Shall WeChat? Switching between online and offline ethnography

Get into the place

I spent a lot of time with Li Liang and her children. I often stayed at her place overnight. I also accompanied her children to school and later joined Li Liang at the market. Through Li Liang, I met Ping Er, Miao Miao, Fujin and Dan. They were fellow migrants and often gathered together at her place. Like Li Liang, Fujin was a Sichuanese native. She owned a lingerie shop in the suburbs of Taipei and loved to cook spicy food. These women all came from different provinces in rural China and moved to Taiwan due to marriage. Although these women usually gathered in restaurants, parks, street markets and shopping malls, the place they first met was not necessarily located in the physical world. For instance, Fujin and Li Liang had a first virtual encounter within the WeChat group ‘The sisters of Chongqing’ and only later met in the physical world. Fujin explained that the application WeChat has two special functions: ‘shake’ (dou抖) and ‘drift bottle’ (piaoliu ping 漂流瓶). It should be noted that in the frame of the so-called ‘great firewall’ of China, i.e. internet censorship, WeChat is the only online social network authorised by the government. It is thus an application used exclusively by Chinese people, both in China and abroad. In contrast, in Taiwan people use other social networks, such as LINE or Facebook, to get in touch. Fujin was thus sure that these two WeChat functions would enable her to identify Chinese compatriots. When ‘shaking’, it is possible to identify people nearby, and see their distance in km. When ‘drifting the bottle’, in the meantime, Fujin specified the characteristics of the people she wanted to find:

When I arrived in Taipei, I felt lonely. I missed my country! And I had no friends. There was only my husband here, and I wanted to meet people from China […]. I shook the phone and saw who was nearby. I added people and we started talking […]. We were all from China and I was added to their groups. (Fujin, Taipei, 21 November 2016)

Dan and Li Liang, in contrast, met for the first time while taking their children to the park, and in moments added each other on WeChat to keep in touch. Interactions shifted from the offline to the online world. Aware of the fact that in the district of Banqiao, where they lived in Taipei, Chinese migrant women were numerous, they decided to create the group ‘Chinese sisters in Banqiao’ (Banqiao Dalu jiemei板桥大陆姐妹) to meet new fellow migrants. Li Liang explained that groups were helpful for meeting people, but also for asking for favours and help whilst concomitantly providing advice and support to those in need. For instance, she met Fujin when she was complaining inside the group that she had finished her Sichuanese spicy sauce. Li Liang had some at home and so she spontaneously exited the group to meet Fujin physically and give her some sauce. Interactions could thus be produced online first and performed offline later, or they could simply remain online. When, in the same sequence, Fujin grumbled about having no sauce, she received virtual moral support by several women, who expressed sympathy because her noodles would not taste the same without the sauce. However, except for Li Liang, none of these exited the online frame to produce action offline.

If WeChat groups are ‘unsited’ (Falzon, 2009), these brief examples indicate that productions and performances made using this app take place in dialogue with the ‘physical’ world. Detached from a fixed or geographically bounded place (Candea, 2009), groups are nonetheless constructed in situ by actors according to various opportunities and constraints. The social and affectional bonds they developed converged into online ‘emotional communities’ (Zani, 2020) based on similar origins, migratory paths and marital routes as well as shared experiences of exclusion and vulnerability. Yet, such online communities are not placeless, nor detached from the situations of social contempt and endured economic marginalisation in the labour market in Taiwan. The context matters. Gathering online and offline, the application WeChat strengthens heterogeneous social and affectional bonds, and creates new forms of digital proximity, which are highly entangled with the offline social and economic worlds inhabited by women.

In this respect, I had to observe both online and offline situations. Beyond my physical presence in the restaurants, shops or parks, where women gathered together, I also needed to observe the ways such social practices were being translated inside virtual spaces. Thereby, I needed to enter these. This choice was not made a priori, but emerged through interaction, side by side with the rather ‘traditional’ multi-sited ethnographic methods I was using on my field sites. Virtual ethnography became an imperative for ‘physical’ ethnography as soon as I realised that most of the physical interactions, creative socialisation, emotional processes, and economic practices I could see were being designed and imagined somewhere else.

