Abstract
This article recounts what happens when an increasingly commonplace technology such as the smartphone is mobilized in ethnographic fieldwork practice, investigating the particular research-related affects and intimacies that are produced by/in this sociotechnical assemblage. I start with a brief account of my research project, after which I discuss the ways in which my smartphone has informed and modulated the different components of my fieldwork, conceived as a heterogeneous practice of logistical and affective labor. In the last two sections, I reflect on the methodological consequences of incorporating a smartphone into ethnographic research and address the question of how this practice prompts a reconsideration of the relation between knowledge production, research intimacies, and mobile technology.
Prelude
For a brief moment, I am utterly discombobulated as I sit up in bed surrounded by pitch-blackness. It takes me a second to discover/remember (the two are hard to disentangle in the moment) that the bed is not my own and that I am in fact at my parents’ house in Leusden, the Netherlands. The alarm clock tells me it’s 4 a.m. Why the hell am I awake at this hour? I vaguely remember bits of a quickly receding dream and then. . . a noise? Yes, there was a noise that suddenly interrupted whatever my dream couldn’t contain. I probe the room and grab my smartphone from the table next to the bed. There’s a new text message. It’s E. and he wants to know if I’d still like him to cut my hair. “Either way,” he writes, “care for a candle light dinner for 2 sometimes?” I feel an odd sense of invasion, like my fieldwork in Baltimore suddenly caught up with me in the presumed personal space of my family’s home across the Atlantic. Next to surprise, there’s some insecurity and irritation too: did he just come on to me? Did I give off any signals during our last few meetings? Surely he must recognize the boundaries between researcher and participant, right? Perhaps he just doesn’t care. Still, couldn’t he have waited until I got back to Baltimore? I believe I told him about my trip, so why . . . And what will I write back? I mean, I don’t want to be rude, just clear about our professional relationship. I would hate to lose him as an informant and, besides, he’s such a nice guy. Oh well, screw it for now, I need to get back to sleep. I’ll deal with the situation when I get back into town and return to the field I thought I had left behind.
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Introduction
The prelude above can be taken as a parable for much of what follows. What it conveys, and what I will attend to in the pages to come, are the unexpected and often intricate ways in which ethnographic research is shaped by intimacies and affective relations whose technologically mediated textures complicate common understandings of what constitutes the spatial and temporal parameters of “the field.” The main character throughout my account will be the smartphone that I acquired at the start of a recently completed ethnographic project, which has comprehensively modulated my fieldwork experiences in a way that viscerally resonates with a number of current claims about certain marginalized and neglected aspects of social scientific knowledge production. For instance, Law and Urry (2004) stress the need to come to terms with the productive role of social research, which does not simply describe or represent the world but rather “enacts” it (391). They lament the retrograde character of much contemporary social science, whose epistemology and methodology are largely stuck in “nineteenth-century realities,” instead of living up to the challenges of an increasingly complex world (idem). In particular, they insist that current social scientific methods “do not resonate well with important reality enactments” and go on to enumerate several aspects of everyday life that, in their view, remain inadequately addressed: “the fleeting,” “the distributed,” “the multiple,” “the sensory,” “the emotional,” and “the kinaesthetic” (403). Approaching the criticism of these issues from a different perspective, the journal History of the Human Sciences recently featured a special issue on “intimacy in research” (Fraser & Puwar, 2008). Rather than focusing on the inadequacies of conventional research methods and methodology per se, the authors in this collection highlight the intimacies that are encountered, navigated, and produced during the labor of (social) scientific research, but that have largely been obscured in the “final products” derived from these practices—for example, articles, lectures, and books. Like Law and Urry, however, they are concerned with the systematic depreciation of the affective, ephemeral, and sensory qualities of our engagement with the research materials and environments that shape how we create knowledge and negotiate power relations. Commenting on the lack of attention to these aspects in debates on methods and methodology, the editor’s note:
The rhythm, smell, sense, tension and pleasure that go into producing what will become research and data remain largely outside of such discussions, even though these are the very ways in which we carry research into the library, the studio and the lecture hall. By privileging considerations that are usually edited out of the research process, this issue explores how sensory, emotional and affective relations are central to the ways in which researchers engage with, produce, understand and translate what becomes “research.” (Fraser & Puwar, 2008, p. 2)
One methodological approach that explicitly takes on the challenges of attending to these oft-neglected elements of social science research, and which has received increased attention over the past several years, is “sensory ethnography.” In her insightful book Doing Sensory Ethnography (2009), Sarah Pink draws together a varied body of scholarship that comprises “a new literature that accounts for the senses across the social sciences and humanities” (1) Rooted in social anthropology, specifically in what is commonly referred to as the “anthropology of the senses,” Pink integrates existing work on everyday sensory experience and draws from her own research to examine “how this multisensoriality is integral both to the lives of people who participate in our research and to how we ethnographers practice our craft” (1, emphasis in original). Her book abounds with valuable theoretical and methodological considerations that take into account how intercorporeality, affectivity, and materiality permeate qualitative research methods as well as the spatiotemporal settings which they help to create, teasing out the multisensorial complexity, and subtle intimacies that are part and parcel of ethnographic research practice. Moreover, Pink also reflects on various media technologies that are frequently employed during fieldwork, such as the digital (video) camera, stressing the interplay of the senses engaged by these technologies as they modulate the temporality and spatiality of this mutating entity called “the field.”
