologie/Volkskunde. It examines which tasks, expectations, insights and goals in the extended discipline were connected with the turn to the Internet and digital technologies and how precisely the digital and the virtual were negotiated on the methodical and theoretical level. The focus is on the questions: Which particularities and innovations did these methodological discussions about the Internet and the digital bring along, and what does the digital render possible for the ethnography and the discipline?