This paper explores the ethnographic technique of the focused revisit—rare in sociology but common in anthropology—when an ethnographer returns to the site of a previous study. Discrepancies between earlier and later accounts can be attributed to differences in: (1) the relation of observer to participant, (2) theory brought to the field by the ethnographer, (3) internal processes within the field site itself, or (4) forces external to the field site. Focused revisits tend to settle on one or another of these four explanations, giving rise to four types of focused revisits. Using examples, the limits of each type of focused revisit are explored with a view to developing a reflexive ethnography that combines all four approaches. The principles of the focused revisit are then extended to rolling, punctuated, heuristic, archeological, and valedictory revisits. In centering attention on ethnography-as-revisit sociologists directly confront the dilemmas of participating in the world they study—a world that undergoes (real) historical change that can only be grasped using a (constructed) theoretical lens.

Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origins and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure studies provides a valuable approach to the evolution of shared, widely accessible systems and services of the type often provided or regulated by governments in the public interest. On the other hand, platform studies captures how communication and expression are both enabled and constrained by new digital systems and new media. In these environments, platform-based services acquire characteristics of infrastructure, while both new and existing infrastructures are built or reorganized on the logic of platforms. We conclude by underlining the potential of this combined framework for future case studies.

Using the ecology of games perspective, this article analyzes China’s regulation of internet cafes. Based on the analyses of regulatory documents, interviews, and news coverage, we identify three games fundamental to our understanding of the subject: (1) the establishment of national regulatory regime, (2) local policy implementation, and (3) market competition. We situate the discussion of game players, their goals, strategies, and performances in the context of rapidly increasing internet cafe penetration under intensifying government regulation, a manifestation of the inevitable clash between state and market at the local levels of internet development. This culminated in the April 2003 proposal by the Ministry of Culture for a national chain-store model, which led to a “nested game” involving key players from all three essential games including national regulators, local state agencies, cafe operators, user groups (e.g. students and migrant workers), and members of the urban elite (e.g. parents and teachers). We conclude by maintaining that there is a pressing need for more research on internet cafes as localized points of access control; that the processes of internet cafe regulation constitute a prism for the examination of the internet’s socio-political ramifications; and that the ecology of games provides an insightful theoretical framework for this analytical task.