the project calls smart-from-below.
Social media platforms and digital technologies are increasingly used for health purposes. (© Daniel Miller)
This is an excellent example of research that combines the intellectual challenge of understanding the impact of new media on the contemporary nature of ageing with an applied challenge to use this knowledge to help make smartphones more effective in the field of health. Both the intellectual and the applied challenges depend upon sensitivity to the forms of cultural diversity uncovered by the comparative ethnographic approach.
The research will lead to a series of open access monographs and collaborative volumes, aimed at both anthropological and wider audiences alike. The findings will be shared on a website, in films, and through accessible teaching materials. Early findings (2020) suggest that:
The smartphone is not just a youth technology. In fact, the research finds that older people with mobility issues, for example, see smartphones as more central to their lives than do some young people
The smartphone is not just a device that is used, but a place that we live, which is really important in a sometimes rootless and restless world. The smartphone is the place that we can come back to at a second’s notice
The smartphone has become a vehicle for the provision of care. There is also a fine line between care and surveillance.
The new characteristic of ‘old age’ is frailty. People who expected to become elderly actually don’t feel any different, so they never come to see themselves as old. This continues until they experience ill-health and frailty.
The smartphone achieves a new intimacy that feels like an expression and extension of the person, and, being always present, creates a kind of perpetual opportunism, taking pictures, making notes, providing entertainment and enabling contact with others at any time.
STOP & THINK
What are the implications of the ethnographic approach to the digital world for anthropological research practice?
Interview with Sarah Pink (2020)
Sarah Pink is Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, Australia, and has a joint appointment across the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture and the Faculty of Information Technology. Her research focuses on emerging intelligent technologies, automation, data, digital futures, safety and design for wellbeing. Here, she explains how digital ethnography is used in her own research.
digital ethnography This is an approach to ethnographic practice that accounts for the relationship between the digital, material and physical elements of human activities, experiences and environments
WHAT IS DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY?
Digital ethnography is an approach to ethnographic practice that accounts for the relationship between the digital, material and physical elements of human activities, experiences and environments. A digital ethnographic approach understands the digital, material and physical as being inseparable in the contemporary world.
HOW IS DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY DIFFERENT FROM CLASSICAL FIELDWORK?
Digital ethnography acknowledges that the digital layers of life are now inextricable from our everyday worlds and therefore need to be accounted for in ethnographic practice. It therefore moves seamlessly between digital and material environments. It might involve following research participants as they move through material and digital environments or social worlds simultaneously – for example, as a person walks along the street talking with a friend, while at the same time moving through online maps and including another person in the conversation through an app.
HOW DO ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES INFORM YOUR WORK?
My ethnographic practice is informed by three key approaches: attention to sensory perception and experience – those things that we feel in our bodies and emotions that we cannot necessarily put into words; the idea that people and things are always moving (both digitally and materially); and theories of place and emergence whereby I understand human experience and activity to occur in a continually changing and evolving situation that different things and processes move in and out of.
HOW DO YOU CONDUCT FIELDWORK ONLINE? Online fieldwork can be undertaken by participating in a range of online activities. For example, this might be in online forums, in social media and though engagement with participants in other online practices and platforms, always with their permission. My own research brings together online and offline as part of the same context; however, other researchers have usefully developed methods for doing research online.
DO YOU COLLABORATE WITH OTHER DISCIPLINES IN YOUR RESEARCH?
Interdisciplinary research underpins much of my work and this enables me to do research that would have been impossible for me as a lone anthropologist. I have collaborated with researchers from many disciplines, including, engineering, design, arts practice, media studies, cultural studies, art therapy, safety science, organization studies, pedagogy, sociology and geography. I collaborate with researchers based both in universities and in industry. This allows me to develop projects that advance academic theory and methodology, on the one hand, and, on the other, that make a contribution outside academia.
WHAT IS YOUR LATEST WORK?
My current work focuses on the anthropology of emerging technologies – such as new modes of automation and artificial intelligence, and how they are experienced in technologies like self-driving cars and future mobility systems, energy futures and healthcare environments. I want to understand how we can best engage such technologies for the benefit of human futures, and I argue that anthropology has an important role to play in guiding such futures.
WHAT ARE THE ETHICAL ISSUES REGARDING DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY?
Ethical issues tend to be specific to different research contexts and questions rather than being particular to digital ethnography per se. My recommendation is to underpin any digital ethnographic research with rigorous and reflexive anthropological ethics that attends to questions of participants’ informed consent, privacy and wellbeing and regards research as a collaborative relationship.
Interview with Crystal Abidin (2020)
Crystal Abidin (aka ‘wishcrys’) is an anthropologist and ethnographer of internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation and vulnerability. Her books include Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (2018), Microcelebrity Around the Globe: Approaches to Cultures of Internet Fame (2018, co-edited with Megan Lindsay Brown), Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures (2020, co-authored with Tama Leaver and Tim Highfield) and Mediated Interfaces: The Body on Social Media (2020, co-edited with Katie Warfield and Carolina Cambre). She is listed on Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia as well as Pacific Standard 30 Top Thinkers Under 30. Here, she talks about her work and what it means to be an anthropologist of internet cultures.
