Notes on Technology Devices in Research: Negotiating Field Boundaries and Relationships

Introduction

Social and mobile media technologies are significantly transforming the possibilities for conducting social research. The incorporation of these technologies into fieldwork activities implies a convergence of various media forms, methods, and technological artifacts. This convergence is shaping the way researchers are composing and navigating their “fields”; collecting, storing, and analyzing data; and making sense of and communicating insights from the field (van Doorn, 2013). There is a growing body of work on how digitally mediated contexts, objects, tools, and new modes of research are transforming the everyday practices and experiences of researchers who conduct ethnographic research (Baker, 2013; Baym & Markham, 2009; Beaulieu & Estalella, 2012; Burrell, 2009; Hine, 2015; A. Markham & Stavrova, 2016; Murthy, 2008; Pink et al., 2015; van Doorn, 2013). Digital cameras on smartphones can provide ultra sharp images and video of ethnographic sites and enable not only the recording of interviews and research sites but also the possibility of webcams and videoconferencing. Researchers can meet and “friend” potential participants on social networking sites, chat with them, and read their status updates.

The aim of this article is to explore how emerging digital technologies can shape and configure ethnographic fieldwork and the everyday practices of research in digitally mediated contexts. We use our reflections on some incidents that we encountered during past research experiences to illustrate some conceptual and practical tensions and challenges involved in conducting ethnographic fieldwork on and with social and mobile media. Social and mobile media are remaking ethnographic fieldwork practices by bringing relationships and interactions from different spheres of everyday life into closer proximity (Bengtsson, 2014). We discuss the role these media play in structuring and aligning our fieldwork activities and the proximities and intimacies constitute our experience of fieldwork. We examine the forms of affective labor involved in managing disparate social worlds and the rhythms and cadences of fieldwork encounters.

The experiences that we reflect on in this article were drawn from our earlier academic careers. At that time, Mainsah was conducting a digital ethnography of diaspora youth in Norway and identity expressions on social networking sites. Prøitz was studying the cultural practices of mobile phone use among Norwegian youth. However, our analysis is based on reflections that we engaged in during the period prior to the writing of this article, where we have been looking back at our previous work, sharing stories, and finding ways to frame the meaning of our ethnographic fieldwork practices on and with social and mobile media. We did this using a collective autoethnographic approach (Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez, 2013) that combines autobiographic self-reflection, the contextualized cultural interpretation of ethnography, and the multisubjectivity of collaborative memory work.

Digital Cultures of Intimacy

As both a symbol and a set of practices, social and mobile media cultures offer a powerful illustration of the complicated nature of contemporary forms of intimacy (Hjorth & Lim, 2012; Prøitz, Hjorth, & Lasen, 2017). Mobile media and technologies are reconfiguring human and nonhuman relationship, and bringing new forms of embodied, sensory, and emotional engagement. Contemporary forms of intimacy and mobility are embodied in digital media practices in which work and leisure, and public and private distinctions are increasingly blurred. The blurring of the private and the public means that personal life is increasingly available for public interaction, and personal data become part of aggregated databases. Hjorth and Lim (2012) argue that contemporary social mobile media cultures prompt a shift in the way intimacy is understood and practiced. In this regard, intimacy has taken on new “geo-imaginaries,” meaning that intimacy is no longer a “private” activity but rather a pivotal component of what can be considered as part of what constitutes public sphere performativity.

Fraser and Puwar (2008) have highlighted the range of intimacies that researchers encounter, navigate, and invent during the process of research. These intimacies that researchers experience that include aspects such as rhythm, smell, sense, tension, and pleasure that play a role in the production of what subsequently becomes research data remain largely out of discussions. They argue that the intimacies afforded by research materials and activities that inform the making of knowledge are yet to be fully addressed in debates on methods and methodology.

Blurred Boundaries

The social media scholar, danah boyd (2010) argues that the current era of digital technologies is characterized by a distinct set of affordances and dynamics. These include persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability of information. To this list of affordances can be added the characteristic of sharability (Papacharissi & Yuan, 2011). Persistence refers to the fact that content created by digital social networks and devices remains available beyond the moment that it is created. Even after being deleted, the content may have spread and may be stored and potentially altered, in a variety of physical and digital locations. Scalability refers to the fact that users often share this content with large and potentially diverse audiences, who, in turn, can further share it with their own networks, thereby expanding its reach far beyond the local interaction situation. Searchability refers to the fact that it is stored on servers and becomes available again, when someone types matching key terms into a search engine. Sharability implies the tendency of digital social network infrastructures to encourage users to share, as opposed to withholding information (Davis & Jurgenson, 2014).

