PART III. Experience. Sarah Pink

Transcription

1 PART III Experience Sarah Pink DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY Ethnography is one of the most established research approaches for doing research with and about people, their experiences, everyday activities, relationships, material cultures, social environments, and more spectacular events or performances. Ethnographers have long since worked with media, both as a research method, as a research topic, and perhaps most importantly as something that we acknowledge is an almost inevitable and universal element of everyday life. As digital technologies are increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life, as well as in the more extraordinary events and activities in which people become involved, then it becomes important to do research in a way that accounts for this, even if it does not necessarily put the digital at the center of the study. While the three chapters in this part show how ethnographic methods can be fruitfully employed on film, multi-media political practices, and mobile technologies, this short introduction focuses on digital ethnography as an emerging and influential subfield. As my colleagues from the Digital Ethnography Research Centre and I have noted in Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice (Pink et al. 2016), there is no single definition of ethnography, therefore it would S. Pink ( ) RMIT, Melbourne, VIC, Australia sarah.pink@rmit.edu.au

2 162 INNOVATIVE METHODS IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH be difficult to advance a simple statement about or guide to what digital ethnography involves. For example, ethnographic methods and processes are played out differently when they are inflected with disciplinary theories and approaches, such as in anthropology, sociology, and design research, although advocates for all fields claim to be doing ethnography. Moreover, ethnography is used across a range of interdisciplinary fields, including cultural studies and, of particular relevance to the digital, media and communication studies. Our approach has been to focus on digital ethnography practice that takes as its starting point the idea that digital media and technologies are part of the everyday and more spectacular worlds that people inhabit. This has meant taking what we have called a non-digital-centric approach to the digital, which also acknowledges the digital intangible those elements of digital environments or worlds that we can sense but not necessarily see, as well as those aspects that researchers cannot see or sense until they are made aware of them by research participants. As such, we are interested in the relationship between digital, sensory, atmospheric and material elements of our environments. Therefore, digital ethnography is not a tool box method that can be applied directly in an already existing format to a research problem or question. Instead, it is an approach to ethnography that involves being concerned with how the digital has become part of the material, sensory and social worlds we inhabit, and what the implications are for ethnographic research practice (Pink et al. 2016, p. 7). As I have already noted, digital ethnography will always be inflected by the theoretical and practice stances of particular disciplines and fields of study. For example, the field of digital anthropology (Horst and Miller 2012) would inflect digital ethnography practice in particular ways, sometimes toward a material culture approach to understanding digital technologies as part of our worlds and environments. Other approaches, which might be more rooted in media phenomenology or phenomenological anthropology, might put human experience and perception at the center of their ways of doing digital ethnography (Pink and Leder Mackley 2013). Other related but different approaches can be found in a series of other volumes that likewise seek to develop ways of doing ethnography that engage with digital environments and the human relationships that are implicated through them, such as in the work of the sociologist Christine Hine (2015), the anthropologist Tom Boellstorff (2008), and others.

3 EXPERIENCE 163 Nevertheless, the important point to keep in mind is that throughout these different renderings of the relationship between the digital and ethnography is the consistent recognition that we need to engage with the digital as part of the way in which we operate as ethnographers. I do not go into detail here about the different methods used, but the chapters in this book will provide some examples. However, I would emphasize that just as digital ethnography can be shaded and directed by disciplinary theory, it is also always developed as part of specific projects. Digital ethnography methods have included doing ethnography online and as such participating with people online as part of the research process; interviewing people with their technologies; accompanying people as they use digital technologies in everyday life; asking people to make images that they post online and working with them to understand their meanings; or video-recording people as they use technologies or demonstrate their uses of technologies in everyday life, and asking them to reflect on these activities. These research methods are, however, not a set of pre-determined techniques that are subsequently applied, but are always evolved as part of a specific research project, question design, and practice. Methods can vary depending on circumstance, because they need to be responsive. What is more important to keep in mind as a constant influence in any ethnographic process is the need to consider some of the core principles that have become embedded in most approaches to ethnographic practice. These include the need to be reflexive about the ways in which we produce knowledge, the status of that knowledge, and subsequently what this tells us about what that knowledge can mean academically, and if disseminated in non-academic contexts. It also brings to the fore the idea of ethnography, particularly in anthropology, as involving doing research with rather than about people. That is, it is always a collaborative exercise. This means that digital media are part of the worlds in which we live and research, they are part of the lives of our research participants, they are part of the tools and techniques that we use to do ethnographic research, and they are equally implicated in the ways in which we and others represent and disseminate our work. Digital technologies also form alliances with particular ways of doing ethnography, enabling us to enhance that practice in new ways. For instance, the possibilities for participatory ethnographic techniques increase as online collaboration with research participants becomes possible. Other examples include the parallel or linked possibility of doing ethnography in public to different degrees and extents (see Pink and Abram 2015). For example, John Postill s ethnographic