In a different vein, Grant Kien’s Global Technography: Ethnography in the Age of Mobility (2009) proposes a “technographic” approach to ethnography, which highlights our everyday engagements with mobile communication technologies, especially in terms of how they shape our affective sense of being in and belonging to an increasingly globalized world. Rather than assuming that globalizing wireless technologies somehow create a uniform experience that erases distance and difference between places and peoples, Kien shows us how technological experience is informed by mundane, messy practices and performances that produce idiosyncratic scenes in hybrid spaces (in both an ontological and cultural sense). Through various auto-ethnographic vignettes that attend to the ways in which mobile technologies intimately manage to upset, fail, or surprise us, he also elucidates how these devices fundamentally change the practice of ethnographic research, especially in terms of how we conceptualize and act upon a “deterritorialized” field. As Kien asks, “[h]ow can one define a field when the users and technologies are constantly in motion and intermittent, and when the nature of the network itself has changed from the central-server model to distributed networking dependent on the active involvement of the users themselves?” (Kien, 2009, p. 14).
Yet despite their careful attention to the interconnectedness of affective and sensory experience, everyday technologies, and the ethnographic imagination in concrete research encounters, both authors nevertheless tend to treat the multiple technologies enrolled in ethnographic methods as discrete objects. A video camera for filming, a photo camera for taking pictures, an audio recorder for interviews; the implicit assumption in Pink’s work is that while these different practices may be combined during fieldwork, they remain attached to distinct technologies that mediate and record affective research encounters without significantly transforming them. In contrast, my own ethnographic research has been intimately informed by the incorporation of my smartphone into fieldwork activities, which converged various media forms and methods into a single technological object. This convergence profoundly influenced the ways in which I composed and navigated my “field,” collected, stored and analyzed data materials, and made sense of research intimacies as they occurred and as I remediated them on subsequent occasions. Moreover, while Kien’s work addresses the central importance of mobile technologies for ethnographic research, in particular their capacity to create a dispersed and hybrid “field,” he scarcely elaborates on the precise ways in which these technologies—such as the smartphone—augment, inflect, and transform actual ethnographic methods and the intimate spatiotemporal relations they engender. In Global Technography, he seems to be more concerned with certain existential repercussions of pervasive and mundane wireless networks—taking up Heideggerian notions of revealing truth, essence, and Being—than with the methodological, epistemological, and ontological transformations introduced by the enrollment of mobile technologies in everyday ethnographic practices. In contrast to his global ethnography of technological experience, then, this article reflects on the pragmatics of doing ethnography with a particular mobile technology—my smartphone.
Creating “The Field”: Researching the Intimate Life of (Non) Citizenship in Baltimore
Even though I had visited the United States on several occasions before arriving on a late August afternoon in 2010, I had never made it to Baltimore. Moreover, I had never lived or worked outside of the Netherlands before, so this felt like a big and somewhat overwhelming adventure. Earlier that year I had received a postdoctoral grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research to conduct an 18-month research project on the articulations and potential intersections of intimacy, spirituality, and citizenship among various LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) collectives in the city of Baltimore. Prior to my arrival, I knew little about my new environment and its plethora of problems—I hadn’t yet even seen The Wire—save for some spectacularized generalizations about the city’s high rates of drug-related crime, murder, poverty, and disease. Of course I had inquired into the city’s LGBT culture and sent out some advance introductory emails to a number of organizations in order to stake out some possible sites for future fieldwork, but for the most part you could say I just jumped in at the deep end. Over the course of the next 10 months, I had to learn how to swim in water that can suddenly turn thick and murky, often feeling more like quicksand—slowing your body and activities down or altogether threatening to pull you under.
There were my initial encounters with different organizations and individuals somehow associated to this larger—and largely intangible—entity commonly referred to as the “Baltimore LGBT community.” Through these encounters I quickly found out how intensely segregated this “community” is and has been for the past decades, forming clusters along Baltimore’s deeply ingrained dividing lines based on race, class, and neighborhood (see Harvey, 2001; Pietila, 2010), in addition to the gendered and sexualized circumscriptions entrenched by years of tribal identity politics and its bifurcation of ostensibly “opposing interests.” There was a lot of spite, anger, and mistrust between the many different factions claiming their own territory in this relatively small—and shrinking—city, to the point where some groups had just stopped communicating altogether, except on those few occasions when the outward representation of unity was seen as somehow beneficial to multiple parties. The invisibility of Baltimore’s LGBT Community Center and its incapacity to intervene into the ongoing impasse proved to be both a symptom and cause of the affective tensions circulating throughout the city, all of which I learnt about the hard way after I was confronted with an empty space where I was expecting to find a lively locus of activity that would serve as the setting for my fieldwork. It was the first time I would have to “regroup and strategize.” As I gradually managed to spread out and connect to different groups and organizations, composing the network that was to become my “field,” I was forced to negotiate the often-glaring differences between my new environment and the habitat/habitus I had partly carried with me overseas. Despite the tremendous generosity and warmth I received from the majority of people I interacted with, these differences—cultural, racial, sexual, gendered, class-based—would continue to inflect my work during the period of my stay. I was indeed a stranger in a foreign land, inquiring into two concepts—intimacy and citizenship—that for most of my contacts couldn’t be more disparate and whose juxtaposition frequently evoked a sense of confusion, if not indignation. Yet while my foreignness would sometimes work to my advantage, triggering feelings of hospitality and curiosity, my affiliation with Johns Hopkins mostly did not. This made it especially difficult to forge connections within the city’s African American and transgender communities, given the university’s controversial history with both 1 , and on multiple occasions people politely declined to cooperate after I told them where I worked.
