Jan Blommaert & Dong Jie's book is an easy-to-use, practical guide for students and researchers who want to use ethnography as a research method. It serves as an accessible introduction for those of us who intend to investigate society and human behaviour as they unfold in real life. In this second edition, the authors further a vivid discussion of ethnographic practice in both offline and online contexts. To do so, they track the theoretical and methodological changes that emerged since the book was first published ten years ago. The authors explore the challenges a highly mediated society presents for social scientists and provide useful information on how to undertake fieldwork in both offline and online contexts. An important advance of the book is its focus on the inseparability of life offline and online. The authors highlight the affordances and difficulties this nexus presents for ethnographers.

In the introduction, the authors point out that their aim is to offer students and researchers insights on how to start fieldwork, collect data, and build and organize a corpus. They stress the fact that ethnographic work entails learning through practicing it and that this book should be used as a guide to start this process. Specific research contexts require flexibility to adapt as fieldwork progresses. The second section discusses various dimensions of ethnography as a research paradigm and a genre that requires inductive reasoning through detailed empirical observation of social groups. On the whole, the two first sections pinpoint that the empirical basis of ethnography should inform theory, not the other way around.

The third section provides important suggestions on how to organize and structure the research before going into the field. It brings useful tips on how to organize documents and equipment. Importantly, it also advises the ethnographer to prepare for the unexpected, as fieldwork has its own dynamics which requires researchers to be flexible and reflexive. The fourth section provides the reader with preliminary information about ethnographic daily routine and what to expect when in the field. The authors stress that the chaos of social life is a source of data in and of itself. They also argue that fieldwork is much more than data collection; rather, it must be seen as a unique learning opportunity. In the fifth section there are suggestions on how to organise and analyse data after the fieldwork has ended.

One of the book's most important contributions is found in sections six and seven in which the authors reflect on the challenges of doing ethnography in contemporary society. For them, ethnographic research is currently influenced by the inescapable connection between actions offline and online. Not only does this book help researchers navigate the online-offline nexus, but it also casts a critical eye on the specificities of the internet, such as filter bubbles, bots, and fake profiles. They conclude the book by emphasizing that the more complex the research context is, the more ethnographic immersion will be needed. This is particularly relevant to understand social actions at the offline-online intersection. Blommaert & Jie's keen analytical eyes and accessible style make this book a must-read for any researcher who is interested in social processes as they are (re)produced and contested by people in their daily lives.