Social Networks, Communication and the Internet

The internet has changed our lives within just a few decades: we watch TV, pay our bills and fill in our tax forms, book appointments and hotel rooms, look for recipes, communicate, form networks and share our everyday lives on the internet. It would actually be easier to list what we cannot do on the internet rather than list what we do or could do on it. For example, sociologist Christine Hine (2015) has noted that the internet is embedded in our daily lives, cultures, social interactions and economies to the extent that it should no longer be considered a curiosity. The call for papers in Ethnologia Fennica 2015, volume 42, asked writers to discuss how internetrelated communication and social networks are studied and discussed in contemporary ethnological research.