And then there was the city itself. Baltimore can be a rather opaque place, a quilt-like ensemble of contiguous neighborhoods that are difficult to access without a car. Not having a car, I was regularly delivered to a public transportation system that was notoriously unreliable and patchy, making some remote and usually more impoverished areas harder to reach. Riding buses, walking, and sometimes biking, fieldwork was a time-consuming practice, whose particular mobilities nevertheless provided me with a perspective on the city that would have remained obscured had I owned a car. Baltimore does not disclose itself to strangers very easily, or rather, it makes a concerted effort to present only its razor-thin “Charm City” façade, embellished with a shiny pink and purple 2 varnish that barely conceals the widespread attrition covering large parts of the city’s west and east sides. Both the Hopkins Shuttle and the Charm City Circulator bus attempt to elide these decrepit scenes, either by rushing students through the interlacing impoverished areas on their way to the university’s Medical Campus or by simply moving tourists between the Inner Harbor and one of the limited other family-friendly attractions along a route that excludes most of the city. When taking a public bus or going for a bike ride, however, it is very hard to ignore the rough texture of Baltimore’s urban core, at the same time as you discover places that show you the surprising beauty of a city that once had so much to offer. I gradually learned that there was in fact a lot to love about Baltimore, you just had to look sideways for those lateral spaces that the city harbored almost despite itself. To help me accomplish this, to assist me in reorienting myself and get my bearings in this “urban multiple,” I decided to get a smartphone with a navigation application. In addition, I figured, such a tool would also help me to get to my fieldwork appointments on time.
Reassembling the Practice of Fieldwork
Although my initial decision to buy a smartphone was prompted by a desire to increase my geographical grip on Baltimore and alleviate the anxiety involved in finding my way in a new city, this newly acquired technological artifact began to permeate my fieldwork in ways that exceeded far beyond navigational assistance. Slowly but surely, an intimate relation of codependence emerged in which the “supplementary tool” turned out to be an indispensible component of constitutive value to the shape of my ethnographic project. Since the practice of navigation formed the start of this trajectory, I start here.
Navigation
Using my smartphone to locate particular addresses around the city and choose the most appropriate route and mode of transportation to get there was something of an experiential validation of Marshall McLuhan’s well-worn aphorism that media at once extend and amputate certain bodily sense capacities (McLuhan, 1964). While the cartographic software embedded in my smartphone provided me with easy directions and approximate arrival times, it also kept me from paying closer attention to my surroundings while traveling between fieldwork locations. Especially during the first few months, I often caught myself immersed in the digital map, following the blinking blue dot as it moved along the predesignated purple line that represented my route, vigilant not to miss my exit stop. On the one hand, this visual and tactile screen immersion thus prevented a more extensive multisensory absorption of my embodied environment, at least on a conscious level. Remembering specific routes by heart, situated within their physical geographies, was initially challenging. Yet on the other hand it also offered a different spatial visualization and imagination, folded into my embodied, social, and intimate experiences that together added to the total “feel” of the city. My smartphone acted as a compass, in a cartographic, phenomenological, and social sense; it served as a navigational medium through which I got to know the city, to sense it, as I explored its public and intimate spaces, both material and immaterial. Sometimes the digital map on my screen made Baltimore’s historic geospatial segregation intelligible while walking through the city, by visualizing the topographic contours of various public works—such as Martin Luther King Boulevard and the Interstate 83—that have throughout the years unequally distributed wealth and health along racial lines. At other times the frustrating discrepancy between the bus times indicated on my screen and the arrival of the actual buses reminded me of the seemingly incommensurable difference between the “ought” and the “is,” or the normative expectations one may have of a city and the practical realities of urban logistics—particularly when it concerns “public services” in a chronically underserved city. At all times, however, there was a growing sense of dependency on my smartphone, and a feeling of comfort while underway, trusting that it would get me to wherever I needed to be and subsequently tell me how to get back. Indeed, I really trusted my smartphone, which created a strange and strangely intimate “object-oriented dependency.”
Voice-Recording
After downloading one of the many voice-recording applications available, my smartphone also became integrated into the interview process. Acting as a medium between my interlocutor and me, its presence was often a bit awkward at first, imposing itself on the interpersonal space I was attempting to cultivate. As it laid there on the table or couch, with its big red “START/STOP” button conspicuously attracting attention to itself, it usually evoked a brief conversation about mobile phones or how the application functioned. On occasions when I noticed that people felt uneasy in the interview setting, I invited them to initiate the “official” interview by pressing the red button on the touch screen, thereby giving them a sense of control over the proceedings in terms of its temporal delineation. Once the interview was started the screen quickly turned dark and the phone would withdraw into the background, unobtrusively recording our exchange. In addition to acting as a somewhat awkward icebreaker prior to the recorded interview, my smartphone would on other occasions provoke a more sustained reflection on the effect of new media technology on gay gathering spaces, particularly when I interviewed older participants. In these cases, it simultaneously performed multiple actions as it induced, conduced, and recorded our conversation. For a number of older gay men, the phone/recorder positioned in the space between us became a target-object of lament over the waning of social life in gay bars, as well as the demise of gay bars in general. They argued that people hardly talk to strangers in bars anymore, instead compulsively staring at their screens—the newly coveted locus of social and intimate sociality. Whereas bars used to be the prime setting for meeting friends or picking up a guy, these men now felt alienated in their former hangouts, where the cigarette smoke had cleared up to make way for the ubiquitous cell phone. And bars were simply a lot emptier these days, they continued, because young guys meet each other online rather than actually going out to arrange a hookup. Many gay bars in Baltimore had to close their doors over the last few years and my interlocutors contributed this to the rise of social media as much as the economic recession. Regardless of the “truth value” of their claims, these reflections illustrate a profound generational gap in Baltimore’s gay community, whose mundane intricacies and contested grounds became intelligible to me through my smartphone. It was this technological object, rather than my intention or interview technique, that elicited and saved these stories.