When I asked Li Liang to help me join a few groups, she added me where she could. In other cases, I had to ask for permission from the administrator of the group, a ‘gatekeeper’ (Schwartz and Jacobs, 1979). Like physical and ‘bounded’ field sites (Candea, 2009), virtual sites also need to be open and negotiated. My presence inside them could not be taken for granted. I had to develop strategies to remain inside, each group having its own norms, rules and roles. Groups are not, as it may appear, ‘given’, pre-existing the ethnographer. Indeed, generally they were created and performed by women before I had access to them. However, they were constructed by my very process of data collection. Moreover, I was given the right to perform them together with the actors who were already inside. I was also myself contributing to the making of online interactions and situations. At the very same time, as my stay at Li Liang’s place suggests, I was also, partially, performing these sites offline. The very concept of a field site was therefore constantly brought into question: boundaries were porous since they exceeded space and time in a new and mutable way. The perimeters of the site had to be continually reframed, together with the fluid connections between the physical and the virtual. Sometimes they overlapped or were juxtaposed: when I first joined a WeChat group, I was simultaneously talking with Li Liang on her sofa eating fried rice and interacting inside a chat group with some of her fellow migrants. Li Liang was concurrently interacting face-to-face with me on the sofa, but also virtually communicating with me and with the other 298 connected people inside the group. Most of them were ‘familiar strangers’ (Milgram, 1972) to each other. They never had face-to-face interactions inside any physical reality, yet they had daily conversations online, during which they shared everyday life experiences.

WeChat is a platform for communication, which enables a variety of exchanges inside two-person conversations or group chat rooms, where participants send written or vocal messages, emoticons, smileys, pictures or videos. In ‘Moments’ (pengyou quan 朋友圈) users can share different content within this online social network, in textual or visual formats. Also, through the ‘Red envelope’ (hong bao 红包) mechanism, WeChat allows money transfers, payments, and commercial transactions. To access these dematerialised and rather unfamiliar field sites, I had to proceed by trial and error. First, I created an account and I adopted my Chinese name Bei Ai Qi 贝爱琪 as a pseudonym. I added a picture of myself together with a Chinese friend and her son, yet my physical identity was not easily recognisable. After this, things were less complicated than expected.

Since in most cases, I did not know any of the women inside the groups, Li Liang acted as an intermediary. In this ‘presentation of self’ in online everyday life, to paraphrase Goffman’s expression (1958) she introduced me. Issues of trust inside digital worlds relate to the lack of information about the ‘real identity’ hidden behind the keyboard (Garcia et al., 2009). For this reason, the very first time I entered ‘The group of mutual help of the Chinese sisters of Hsinchu’, Li Liang took some pictures of me playing with her children, so that the women would have more confidence in me. She wrote:

‘This is Bei Ai Qi, our Italian sister. She has spent a lot of time with us, and my sons adore her’.

She added a picture of me playing with her children.

Then, she continued:

‘Bei Ai Qi is a researcher who has lived in our Mainland China! She has become Chinese, but she cooks very good Italian noodles’ [picture of the noodles I cooked] She would like to spend time with us and talk with us. Let’s welcome her! If you want to meet her, just text her or come over’.

Exploit the place

Progressively, I became more and more familiar with WeChat. Initially, I was reluctant to take part in conversations actively. I felt like an ‘outsider’. As a foreigner and a researcher, I did not feel able to participate. Nevertheless, I progressively ‘tuned my body up’ (Goffman, 1989: 125). I understood that the need to gain acceptance and to negotiate my permanence in the group was not much different from efforts required to gain the ‘ecological right to get close’ (Goffman, 1989) to observed situations in traditional offline ethnographic methods.

In some cases, after a physical meeting or an interview, an informant added me to a group. In other cases, I asked if I could join and had to gain women’s trust and sympathy. All in all, virtual ethnography requires the same patience and long-term engagement as the traditional offline one. At the beginning, I was a ‘stranger’ inside the groups. Yet, this would be the same in the physical world, where gaining confidence, trust and sympathy takes time (Clifford, 1980). However, the advantage was that after I joined a group, I could take part in the conversations directly and could also read previous communications, download images or listen to vocal messages. Swiping back to the very first messages exchanged between the women involved, at once I had access to the rich mix of past and present information which made up the records of online interactions. The temporal frame was somehow compressed: not only could I observe current, simultaneous exchanges, but I could, diachronically, reassemble previous records and understand the differences between the participants’ situations, practices and interactive frames over time. Such mobile tools produced not only a multi-scalar but also a pluri-temporal understanding of the social worlds (Carolus et al., 2019).

