Methods Forum ■ Gabriella Modan Department of English The Ohio State University gmodan@gmail.com Writing the Relationship: Ethnographer- Informant Interactions in the New Media Era With the ever-increasing accessibility of new communications media, there has been growing discussion among ethnographers about how new media data such as e-mails, SMS/texts, blogs, news article comment sections, or community group websites have impacted the practice of ethnography. Generally, questions center around the characteristics of the data itself. Less often discussed is the effect of new communications media on relationships between ethnographers and members of the communities they study. This article explores what happens when social media becomes a channel through which researchers interact with informants both during fieldwork and between fieldsite visits. I examine how new formats of quick and often casual written communication influence the development of ethnographer–informant relationships over time. These technologies make contact with some informants (but not others) easier and more frequent, and, particularly because they bring written language into a relationship that often privileges spoken interaction, they may allow different facets of identity to emerge, reconfigure a researcher’s network of relationships in the fieldsite, or change the personal-professional divide. [field- work, ethnography, social media, new technologies] Introduction R ecent years have seen the emergence of a growing body of scholarship that theorizes the conduct of virtual ethnography and that has begun a conver- sation about virtual ethnography’s place within ethnographic scholarship. What hasn’t been as deeply addressed, however, is the role that new information technologies play in more traditional forms of ethnography. For example, how do we use social media during our fieldwork and after we’ve left the field to communicate with our informants, friends, collaborators, and colleagues? How does this influence our relationships with people in the field, how we see them and how they see us, and how does all this ultimately influence the direction of our research? What ethical questions arise, and, for those of us who work in countries where our research is subject to the approval of our universities’ institutional review boards, how do we or don’t we address such ethical questions in human subjects review documents? These are pressing questions because it is becoming more and more common for ethnographers to interact with informants via social media, both while doing Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 26, Issue 1, pp. 98–107, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. Copyright © 2016 American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/jola.12114. 98