After uploading the audio files to my laptop by transmitting the dematerialized data via my wireless internet connection, they quickly rematerialized as I listened back to the interviews: listening to these conversations returned me to their sociomaterial settings, to the particular private or public space where we sat down to talk, or alternatively kept walking or driving. The “disembodied” voices, reconfigured and spatialized into a horizontal sequence by the interface of my transcription program, induced multisensory memories that resituated these voices in the environments from where they emerged and where they left a visceral trace that stretches forward in time, mediated/translated by the various digital technologies mobilized in the fieldwork process. Listening back to the interviews also reminded me of unexpected, accidental interruptions, for instance when an incoming call would suddenly turn my voice recorder into a phone again, disturbing the flow of the conversation, and returning the previously withdrawn technology to the center of attention. On occasions like these, I was made painfully aware that the schizophrenic character of my smartphone could at times be a liability as much as an opportunity.
Collecting Photos and Videos
Like the audio files, the photos and videos that I collected using my smartphone on various fieldwork locations functioned as “digital memory objects” (Van Dijck, 2007), which I carried with me on my phone and laptop. These objects played a crucial role in retroactively making available to me some of the atmospheric textures and affects that permeated the scenes I had witnessed and contributed to. Moreover, like the audio files, the experience of these remediated scenes was not restricted to one sense modality—that is, audition for the audio files or vision for the photos—but encompassed multiple interrelated sense registers. When analyzing a video I had made at a drag king show a few months earlier, I did not only see and hear the crowd, the performers, and the music, but also I could “re-feel” the excitement surging through the club and came very close to conjuring some of the smells that accompanied the performances. During the show, I was one of many audience members who used their mobile phones to take pictures or shoot videos, which allowed me to blend in with the rest of the crowd. But the use of my smartphone not only provided me with a means of camouflage, but it also proved to be conducive for social ends. On different occasions, people came up to me and asked to see the pictures I had made, wanting to know if I cared to share them, via email, MMS, or Bluetooth. This act of sharing (when possible and appropriate) was often a convenient entry into a conversation, which sometimes led to the recruitment of new interview participants or a gateway into social circles I had not yet reached. At the same time, however, it should be noted that these forms of technologically mediated camouflage and sociality only took place in socioeconomic environments where disposable income could be spent on gadgets such as camera phones. In other locations, my smartphone drew more—and a different kind of—attention on me, and this sense of conspicuousness attuned me to the class-based fissures I had to navigate.
Taking Notes
The “notes” function on my smartphone helped me to gather and translate my thoughts and feelings pertaining to a particular scene, person, or object into quick lines of text, entered with two thumbs tapping away on my touch screen notepad, often while in transit. Whether it was due to a sudden burst of inspiration or a professional sense of obligation, I accumulated an elaborate set of notations that together formed a string of fragmented ideas, quotes, ruminations, open-ended lists, schematized plans for future research activities, incoherent drivel, (short-lived) epiphanies, and makeshift diary entries. In comparison to a physical notepad, which I also used on occasion, the digital version was more portable—I could put it in any pocket instead of needing a bag to carry it—as well as being open to constant modulation without leaving a trace of crossed-out writings. Aside from producing a continuously augmented collection of mobile memory objects to be juxtaposed with other materials in future data analyses, the activity of taking notes on my smartphone proved to be another convenient form of camouflage that allowed me to blend in with other patrons during fieldwork visits to bars, clubs, or other dense locations of sociality—technologically mediated or otherwise. It was a good way to occupy myself and look occupied when I attended events alone, especially during the first months of my fieldwork, giving me a sense of posture and alleviating the initial awkwardness of trying to get your bearings in new social spaces. Unlike the sociality afforded by sharing photos, however, writing notes on my phone at times tended to isolate me from my environment. This was not only due to a level of introspection inherent in the act of writing, but also had to do with the proximity of other applications on the same device: once I had my phone in my hand I was inclined to quickly check my email or read the news, distracting me from the fieldwork I was supposed to be conducting. Once again my smartphone turned out to be as much of a disruptive force as it was a technology for connection and mediation.
Calling
Telephone conversations are a highly particular mode of communication and when conducting fieldwork it is crucial to know, or rather, sense, when to contact someone by phone or through some other communication technology. Like taking notes or photos, making a phone call is a form of collecting or assembling: it is a technology of creating and augmenting a dynamic network of associations that together constitute “the field.” Yet again, it is only one technology among others and as a researcher one has to become attuned to the specific affordances a phone call makes available in different situations and for different objectives. Compared to communication via email or text message, a phone conversation is a much more intimate affair due to the sonority of the singular voice that enters one’s ear, generating a virtual and visceral proximity that demands a level of instant reciprocity not found in textual communication. For this very reason, a stranger’s phone call can be felt as intrusive, especially when the call is made to people’s personal cell phones. This is why I usually started out by contacting potential participants via email, allowing them to formulate a response in their own time. When they didn’t respond to my emails, or when they didn’t respond quickly enough, I would call them and often this swiftly resulted in some form of commitment to cooperate and a scheduled face-to-face meeting. Despite this noticeable advantage of phone conversations over email, I nevertheless remained hesitant to call people I wasn’t familiar with beforehand. The truth is that phone calls made me feel self-consciously anxious and vulnerable. Since English isn’t my native language and talking over the phone amplifies and intensifies the function of speech, including all its idiosyncratic aberrations such as accents and grammatical errors, the auditive intimacy of phone conversations was often an unnerving experience that I preferably avoided until I had met the person face-to-face. At least then my speech could blend in with my other foreign features. Once I had acquainted people, however, phone calls became increasingly crucial modes of establishing enduring relationships. The sociomaterial networks that make up “the field” are never stable and therefore can never be taken for granted, instead requiring constant cultivation and reconnection. Conversations initiated with my smartphone proved to be invaluable in this process, because of their mobility—at least on my end—and capacity to aurally “touch from a distance.”