However, if I first had a ‘physical’ encounter with the groups’ actors, my shifting to the virtual space would be smoother. To some extent, I gained the impression that new written text messages, audio recordings and pictures could reinforce a previously generated closeness. On the contrary, when most of the participants had never ‘seen’ me physically, I have sometimes regretted that embodied experience of interaction. If the communicative ties, socialisation processes or emotional bonds inside the virtual world did not seem to me to be less real or vivid than in the physical world, howbeit it I could not use my body as a vector of recognition of my subjectivity (Roulleau-Berger, 2004). In the physical world, corporeal proximity, be it through gestures, movements, or touch, sustains feelings of intimacy and familiarity (Wei and Lo, 2006). All in all, the smartphone as a mediator (Lock and Farquhar, 2007) was not a barrier in terms of interactions (Hampton, 2015). Quite the contrary. However, at the beginning, I erroneously perceived it to be a cold, plastic which limited physical closeness. Hence, I had to learn, as Chinese women did, how to ‘perform’ the phone and the digital platforms installed on it to creatively construct new, digitalized forms of closeness.

As time went by, I started to take part in conversations and online practices in the same way as I would inquire into offline ‘frames and settings of the everyday life’ (Goffman, 1958). The fact of ‘being there’ helped me to engage actively in situations, to intervene and interact in the conversations, even though these were virtually performed. Sometimes I got lost in the long chats and online conversations and the fact of always ‘being connected’ and fully present in the chat rooms became almost banal. Clearly for the Chinese women who talked, laughed, cried, complained, and provided mutual support and advice inside the groups, virtual spaces extended without disruption across their everyday life scenes and performances. WeChat, as the infrastructure both containing and engendering online practices was not perceived as spatially or temporarily separate from physical reality. It was constructed in dialogue with women’s lived routines and daily experiences. Boundaries between online and offline worlds were blurred by the very simple and instinctive switch between the two scales.

What I had to do was to adapt to the informality and the extemporaneity of the chat groups’ practices and the automatic and spontaneous connections created with their offline social world performances. Sometimes, spending time with Li Liang or working with Fujin in her lingerie shop, I forgot if our exchange occurred online or offline. But did that really make any difference? Reflecting on this double level of performance, Goffman has distinguished between the ‘front’ and the ‘back’ stage (1982): on the ‘front’ stage, interactions are publicly displayed, while on the ‘back’ stage, their performance is invisible to the audience. In some performances, the ‘online’ is the ‘front’ stage and the ‘offline’ is the ‘back’ stage. But such positioning can be inverted. Moreover, their interconnections and co-constitutive dimension bring about a ‘ritual of complementarity’ (Goffman, 1982), which does not only affect the shift from offline to online settings, but also the opposite trajectory. What went on online came back offline, and the frontier between the two scales was not only porous, but in many cases also undistinguishable in the practices.

Digital platforms have vivid and dynamic connections with the situations and circumstances in which they are used. And this required, to say it with Christine Hine (2017: 34–36), an interconnected web of online and offline fieldwork, always focused around ‘making sense of what people think they are up to while using the internet’. Alongside what Chinese women did, I also had to learn how to ‘switch’ from online to offline and how to produce action by being between the two. I must admit being surprised by the spontaneity of the interactions produced online. The corporeally distant dimension of the WeChat groups seemed to generate virtual closeness as a new ‘situational property’ (Goffman, 1982). The interactive roles of friend, adviser, and supporter performed by women seemed to transcend the bodily remote positioning to produce novel social relations and affectional ties within ‘online emotional communities’ (Zani, 2020). Chatting together, asking for help and organising offline meetings were the tacit and banal situations of everyday WeChat performance. The fact of ‘being there’ inside the groups implicitly meant to be part of the same community, something which legitimised socialisation and interaction. I experienced this first-hand. The Chinese pseudonym I used in the groups did not sound ‘native.’ However, I was not fully recognisable in my profile picture and it happened that women did not understand immediately that I was a foreigner, an ‘outsider.’ Therefore, from the very first interaction I was considered one of ‘them’ and contacted without any shyness. More than once, I was invited to join women during offline gatherings, dinners, walks or tea breaks. I was asked for advice or help to babysit children, to collect parcels, to borrow money, even to sign divorce papers. Sometimes I was also treated as a client for their commercial activities and was asked to buy cosmetics or clothes by women who performed small-size entrepreneurship and took advantage of WeChat groups to promote their businesses. On these points, let us look at the following virtual ethnographic snapshot.

