An increasingly pervasive digital environment, where technologies mediate social interaction within and outside organizations, creates new rich data sources for IS research. Of primacy to IS scholars, who study phenomena at the intersection of technology, people and organization, is how future research designs can capture such ongoing sociotechnical entanglements occurring in hybrid online and offline spaces. Building on lessons learned from a study of platform workers, this chapter explores three key challenges of a hybrid ethnographic approach to IS research: (1) navigating unbounded fieldsites; (2) managing technological opacity; (3) working with diverse data. The chapter guides researchers by demonstrating how hybrid methods can be used in different configurations across diverse settings. Simultaneously, in the age of web crawlers, data scraping and machine learning, processes that are invaluable in their own rights, this chapter resituates a qualitative ethnographic approach to digital data, introducing participatory digital observation to the rich empirics gathered in face-to-face environments. Rather than reproducing the valuable work done by scholars in digital sociology and ethnography, this chapter brings strands of the conversation together, highlighting the benefits of studying IS phenomena as a hybrid that exists both in physical and virtual spaces.

On the basis of an interdisciplinary approach informed by ethnographic methods, and computer-mediated discourse analysis, this paper sets out to explore the relationship between multimodal and multilingual practices in Computer-Mediated English as a Lingua Franca (CMELF) communication on Facebook. As the analysis of some naturally occurring interactions shows, CMELF users exploit multimodal resources in novel ways to achieve mutual understanding in intercultural communication. For instance, when a target term in English is unknown to the subject utterer, a corresponding picture can be searched for on the Internet in their own L1, to be then embedded in the CMELF utterance and fill the lexical gap. Multimodal resources, however, can also be employed as part of pragmatic strategies to proactively avoid misunderstanding: emojis, for example, can be used to flag words which are infrequent and therefore potentially problematic for the intended multicultural audience, while pictures can gloss these visually, thus enhancing utterance clarity.