Texting
In terms of their sense of immediacy and invasiveness, text messages fall somewhere in the middle between an email and a phone call. Also known as SMS—from “short message-service”—the brevity and compactness of a text message, together with its mobility, made it the preferred medium for impromptu organizational and logistic tasks such as scheduling meetings, reminding participants of these meetings, or informing them when I was running late. On other occasions, I received text messages containing last-minute cancellations. Depending on how far I had travelled or how long I was waiting, these cancellations induced a range of negative affects in me, from disappointment and doubt to mistrust and frustration, which would sometimes strangely stick to my phone, materialized as “bad memory objects” in my inbox until I finally deleted the messages. Texting was also great for quick check ups, to see how someone was doing and to let them know that I was thinking of them. It offered a mode of affect transmission that was as low key and convenient as it was powerful, allowing for the circulation of little digital gift objects that could be opened and reciprocated whenever someone felt like it. That these objects can be subtle—or not so subtle—transducers of intimacy that stretch the boundaries between “professional” and “private” spheres, in addition to complicating the contours of “the field,” is something I was forced to acknowledge when I received some flirtatious text messages from one participant while I was visiting family back in the Netherlands. Being woken up in the middle of the night by my phone and having to think of ways to respectfully navigate his invitations and intimations sensitized me to the uncertain and flexible geographies of fieldwork, when one effectively and affectively carries “the field” around in one’s pocket at any given time or place. Was I a researcher that moment when my phone woke me up and I read his candle light dinner invitation? Did I really leave the field behind in Baltimore when my plane took off? Was I working right then and there? It is hard to tell, really, and this is due to the deeply distributed nature of this thing called “the field,” which is assembled and composed over time and consequently inserts itself into various kinds of spatially and temporally dispersed yet interconnected objects—both material, such as a text message, and immaterial, such as a feeling or a concept. Some of these objects may very well permeate times and spaces that are regularly regarded as belonging to the realm of the “personal” rather than the “professional,” yet profoundly affected my position as a researcher who is simultaneously—obviously—always more than that. This particular participant certainly did not think of me as a researcher when he sent his text messages, or was at least willing to move beyond this professional identity as his sole frame of reference for thinking about what our relationship might entail. In short, these text messages formed intimate “object lessons” that not only reminded me of the volatility of the boundaries that constitute “the field” but also taught me about the precarious situations and ambiguous responsibilities that are integral to the affective labor of ethnographic research, a form of labor that itself does not adhere to strict circumscriptions of time or space (Hardt, 1999).
Rearranging Methodological Procedures
At this point, it is important to reiterate that the fieldwork activities discussed separately above were in effect all integrated into one object-assemblage that organized a heterogeneous set of technosocial practices, artifacts, and research methods in a very specific way. I choose the term “object-assemblage” to characterize the smartphone in order to indicate its simultaneous unity and multiplicity. While the smartphone is a singular—albeit highly networked—object designed to elicit an intuitive experience of smooth transitions between parts that together constitute a seamless whole, it is also an assemblage in two different senses: it is made up of a variety of different software and hardware components (its “endogenous” constitution); and its primary operation is the assembly and organization of materials and connections (its “exogenous” constitution) 3 . It is this second sense, assemblage as process of composition, which is central to my methodological concerns. Moreover, as will have become evident in the previous pages, my smartphone informed and connected all stages of my research project, from the first attempts to acquaint myself with Baltimore and its LGBT communities, through the various forms of data collection and analysis, to the writing phase in which I currently find myself. In this section, I address some methodological corollaries attached to this pervasive “assembling power” of my smartphone, especially in terms of how it has rearranged the situated affects and intimacies immanent to ethnographic fieldwork methods such as participant observation and interviewing. For the sake of clarity I have condensed my argument into five themes that have partly been abstracted from the discussion in the previous section, each capturing a specific way in which my smartphone has affected my project’s methodological profile by inserting itself into the everyday planning and execution of concrete research methods and their contiguous activities.
Alignment
Whether in the form of making phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, or taking notes, my smartphone assisted me with aligning the different rhythms, trajectories, and life worlds of (potential) participants as they intersected with my project’s own shifting coordinates. When conducting what is traditionally called “participant observation,” one actually has to negotiate a multiplicity of actors and environments that each has its own characteristics in terms of habit, tempo, history, accessibility, scale, and complexity, to name a but a few. This results in a considerable amount of logistical and affective labor that takes up most of the initial research agenda, to such an extent that something like “observation” often seems like a minor activity on the daily “to do” list—if it adequately represents the process of ethnographic knowledge production at all. Rather, the practice of alignment, or calibration, is a much more crucial and omnipresent aspect of ethnographic fieldwork, understood as a progressive but always tentative attempt at translating intimate experience and embodied knowledge into a sustained account of a particular social scene. In order for such an account to obtain a sense of consistency and coherence, much of the logistical and affective labor of fieldwork must be geared toward an alignment of the multiple currents and cadences that constitute the research field, which effectively means learning to maneuver, order, and respond to the diverse challenges that come up along the way. In my own project these challenges came from different angles and in different shapes, ranging from intimate invitations to cultural difference and limited mobility. My smartphone mediated these challenges, making them intelligible in a specific way through the assembly and juxtaposition of their respective frames of reference in one device.