15 April 2017, the WeChat group ‘Chinese sisters in Taiwan’, composed of 498 participants.

Ping Er: Is someone available for a chat?

Dan: I am cooking dinner and waiting for my husband. I want to go out, but the children are here.

Ping Er: I have finished cooking. I am sick of being a housewife […] I feel sad. I have been cooking, cleaning, and ironing all day long. My mother-in-law is so annoying, and she treats me badly. She dislikes me. She dislikes all of us. She dislikes China [little emoticon which cries] I want to do something different now. Let’s go out.

Miao Miao: I finish work in an hour, shall we meet up?

Suqi: Hello! I am Suqi, I come from Sichuan, 30 years old. Where do you live, sisters? I am staying in Banqiao. I am looking for friends.

Ping Er: @ Suqi [sends a purple heart] Welcome! Wanna meet up?

Suqi: [sends a smiley] Yes, I feel so lonely at home. My husband will be back late at night. Let’s eat dinner together.

Suddenly, I was called into the conversation by Ping Er:

Ping Er: @ Bei Ai Qi (myself) wanna join? @ Suqi, we will introduce our Italian sister to you! Let’s meet in an hour at Fujin’s shop. @ Fujin, ok?

Fujin: Just seen. Busy tonight. Why don’t you come for lunch tomorrow? I can cook spicy noodles for you. I also got new bras, come, and get some. They are very comfortable and cheap. No time now, send pics to you later.

As for myself, I answered with a ‘like’ and agreed to join the women.

I had been part of the group for two months and I knew some of the participants, but not all of them. In some cases – Ping Er and Fujin – I had met the women offline first and re-met them later in virtual reality. In other cases, I had met them online first and only later physically. I used mix physical and virtual observations of the conversations, with in-depth interviews and offline observations of their gatherings.

Online spaces represented a double resource for me. Firstly, at the level of experience, my virtual, yet no less ‘real’ (Beaulieu, 2004) presence inside the groups provided me with rich information about women’s daily experiences, habits and routines which was crucial for my study of migration. Unintentionally, I had access to subjective life stories as ‘stories of practice’ (Bertaux, 2003) where objective social relations and practices become visible. Secondly, with regard to the analysis of situations and practices, such vibrant groups offered good opportunities for collecting material about socialisation processes and the social, professional, individual and collective practices of migrants. In some cases, I voluntarily contacted women whose online narrations or experiences caught my interest. In other cases, it was the other way round. Fuelled by curiosity, they texted me privately. If the interaction exited collective chat groups, it could remain virtual or be translated into an offline encounter. For instance, let me refer back to the above snapshot and look at Suqi. Twenty-nine years old, Henan native, Suqi was a newcomer. That very evening, I received a sudden private message from her. Fuelled by curiosity, she was inquiring about my identity: ‘Are you Italian? Where is Italy? Why can you speak Chinese?’, she texted me outside the collective group where we had met a few minutes before. Suqi was curious. She asked me about my age, my origin and about what I was doing in Taiwan. We talked in Chinese which surprised her. She could not understand how and why an ‘Italian sister’ (yidali meimei意大利妹妹) was part of that group. She definitely wanted to meet me alone.

Christine Hine (2015: 258) has stressed the ‘threads of meaning-making that might cross the online/offline divide.’ This meant to me that online field sites are not natural, but rather something fluid and variable, which needed to be reframed step by step in accordance with the context and the social worlds they are constructed in. Crucially, by turns, these have to be understood in dialogue with the offline spaces of the social and economic orders the actors are engaged in. Virtual ethnography has required agility and adaptation to the complex and fragmented social worlds I was observing. Doubtlessly, virtual ethnography helped me to get closer to what I was studying and to gain deeper knowledge of women’s experiences, situations and practices. Yet, the way I was constructing my field sites was gradually strengthening my awareness of the complex interconnection between online and offline field sites. WeChat groups are not ‘out there’ sites, existing prior to independent actors (Robinson and Schultz, 2009). On the contrary, they become a ‘place’ (Augé, 1992) as they are validated by ongoing practices taking place both online and offline. WeChat groups are online-and-offline-lived, co-performed spaces which produce sociality, intersubjective practices, affectional ties, but also commercial activities, as Fujin’s business advertisements and the collective exchanges which go with them suggest.

