Following the publication of Henri Lefebvre’s book Le Droit à la ville (1968), a debate has emerged regarding the neoliberal takeover of urban spaces and activism. Nonetheless, in the past 10 years, we have seen the continuous expansion of public space via social networking media and, today, most public institutions in Western states use social networking sites to communicate with their “citizens.” Although there are many serious problems associated with this takeover, little has been said about them so far. In this article, I address the contribution of The right to the city to this debate by analyzing a public institution which tried to establish communication with its “citizens” in an urban space in a virtual world. My analysis concludes that the users of this new media platform did not regard themselves as citizens when they were dwelling in this urban space online, but instead saw themselves as the consumers they were addressed as in this environment.

This article argues for a revised importance of distance, besides the much emphasized closeness, in the debate on and use of ethnographic methods in online environments. When returning to the founding fathers of ethnographic methods, distance is often put forward as a core aspect of ethnographic methods, something widely forgotten, or even rejected, in the current debate in the field. Space has been restructured by digital media technologies, and the spatial and temporal proximity of digital  media cultures present new challenges for research methodologies. Based on the author’s own experiences of ethnographic fieldwork in digital cultures, and with Henri Lefebvre’s theory of everyday life as a rhythm as vantage point, it is here argued that  distance, dialectically interlinked with closeness and proximity, should be given further attention in current research and debate on ethnographic methods used online.