Since taking the editorial helm of CSSH in 2006, I have watched several intellectual trends shift and gather momentum. Postsocialist and postcolonial studies are merging into a more generalized interest in the politics of empire. Critical impulses once associated with the “post” approaches have found their way into studies of secularism, conversion, translation, and state effects. Increasingly, these topics are analyzed as transregional processes that operate across religious and political logics. In 2009, our first CSSH Conversation dealt with matters of tolerance and conversion in the Ottoman Empire, and in 2010 we filled an entire issue with essays on secularism (52-3). In each case, the ground we explored was contested, but themes of governmentality and moral transformation were central, and the terms of debate were broadly shared.

Ethnographers of new media face a challenge nowadays because they write about technologies people love to discuss and about which journalists love to write. They often find themselves writing against myths about digital media users that other digital media scholars, journalists, and even people interviewed hold in common. In the first decade of Internet research, skeptical scholars often wrote against assumptions about how social practices in virtual spaces differed from offline practices (see Dibbell 1998; Turkle 1995; Stone 1996). They were critiquing many of the premises that accompany an understanding of the virtual as “spaces or places apart from the rest of social life” (Miller, Slater, and Suchman 2004: 77) in which people were supposedly experimenting with new forms of sociality and identity. While these debates continue to haunt more recent ethnographies of virtual worlds (see Boellstorff 2008; Nardi 2010; Taylor 2006), critical scholars of new media are now also addressing commonly held assumptions about the Internet when its use is explicitly understood not to be part of a sociality distinct from offline life. Indeed, the Internet now is taken to be a collection of interfaces for gathering information and conversing with other people—web-based communication can be as integrated into daily life as a phone call or reading a book (for an ethnographic study, see Gershon 2010). This transition from taking the Internet to be virtual to seeing the Internet as a collection of channels of communication has brought with it a new set of widespread presuppositions that ethnography is particularly adept at critiquing.