Get out the place

The observation of, and participation in, what was produced and performed online challenged my analysis of offline situations. After Ping Er, Miao Miao, Dan and Suqi interacted online, they agreed to shift the scale of interaction to an offline stage, by moving out of WeChat into physical reality. Since I was invited to join them at Fujin’s shop, I also had to ‘jump’ outside WeChat to meet women in a material site in the suburbs of Taipei, where the lingerie shop was located. I had to be attentive to this scalar change and flexible about its performance. This could be tricky. Although I was called into the conversation by Miao Miao who clicked on the ‘@’ button, if I had missed the message, I would not have been informed of the offline activity. I would have missed the chance to collect material and I would perhaps even have upset the women in some way. This point could sound banal. Yet, in practice, this has constantly been a difficulty while conducting ethnography. Research into virtual spaces has argued that the use of the internet and digital platforms has restructured space and strengthened the relations of proximity and closeness (Hampton, 2015). However, this is true only to a certain degree. This makes sense only if the actors involved are permanently connected and attentive to conversations online.

On the shift and switch between online and offline practices, I would like to raise a second point. If online and offline spaces and experiences are inseparable and co-constitutive, the blurring of the frontiers between the two constitutes a challenge. Was the switch from online to offline and from offline to online altering our interactions and practices?

To answer, a first example I would like to discuss is my shift from an online to an offline setting through my interaction with Suqi. During two hours of intense virtual communication, Suqi asked many questions about Europe, my work, my everyday life, and, as a tacit exchange, she shared much about her migratory, familial, and professional experiences with me. We then decided to change the setting of the interaction, switching from an online to an offline frame. Although the shift was smoothly produced, I however observed a variation in the interaction I had face-to-face with Suqi. We met up at the 85° café in central Taipei and each had a mango juice. Suqi looked excited to meet me. As surprising as it seems, the mediation of the screen facilitated online interactions, yet it did create diffidence in the offline setting, and this had repercussions in our offline frame of interaction. In Goffmanian terms, technology affects the staging of the role and is also critical in the mediation of the interaction and in its performance (Pinch 2010: 414). The smartphone had mediated an online ‘presentation of the self’ (Goffman, 1958), strengthening Suqi’s capacity of expression and her self-confidence. The WeChat group we met in was contiguous to our bodily encounter, yet the ‘materiality of settings’ (1958), i.e. the coffee shop we were sitting in, was not without any impact on our (offline) interaction. Suqi seemed to feel less at ease, like if something was missing in our face-to-face communication, perhaps the screen which, to a certain degree, guaranteed some distance. To step over this difficulty, I recalled back on our written, screen-mediated conversations, and Suqi felt more comfortable. To some extent, she was reassured by the contiguity between online and offline interaction, and confident that I was the same person she had previously trusted online. Similar to what Minhao Dai and Robert Robbins (2021) have observed in their study of online dating on TINDER, both Suqi and I had used some specific – and quite straightforward – ways of presenting ourselves and conversing online. When being offline, these were suddenly missing; and so, it urged to translate these into the face to face, in presence interaction, to maintain continuity in the ‘impression management’ (Goffman, 1982) previously established while shifting from the virtual to the physical worlds.

Gradually, Suqi felt as confident as during our conversation online. If the mediation of the screen facilitated the making of the very first communication, I gradually understood that our bodily proximity could also reinforced our closeness. That evening, I spent more than five hours with her. We sat in the coffee shop and later took a walk on the street, sitting on a bench and smoking a cigarette until late. In our conversation, references to previous online interactions were omnipresent. Suqi even referred to the dancing panda emoticon that she had sent to me in the online chat. She asked me if we have pandas in Europe. At the very same time, although we had left the digital space to interact inside physical reality, Suqi kept her WeChat open to post pictures that we took together inside the group where we had met in few hours before. Where do offline worlds stop and online worlds begin? Once again, such borders were becoming fluid. We were simultaneously interacting within these two juxtaposed scales. Once again, online social practices and the ethnographic work which went with them could not wholly be separated from their offline counterpart.

This is also true in the opposite way, from an offline to an online frame, as my very first offline meeting with Li Liang suggests. In his lesson on fieldwork (1989), Goffman taught us the difficulties the researcher faces while ‘getting out the place’, since this displacement produces a break or a rupture in the setting and frame of the event. To solve this problem, Goffman’s teachings (1958) suggest that, in a dramaturgical perspective, when being ‘out of frame’, the ethnographer should reproduce his/her previous (online) role to limit ‘misframing’ or ‘unintended disruption’. All in all, it is a matter of guaranteeing continuity while moving ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the frame. And so, both interacting with Li Liang online or Suqi offline, it was a matter of guaranteeing continuity with the previous frames of interaction, whether online or offline.