It also aligned, or often failed to align, my “personal” and “professional” lives. My smartphone was one of the primary locations where these two spheres touched, converged, and at times collided. Or rather, it was a hybrid space harboring multiple locations such as my contact address list, photo folder, text message inbox, and notepad, all of which contained information or materials associated with both “work”—and “nonwork”—related environments. Yet as illustrated earlier by the text message example, my smartphone also sensitized me to the contingency of what is generally called “the field” and the concomitant forms of affective labor circulating through its leaky premises. If it turned out that “the personal” and “the professional” were difficult to align and order within the digital infrastructure of my phone—and it did—this manifested the fallacy of the presumption that these were properly separable spheres to begin with. Just as the challenges of “the field” were crystallized in the smartphone apparatus, the necessities, and interests of my “personal” life were likewise routed through its interconnected locales. But how much of my fieldwork wasn’t thoroughly personal? And how much work did it take to cultivate “a personal life” here in Baltimore? And again, how much of this life—its leisure, its pleasures—was spent in locales also designated as “research field”? Ethnography is a messy and uneven practice, and despite its formidable capacities for assembly, organization, and alignment, my smartphone couldn’t contain this constitutive excess.
Proximity/Distance
Like the prosthetic practice of alignment, the technologically mediated management of spatial and temporal forms of relative proximity or distance to my sociomaterial surroundings disclosed a field of tensions that required continual navigation. Depending on the particular application I mobilized and how I used it, I habitually employed my smartphone as a tool to forge closeness and to keep distance; to draw things together (assemble) and to withdraw from others. To increase the sense of social proximity, I would call participants or send them a text message or email to check in and ask how they were doing. On other occasions I would share photos as a means of generating casual social exchange, an icebreaker of sorts. Yet in different situations my phone became enrolled in attempts to withdraw from people or situations, as the “camouflage” examples above have illustrated. These modulations of social proximity and distance were not only affectively charged but also formed a primary site for the negotiation of power relations between myself and various other actors in the field. Everyday decisions concerning the proper way to approach someone or the amount of distance to keep from certain participants—decisions that were thoroughly mediated by my smartphone—affected how much leverage I had with these persons and their affiliated collectives, at the same time as they modified my vulnerability toward them.
Aside from mediating social and affective proximities/distances during the process of “data collection,” with its own specific spatiotemporal problematics (e.g., how long before I call this person again?), my phone configured another temporal relation of relative proximity or distance to my field during analyses of the collected materials. This relation was rooted in memory, or rather in mediated memories (Van Dijck, 2007). As previously discussed, “digital memory objects” like the audio files, photos, and videos stored and organized on my smartphone—and subsequently transported to my laptop—allowed me to affectively reengage with the fieldwork experiences and events during which these objects were collected. Evoking multisensory memories, they intensified the virtual proximity of these past experiences by protracting them into the future-present of their moment of recollection. This process of temporal contraction thereby also amplified the tensions inherent to the methodologically shaky delineation between phases of “data collection” and “data analysis” in ethnographic research.
Finally, it is worth to briefly consider my increasing emotional proximity to my smartphone. One could even say that I developed an intimate relationship with my phone to the same extent as I cultivated intimate connections through it. Given that it progressively arranged more and more of my thoughts, schedule, rhythm, memories, relationships, and coordination, I grew attached to this peculiar device in equal measures. And with attachment came trust and a sense of dependency. Over time I delegated a significant amount of work—affective or otherwise—to my phone, which has both enabled me to perform my role as a researcher and imported certain parameters in terms of the shape, duration, and texture of my project. Out of need as much as habit I have grown accustomed to, and indeed dependent on, this condition, resulting in a number of occasions when I got viscerally upset after it somehow betrayed my trust (see “Accidents” below). Whereas I initially acquired a smartphone to bridge distances and become less vulnerable, in a way my very proximity to this technology ironically enough also heightened the level of risk to which I was exposed—in my research and beyond.
Tracing
Affective labor is immaterial labor and therefore difficult to objectify, quantify, or circumscribe. It tends instead to circulate between people and permeate spaces, cultivating relationships and atmospheres that are conducive to the creation of value (Terranova, 2000). While the ethnographer does not capitalize on this value in the way corporations do—that is, extracting monetary profit from the “surplus value” of affective networks—s/he does aim to benefit from valuable currencies such as reciprocity and trust. Without these crucial yet precarious modes of relationality, after all, no sustained ethnographic account can be produced. By mediating, translating, and organizing these relational modes, a smartphone materializes their otherwise immaterial constitution, modulating their consistency and visualizing the multiple trajectories of affective labor invested in their creation and maintenance. In other words, a smartphone makes these processes traceable. Whenever I used my phone to conduct fieldwork, I followed and left traces everywhere: I followed routes on my digital map while navigating my way around the city, which I could later retrace; I shot photos and videos as visual traces of events and people, which could subsequently be traced back to their exact place of production through their geospatial coordinates (courtesy of Google); my calls and text messages to (potential) participants left their traces in the outboxes and “sent” folders of my phone, while received and missed calls could be retrieved in its inbox and on the voicemail server; the interviews I conducted were translated into audio files that conveniently inscribed these conversations with traceable information about their temporal coordinates and duration. Thus, my smartphone both informed and recorded my research process as I traced and initiated the associations that made up the intersecting socioaffective networks of “the field” (Latour, 2005), effectively mapping the mutating contours of my ethnographic project by assembling the digital/material/affective traces I left along the way.
