The study of the relation between context and practice has been essential for the theoretical and methodological developments in the field of literacy studies over the last few decades. The introduction of the new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the scope of interest of literacy studies has refreshed the need for a revision of the context-literacy relation upon which former research was based, in the face of new possibilities of interaction at a distance and the use of 'virtual worlds', typical of certain ITC-mediated reading and writing practices. The present essay addresses such revision from the viewpoint of the double-crisis of Ethnography, in an effort to critically evaluate certain empirical and methodological models that have recently been put forward in qualitative studies of digital literacy. It concludes that such strategies, although useful for the construction of more adequate assumptions as regards the practice-context relation, need to be applied to the researchers' practices themselves, so that the degree of reflexivity deemed necessary for the legitimation of ethnographic approaches is guaranteed.
Digital literacy; Policontextuality; Ethnography