Let me consider now another dimension of the process of getting out of the place. Switching to the offline world often becomes fundamental for understanding situations observed online. In some cases, what happened online puzzled me, and often, online I could not get any explicative clue. In many cases, online, women mentioned several practices performed offline, and through the written or vocal messages they were exchanging inside the groups, it was for me exceedingly difficult to imagine or even ‘visualise’ them. This was certainly a limit related to my inexperience on the field sites I was conducting ethnography on, yet I had the impellent necessity to experience first-hand what I was getting to know inside the chats. I had the impression of missing something, of being unable to grasp the ‘whole’ (Marcus, 1998). What I wanted to absolutely avoid was to be ‘external’ to the social reality I was observing: an inquiry realised ‘outside of’ the social worlds is a major risk of digital ethnography (Murthy, 2008). The accelerated rhythm of virtual conversations makes deciphering them hard. I felt almost frustrated as no matter how much explanation I could get by women, I felt unable – almost inadequate – to understand the complexity of the offline practices simply through a scrutiny of online conversations. Moreover, the more pictures and images of the offline reality I could see online, the more I became curious and impatient.

For example, after a few weeks of intense permanence in the group of the ‘sisters from Chongqing’, I understood that solidarity was only part of the heterogeneous activities women collectively performed online. For example, Fujin often advertised the products she sold, mainly Made in China bras. On the ‘front’ stage (Goffman, 1982) of the groups, I could see the pictures she posted, together with the bras’ sizes, colours, prices and delivery times. Such a practice did not seem anything more than a common advertising and selling process. Yet, inside the chat groups, many commercial exchanges and economic interactions proliferated, their inner-workings remaining mysterious. Fujin owned a little lingerie shop in Nanshijiao, in the suburbs of Taipei, where I used to spend time both with her and with her fellow migrants. I had been to her shop several times, and every time I found the shop empty of clients. More than a lingerie shop, that place looked like a stockroom for bras and underwear. Inside, there were huge boxes full of colourful lingerie. Clients were all inside the WeChat groups, yet the lingerie was still delivered to Fujin’s shop. Ascertaining this, and closely scrutinising online conversations, I progressively realised that I was missing an extra piece of the puzzle. Online, women were not only discussing the bras they wished to buy. They were also negotiating other sales. Some of them mentioned products which had nothing to do with Fujin’s lingerie. They talked about milk powder, medicines, cosmetics and heterogeneous food provisions, such as spices or chicken feet. And these all came from China. However, since these online conversations were fast, I could not follow everything. Another difficulty derived from the non-stop temporal sequence of the conversations. ICT generated what Keith Hampton (2015) called a ‘persistent contact and pervasive awareness’: women seemed to be permanently connected. For example, while negotiating prices and the commercialisation of milk powder from Taipei to Chinese Shenzhen, I observed more than 400 messages for one hour, exchanged among more than thirteen women.

Only by getting out the digital space could I find the clues that would solve this puzzle. I decided to move to the ‘back’ stage (Goffman, 1982), back at Fujin’s shop. By spending time there, I realised that there was not only lingerie inside the boxes in her shop. Curiously, there, I discovered the same commodities I had seen mentioned inside WeChat. By juxtaposing the online ‘stories of practices’ (Bertaux, 2003) and the evidence I had seen with my own eyes inside the shop, I understood that what was hidden behind this lowly-visible lingerie shop was a transnational business of heterogeneous products between China and Taiwan.

Through WeChat, Fujin and her partners could get in touch with fellow migrants, family members and friends located in different Chinese cities and villages. Multi-sited, translocal social ties, both in China and in Taiwan, could set in motion transnational business activities between China and Taiwan. Chinese homemade food provisions or clothes were sent to Taiwan, while Taiwanese medicines, good quality cosmetics and milk powder, absent from the Chinese local market, were sent to China. Clients and commercial partners got in touch on WeChat, where the business transactions were negotiated. On WeChat, it was also possible to transfer money, to pay for goods and to organise deliveries. At the same time, the material counterpart of such economic transactions cannot be neglected. Commercial partners and clients have a body and are positioned within physical locations. They move in the material world to collect goods, pack them in huge boxes and carry them to container ports or to post offices to ship them. If business can be digitally arranged, the products’ deliveries and commercialisation paths also necessitate offline activities, which can be observed only though physical presence ‘on the scene, immersed in local activity […] not to miss some key events in the physical world’ (Boellstorff, 2012: 76).