4 164 INNOVATIVE METHODS IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH research with groups of internet activists whom he calls freedom technologists involves him writing up fieldnotes and blog entries as he goes along, in ways that are in correspondence with the people who participate in his projects (Postill 2015). His media/anthropology blog therefore creates a kind of public digital ethnography, beyond public scholarship as it has been conceived in the past. 1 Another example is the Mobilizing Media for Sustainable Outcomes in the Pacific Region project, led by Heather Horst, Jo Tacchi, and Dominic Friguglietti. This project uses the Research from the Field section of its blog to bring together the on-the-ground research with the design of a tool kit in conversation with the project s industry organization, ABC International Development, and the Pacific Media Assistance Scheme. The blog posts range from insights and trends emerging through research on mobile phones, social media, and the internet to development practitioners and filmmakers using media in Communication for Development initiatives. Indeed, the possibility of making digital ethnography projects come alive online as they emerge and develop creates new ways to engage research participants, other academics, and students with research in progress. A good example of this is the Locating the Mobile website, where the research team has posted examples of the work that the collaborative team spanning Australia, Japan, and China produced during the fieldwork process. The website shows ongoing work on mobile locative media and privacy in families through accessible written and photographic texts, as well as news updates and other materials. The Energy and Digital Living website is an example of a different way of engaging with the possibilities of digital media in relation to research and design that involved the study of people s relationships with digital technologies and the making of digital design interventions for energy demand reduction. In the research process digital video methods were used extensively, and digital technologies were also important for the wider project team s work, involving energy monitoring and measurement. However, part of our ethnography work in this project was also to research how people used digital technologies in their everyday lives. In this project, differently to the two discussed earlier, the website was constructed after the project was completed. This was because it was conceived partly as a site through which we could tell the stories of the project once we had gained certain insights and understandings, and because we wanted participants to be able to make informed decisions, over time, about how or if they wanted to be depicted on video on the website. The site also has different aims in terms of its potential audiences,

5 EXPERIENCE 165 seeking to be accessible yet also an introduction to a digital research and design theme, methodology and project, and set of materials, which can be viewed by people interested in the issues, students, and researchers. To conclude, digital ethnography is not just one method or research strategy. It is based in an acknowledgment that we need to theorize and understand how the digital has become part of the world in which we live and research. It is not simply about studying how people use digital media, or using digital media to study people. Instead, it is concerned with a wider vision of how everything we do as ethnographic researchers is happening in ways that might be more or less relational to digital media, and an acknowledgment that we will continue to change with them as we move on into the future. NOTES 1. For this and the websites mentioned subsequently, see: com, and (all accessed 10 March 2016). REFERENCES Boellstorff, T. (2008) Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Hine, C. (2015) Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday (London: Bloomsbury). Horst, H. and Miller, D. (Eds.) (2012) Digital Anthropology (London: Berg). Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J., et al. (2016) Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice (London: Sage). Pink, S. and Leder Mackley, K. (2013) Saturated and Situated: Rethinking Media in Everyday Life. Media, Culture and Society 35(6): Pink, S. and Abram, S. (Eds.) (2015) Media, Anthropology and Public Engagement, (Oxford: Berghahn). Postill, J. (2015) Public Anthropology in Times of Media Hybridity and Global Upheaval. In S. Pink and S. Abram (Eds.), Media, Anthropology and Public Engagement ( Oxford: Berghahn), pp