Paper short abstract:

This paper attempts to discuss the complexity of Chinese youth migratory trajectory across Malaysia and Singapore upon its encounter with social media. It aims to explain how multi-sited (or open-sited) ethnography has changed the meaning of "the field" to anthropologists.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to explore the possibilities and the challenges of using social media as a virtual ethnography method in forging empirical investigation with young rural-to-urban job seekers from Malaysia to Singapore. Ethnography, consisting of close observation and key informant interviewing, is a well-developed and the most widely accepted methodology to obtain cultural knowledge of the natives. Its significance to the discipline of anthropology and other social science is of no doubt. However, as that social media are increasingly central to contemporary everyday life, its intervention has dramatically changed the way we communicate and circulate information. Dwelling on the traditional face-to-face ethnography at single site can no longer fully address our scholarship inquiry in understanding the nature of human mobility.

In my presentation, I want to further this discussion by exploring the possibility and, more importantly, the challenges of using social media as an experimental virtual ethnography method and how it transforms the concept of what a field is to anthropologists. I want to discuss: in what situations is social media a particularly good method to use? What are the ethical issues we need to be concerned? How to judge and evaluate the validity of virtual data? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this method and how it can be improved in future research? Based on my fieldwork starting from a remote setting in Peninsular Malaysia, this paper discusses the complexity of the Chinese youth migratory trajectory upon its encounter with ICTs.