Nine field sites, nine ethnographers, eleven books: not exactly the setup for a conventional anthropological study. But for Daniel Miller and a team of eight other anthropologists in the Global Social Media Impact study at University College London (now online as Why We Post), this ambitious, comparative model was necessary to understand emerging social media practices across the world, or at least, in many different places, and extends what anthropological ethnography can be. As Miller explained in a 2012 post on this blog (when the fieldwork was still underway), the shared features of social media platforms (from Facebook and Twitter to China’s QQ) make it possible to ask what social media are: a new means of communication? Longtime social practices in a new setting? An emergent form of social connection? So a study that looks at this simultaneously in eight sites works particularly for something that has been introduced across the whole world within a very short time period. All this would at least suggest that a comparative study can actually deepen rather than take away from each individual ethnography. (read more...)