Ethics
But when all my activities and interactions become so easily traceable, what kinds of tension does this introduce in relation to ethical research practice and conceptions of “confidentiality” or “anonymity,” especially in relation to the research intimacies mentioned above? While a comprehensive discussion of the ethical repercussions of incorporating a smartphone in ethnographic research is beyond the scope of this article, I would nevertheless like to briefly touch upon one potential concern. The issues that arise are to a certain extent all problems of “data mobilities”: as more materials become digitized they are liable to travel faster and more frequently—digital materials travel “lighter”—as well as becoming more easily translatable into other formats, with the latter essentially supporting the former. Given this situation, ethical research practice is increasingly concerned with the careful scrutiny and delineation of data mobilities, in the sense of managing the distribution and storage of fieldwork data and the traces they leave. This is necessarily a highly situated and iterative process that cannot be orchestrated in advance of the actual collection and archiving of the materials, yet certain provisional benchmarks may be set in advance. One such benchmark could be usefully derived from Nissenbaum’s conception of privacy as “contextual integrity” (Nissenbaum, 2004), in which privacy—as well as the related notions of confidentiality and anonymity—is negotiated and valued by “norms of information flow” that are highly dependent on specific spheres of everyday life, each governed by more or less circumscribed and explicit regulations (p. 119). As people move in and out of these different realms they enter and leave distinct normative environments, which assume or prescribe “key aspects such as roles, expectations, behaviors, and limits” (p. 120). Importantly, these “key aspects” mentioned by Nissenbaum are formative of the recurring research intimacies I encountered as I navigated the plurality of situations and “contexts” that made up my field. Yet when these intimacies are subsequently assembled and translated into fieldwork data, they may, once archived, no longer adequately adhere to the contextual “norms of information flow” from which they were abstracted, which returns us to the need to formulate a benchmark for managing the distribution and storage of research materials in a situation of digitally enhanced data mobility. In my own practice, I have tried to apply the idea of privacy as contextual integrity as a guiding principle when organizing and compartmentalizing digital fieldwork materials on my smartphone and my laptop. Although often an experimental process that was necessarily augmented by more straightforward measures such as encryption and password protection, it encouraged me to create and maintain distinct spheres in my archives that roughly corresponded to the spheres in which the materials were collected, as well as increasing my awareness of the traces these materials leave when moved around between archives.
Accidents
Things never go as hoped or planned and accidents always occur, especially during fieldwork that traverses different complex and unfamiliar spaces (see also Kien, 2009). In general, my smartphone helped me to adapt to these circumstances more quickly, as I have discussed, but aside from simultaneously facilitating new ways to engage with my environment and setting the parameters for this engagement, it also failed me on several occasions. These accidents took on many shapes and while some could be explained and/or ameliorated, others proved to be more enigmatic events. All, however, contributed to the shape of my fieldwork activities and thereby became constitutive elements of my developing methodological infrastructure. I have already recounted how an incoming call would suddenly revert my voice recorder back into a phone, temporarily disrupting the interview I was conducting, but these minor accidents were marginal compared to other mishaps that more severely impacted the course of my project. For instance, I have had to end and reschedule two interviews after my phone’s battery died midway the conversation, of which one eventually fell through. While this meant the foreclosure of an opportunity to conduct a potentially valuable interview, I also lost the audio files of two completed interviews before I could transfer them to my laptop. What happened will most likely remain unclear and although I probably didn’t save the files correctly these incidents bruised the trust I had invested in my smartphone, which unexpectedly felt like an opaque, impenetrable object; some kind of black hole that had mysteriously absorbed the interview files without, this time, leaving a trace. I lost several photos and videos in a similarly inexplicable way and together with other incidents, such as arriving late for fieldwork appointments due to incorrect navigational information or accidentally “pocket dialing” participants late at night, these events disclosed the extent to which the mobilization of smartphone technology not only contributes to the organization and durability of ethnographic research but also introduces an intensified level of contingency and disorder to daily research scenes and practices. My smartphone made my work messier on multiple occasions, although it also assisted in provisionally “cleaning up” this mess by enabling me to recompose my activities in the wake of one of these accidents. As an assemblage of “folds and detours, layers and reversals, compilations and re-orderings” (Latour, 2002, p. 251), a smartphone is a fundamentally nontransparent object despite the fact that many of its achievements pertain to an increased visibility and grasp of the environments in which it is enrolled. But just when this grasp tends to shift the research process in a more habitual or comfortable gear, smartphone technology inserts what Latour has called “the slight surprise of action” into fieldwork activities. Unexpected deviations from my planned trajectory forced me to adjust to a new situation by recalibrating the earlier intentions, objectives, and expectations that populated my methodological framework (Latour, 1999).
