In a longer blogpost/essay ↑on his Rule 34 Charlie Stross wrote, among other things:

We’re living in the 21st century: it’s not possible to write a novel that seriously explores modern life without a background that includes rapid, cheap international travel: the commercial space industry: smartphones and the internet and spam: social networking sites, Facebook and Twitter: the rapidly shifting reference points of life expectancy, gender roles, and politics.
    The mundane world we live in is rapidly accreting the baroque trappings of a science fiction novel. The internet has exploded messily across the world around us: ignoring its noxiously fermenting culture in a novel of the near-present is like ignoring the clashing influences of punk and Margaret Thatcher’s vanguard Tories in a novel set in the London of the late 1970s.

Well, the exact same is true for ethnography.