For decades, Clifford Geertz inspired and provoked controversy with his insistence that ethnography primarily involved the construction of text. His concept of ‘thick description’ was employed to train undergraduates in the basics of participant observation. Works and Lives (1988) became de rigeur reading in graduate seminars in both methodology and the history of anthropology. Senior anthropologists liked to agree that Geertz took the parallels too far and that he should never have strayed so far from his own early empirical work. Geertz's message was amplified and reduplicated into a ‘literary turn’.

Yet we never really reached a disciplinary consensus on the question of whether social life, as people live and experience it, is really indistinguishable from the textual strategies, representational forms, literary devices, and rhetorical flourishes with which we anthropologists present that social life. Most anthropologists were inspired by Geertz but stopped short of taking textual views of culture too literally. So too have they been intrigued by Erving Goffman's stage and performance metaphors (1959), and by Benedict Anderson's ‘imagined community’ (1983) – yet nevertheless persisted in upholding belief in objective, empirically observable, tangibly experienced, unmediated, and transparently untamperable ‘real’ communities and social lives.

Digital sociality turns us back to questions of mediation, presentation, and representation. Only this time, it is very clear that the metaphors are meant. The people ‘we’ study know ‘they’ are representing themselves – whether as fit Norwegians or as water ambassadors, doctoral candidates or angry minoritised persons, journalists or editors, and that they inhabit ‘texted’ worlds. Digital platforms of various types provide the medium for the creation of real selves and communities, reconfigured in space, material forms, and behaviours, alongside other selves and communities. The question now is not whether our avatars have social lives, but rather how we integrate them.

The editors at AJEC thank Tom Bratrud and Karen Waltorp for pulling together a selection of articles on several faces of digital sociality in the Nordic countries. Our reviewers have taken a special interest in the Nordic context, which the authors have done their best to elaborate, with reference especially to these countries’ marked support for digitalisation and its incorporation into social welfare. Following the conversation taken up on intangible cultural heritage in the previous issue, we hope readers will begin to assemble new questions (and answers) about the digital futures of heritage, ownership, and projections.

Jennifer R. Cash

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

E-mail: Jennifer.cash@ntu.edu.sg

ORCID: 0000-0003-1213-2361