Reconfiguring Qualitative Knowledge Production
Of course the “folds and detours” introduced by smartphone technology are not only expressed in the accidents recounted above. In fact, what I have tried to do throughout this article is generate a mode of reflexive attunement to the abundant ways in which my smartphone has (in)consistently modulated, folded, and translated my ethnographic fieldwork practice. I have been particularly concerned with the intimate logistics and affective permutations of this practice, foregrounding how processes of technological mediation conduce and inflect the “structures of feeling”—to use Raymond Williams’ terminology—that are integral to the labor of composing one’s research “field.” This finally brings me to an assessment of the relationship between knowledge production, research intimacies, and smartphone technology, for which I return to Sarah Pink’s work on sensory ethnography. Pink (2009, p. 23) outlines a set of principles for sensory ethnography, based around five themes: perception, place, knowing, memory, and imagination. Instead of discussing the principles she puts forward—but taking into account the argument she develops—I would like to employ four of these themes in my own evaluation of the ways in which mobile technologies such as my smartphone inform qualitative knowledge production in specific relation to intimate research practices.
In a slightly schematic way, we could say that perception, place, memory, and imagination are the constitutive components of qualitative knowledge production, ethnographic or otherwise, in that all are crucially thought provoking: they incite and direct our thinking about the worlds we investigate and thereby shape how we come to know these worlds and the people who inhabit them—each with their own singular and collective ways of perceiving, remembering, imagining, and making sense of place. Conversely, as our knowledge of these worlds accumulates and changes so do our experiences of their places and spaces, including the perceptions, memories, and imaginaries that attach us to them. This recursive process is interlaced with and composed of intimate and multisensory events and encounters, as Pink and the contributors to the special issue of History of the Human Sciences have so eloquently argued. What I want to stress here, in turn, is how these interrelated components engaged in the process of qualitative knowledge production are all subtly yet radically reconfigured when an increasing amount of the affective labor involved in ethnographic research is rerouted through, or delegated to, a technological object-assemblage such as a smartphone. Accordingly, this reconfiguration does not only have methodological repercussions, as we have already seen, but also raises a closely related epistemological question about the nature or “consistency” of the knowledge that is produced: what does this knowledge consist of and how does it acquire its specific textural features?
Let us first look at how the four interrelated components of qualitative knowledge production are reconfigured by the incorporation of smartphone technology into fieldwork activities. While any effort at knowledge production makes use of abstraction and translation in order to make the world around us both comprehensible and manageable—that is, through the use of metaphors or an experimental setting (Latour, 1999)—the abstractions and translations afforded by a smartphone of the type I used enable a particular ordering of the sociomaterial environment that I have described above as the contiguous processes of alignment, drawing together/withdrawing, and tracing. In terms of perception, the previous sections have discussed how these processes mediated my encounters with (potential) participants and unfamiliar social scenes via phone calls, text messages, or photos and thus informed how I perceived the actors and networks that made up my research field. The most important way in which my smartphone accomplished this was through “emplacement,” or the way that it attuned me to the particular affective and material “sensoriality of the environment” constitutive of a sense of place (Pink, 2009, p. 25). Whenever I was occupied with aligning the different rhythms and requests of participants, or finding my way around the city, my abstract and concrete experience of place was effectively filtered through my phone. Next to perception and place, memory and imagination are also reconfigured through the interlaced processes of alignment, drawing together/withdrawing, and tracing. In the case of memory, I have already recounted how digital memory objects like audio files, videos, or notes contracted the temporal distance between the process of “data analysis” and the moments in which the analyzed materials were collected, but they also converged with the embodied memories I had of these events. As such, this distributed, technomnemonic practice of recollection and interpretation ingressed into my eventual accounts of my fieldwork experiences and thus into the production of ethnographic knowledge. It is more difficult to clearly identify how the abstractions and translations enacted by my smartphone affected the role of imagination in my research project, perhaps because it might be the least concretely locatable in the sense that it tends to blend in with other components like perception or memory. Yet just like the most striking quality of our imagination is its capacity for “transduction,” or the “knotting together of diverse realities” (Mackenzie, 2002, p. 13), smartphones are object-assemblages that similarly connect, fold, and juxtapose different spatial and temporal realities in one technological device, whether they are differentiated formally, technically, visually, practically, or experientially. In this way, we can conceive of the smartphone as “tweaking,” or amending, the transductive practice of the embodied imagination by adding to it a constantly mutating technical infrastructure with its own way of ordering heterogeneous realities, which can be understood as its own ontological grammar.
It is exactly this matter of ontology that leads us back to the epistemological question raised above: what happens to the consistency, or texture, of ethnographic knowledge when the methods by which it is produced have been structured by smartphone technology? The answer has been formulated in different ways throughout the article, so I will merely rephrase it here. As already indicated by the term “knowledge production,” knowledge is made; it comes to life through a multisensory process of fabrication, assemblage, and invention that is contingent upon the sociomaterial realities in which this process takes place. This is necessarily a technical affair that requires abstraction and translation as tools with which to decompose, transport, and then recompose parts of the often intimate, ephemeral, and affectively dense realities that ethnography eventually aims to (re)enact (Law & Urry, 2004). Smartphone technology makes this trajectory more consistent and durable, at the same time as it introduces new inconsistencies and insecurities, generating a body of qualitative knowledge whose complex texture can occasionally feel excessive, confusing, or redundant due to the sheer heterogeneity of the subject matters and “forms of knowing” assembled and compressed into one device. At the same time, however, it is this very “assembling power” of my smartphone that has enabled me to turn this epistemological ambiguity into a productive force by facilitating unexpected associations and juxtapositions that pushed me to (make) sense (of) difference and alterity.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jane Bennett for her invaluable comments and advice, as well as her ongoing support and friendship. Many thanks are also due to Sally Wyatt, whom I owe so much.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was enabled by a Rubicon grant, awarded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).