Paper short abstract:

This paper is about how the simultaneous online and offline observation of political events enabled me to experience these occasions as online/offline ones. It allowed me to understand these episodes through the contextual connections and contrasts between the actual event and the related posting.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is about how the double – online and offline – observation of political events enabled me to carve out an online/offline ethnographic space of investigation and reflection in my doctoral research. My PhD in Social Anthropology – awarded in 2023 by Queen’s University Belfast – was about everyday social media engagement about Northern Ireland’s politics. In my fieldwork, I attended several political events in Northern Ireland and simultaneously tracked the posting about them on Twitter through a smartphone. The strategy deepened my understanding of how events and current affairs were processed by the online exchanges. Furthermore, it allowed me to follow demonstrations, parades and public meetings in the ‘traffic’ between the online and offline (Boellstorff 2012). It was a ‘traffic’ activated by users in their drive to promote their (ethno)political interpretations about the episodes in question. At the same time that this ‘traffic’ contextually connected online and offline, it also made clear their distinct regimes of expression and relationality. In my double observation, the online clearly referred to what was happening in the streets. It could indeed interfere in the perceptions of the event or its developments themselves. However, in the screen of my smartphone, the piling up of texts, images and links destabilised the space-time I was experiencing in the offline, as the paper details. In the boundaries between online and offline, in and through the connections and contrasts of the referential ‘traffic’, I could experience several of these events as online/offline ones.