Special Issue

This thematic issue seeks to advance the methodological scholarship and cross-disciplinary exchange on information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their embeddedness in everyday practices across mobile online and offline spaces. ICTs and mobile media have become ubiquitous in the lives of many people, introducing new forms of communication, and affecting experiences of temporality and space and ultimately understandings of sociality and relationships. Mobile media technologies such as smartphones, now commonplace companions in numerous pockets, place users in digital (online) as well as physical (offline) spaces in novel ways, thus opening up new environments of affordances. In everyday life these mobile online and offline spaces are deeply interwoven in manifold ways. Practices, experiences, meanings and expectations are being negotiated across these spaces, while simultaneously bound by the spaces’ respective logics and limitations, leading in turn to new interrelations as well as contradictions. The intersections of online and offline spaces in the use of mobile media technologies have become an inherent aspect of people’s lives—and hence an intriguing new site for social research. The mobile, interrelating, yet not converging, nature of online and offline spaces, however, poses significant method(odolog)ical challenges. Researchers in the field of media and communication and beyond are confronted with such questions as: What are appropriate designs to study (at) these intersections? How can methods do justice to the volatility and fluidity of practices and experiences across online and offline spaces? In what ways can elaborated mixed and multi-method designs capture complexity adequately without the researchers losing sight of the specifics? How can researchers overcome the potential additivity in their methodical approaches and thus acknowledge that intersecting online and offline spaces are more than the sum of their separate parts? And what are the ethical and practical implications for the parties involved?