Return to the place

To reassemble all the pieces of the puzzle, I had to look at the final sequence, composed of the online exchanges between Fujin and her clients once they received the goods. If, as suggested by Goffman, ‘getting out of the place’ represents an obstacle to the ethnographic process, the acceleration of temporal and spatial sequences enabled by digital technologies makes ‘returning to the place’ easier. The trick was that I was returning to a place I had never really left (Hine, 2015). When I accompanied Fujin, I could be physically present, temporary, in the shop, the warehouses, the post office and the container port where her business transactions took place. I never, however, completely left the WeChat groups.

The reason is twofold. No doubt that after physically investigating her shop, I had to dig around further in the offline world to understand the complex functioning of Fujin’s business. I ‘followed’ (Marcus, 1995) her to the physical commercial sites where she collected, stocked up, packed and set transnational deliveries of the commodities. Yet, there was something more. Crucially, while conducting, in situ, mobile observations of Fujin’s multi-sited business practices, I also had to follow their online counterpart. I was not only returning to an online WeChat group I had never left, but I also had no choice but to remain connected online in order to understand what I was seeing offline. Clearly, I could not ‘follow’ Fujin’s offline displacements and activities without simultaneously tracking the digitalised conversations and exchanges she was having online with the actors involved in her business. More than ever, to apprehend the polymorph functioning of digitalised practices, of which Fujin’s transnational business is just an example, I had to re-assemble the pieces of a puzzle which is concurrently physically dispatched, but virtually imbricated and interconnected. Oscillating between online and offline worlds, I had to get out of the place when the digital level of action did not provide me with enough interpretative clues to decipher online practices.

Reflecting about ‘staying connected while on the move’ (Wei and Lo, 2006), another point deserves attention. In Summer 2017, I left Taiwan and returned to Europe. Yet, from Italy, France or Germany, I was, and I am still part of the 12 WeChat groups I joined while living in Taiwan. This helped, and still helps me, to remain in touch with the women I left there. This point may sound banal. Doubtlessly, when I was in Taiwan, through other online applications, I could also easily remain in touch with the people I had left in Europe. However, for methodological and data collection purposes, through WeChat I had not only the chance to keep in touch with my informants in loco. I could also keep on conducting ethnography while being away. And this has been particularly important in my data analysis and result writing process. In this respect, in the following years, when writing my doctoral thesis or journal papers, by getting in touch with the informants I interacted with or interviewed in Taiwan, I could constantly refresh and update my data. Let me think again of Fujin’s transnational business. When I left her in summer 2017, Fujin was facing some commercial difficulties and could not succeed in the import of several products from China to Taiwan. The trading regulations and restrictions between the two countries generated obstacles to the success of her commerce. I still remember that a few days before I left, Fujin expressed her worries to me: if the goods could not arrive to Taiwan, she would face financial difficulties. From France, between July 2017 and January 2018, I could follow the evolution of her commerce and, from abroad, I could still collect important information regarding the novel strategies – transgression of commercial regulations and of borders (Zani, 2020) – which helped me to improve my analysis, integrating ‘real time’ pieces of information. At the same time, despite our spatial distance, when in March 2018 I unexpectedly travelled from China to Taiwan and remained in Taipei, the reunions with the women I had left a year before were smooth and spontaneous. Continually in touch with them through WeChat while being away, we all had the impression that I was back to a place that I had never completely left.

All in all, the problem of distance from the place or of movement between online and offline scales of action can be easily deconstructed through a creative use of the digital applications. Let me resume my point. In situ or on the move, in place or abroad, more than ‘getting out of’ or ‘returning to’ the place, virtual ethnography needs us to move between online and online places and spaces, both ‘in and out’ and ‘out and in’. Virtual ethnography needs us to be agile, to take leaps, and to build bridges that help us to permanently switch between online and offline spaces. These are intrinsically connected both by the actors’ practices and by the ethnographer’s displacements. Hence, it is a matter of understanding how to organise interactional movements between online and offline levels in a variety of contexts and of interactive frames.