Social media often overlap with mobile platforms, as mobile devices integrate practices such as phone calls and SMS texting with checking email or Facebook. Users can now fit online activities into little gaps throughout the day, thereby stretching and contracting experiences of time (Kraemer, 2016). Social and mobile media make it possible for users to switch rapidly between conversations and contexts. However, this might sometimes lead to “context collapse” (Marwick & Boyd, 2011), a situation in which people, information, and norms from one social world impinge on another. In some cases, this happens by default, through the affordances of a particular medium, while in others, social actors intentionally collapse, blur, and flatten, using the affordances of social media. Context collapse can thus be distinguished between two types, “context collisions” and “context collusions” (Davis & Jurgenson, 2014). Context collusions can occur when users purposefully and intentionally bring together various contexts and their related networks. Users who understand the porous boundaries of many social media platforms actively and intentionally invite various contexts and networks to, for example, witness status updates, photos, and public exchanges. Context collisions can occur in situations in which contexts come together without the knowledge or desire on the part of the actor, often with turbulent or chaotic consequences. This illustrates Hjorth and Lim’s (2012) observation that in this age of affective media, we traverse different types of mobilities and intimacies, where some are chosen; others are forced, while many involve negotiations between the two.

Digital technologies have restructured the space of interactions between researchers conducting ethnographic research in online settings and their participants (Bengtsson, 2014; Christensen, Johnson, Turner, & Christensen, 2011). Being at several locations at the same time, cutting across different time zones instantly, and socializing simultaneously with people in different cultural contexts are mundane and familiar aspects of modern media and society that have been intensified by digital media (Bengtsson, 2014; Meyrowitz, 1985). Social networking sites such as Facebook, for example, are designed to bring audiences together to form network publics with affordances that enhance the persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability of users’ performances (boyd, 2010).

When doing research in a mediated setting, the “contiguity of settings” challenges the distinction between the personal and the professional, or distinctions between “being in the field” and “being out of the field.” Beaulieu and Estalella (2012) describe the experience of fieldwork in such contexts:

Home and field intermingle as research practices become contiguous with other settings. Interviewees “look up your site” and gather information bout your professional and even non-professional identity; friends and family are aware of what you are doing and can jump at any time into your field (leaving a comment on your blog); informants can be found at any moment in the everyday life of the researcher. (p. 8)

As the above quote indicates, conducting ethnographic work in contexts, which mediated interaction plays, an important role, can be a messy process.

In what follows, we present two vignettes that each of us wrote to explore the intimate textures of our fieldwork experiences. Vignettes are vivid portrayals of specific events encountered by researchers during fieldwork written to enhance the contextual richness of ethnographic research (Humphreys, 2005). The process of writing the vignettes served as a means for us to relive each other’s fieldwork experiences and to engage in self and collective analysis. In this article, they serve as a narrative device that invites the reader to “taste the flavour” (Humphreys, 2005, p. 842) of crucial junctures of our fieldwork experiences.

Mainsah’s Story: Relating on Facebook

I recruited the participant, whom I shall call Mariam, on MySpace when I was doing research on how Norwegian youth in urban multicultural environments presented themselves on social networking sites. She was 20 years old then. Mariam was one of several Norwegian youth I went on to interact with on different social networking sites such as MySpace and Hi5, and later on Facebook and other physical locations as well. I had regular chats with Mariam for a while and I conducted a series of interviews with her through Instant Messaging (IM).

Then all my research participants “migrated” to Facebook, as it became increasingly popular in Norway. The decision to follow the participants in my research on Facebook was a significant one.

Features such as the Facebook News Feed, which show the activities of one’s friends, can make visible relationships from different spheres of user’s lives. Initially, I had considered creating a separate Facebook account for my research so as to be able to create a space for my research separate from my other personal and work connections. Alternatively, even while using the same Facebook account, I could also have restricted Mariam’s access parts of my personal networks. I realized that letting her to have full access to my profile was necessary in order to build a rapport of trust between us. This meant that she could see on my profile who my friends and work colleagues were, and what private interests I had, based on what I posted.

The fact that we were Facebook friends meant that it was not only I who had access to her profile. She also had access to mine. Having research participants as friends meant that I had created a new audience for my Facebook profile. Being aware that participants like Mariam could check my profile at any time and get information about my personal life obliged me to always mindful of my personal and professional Facebook network audiences when composing its content. Whenever I had to post something that I knew would appear on my News Feed, I had to think carefully about whether or not I wanted my research participants to see it. I made sure it was nothing too personal.

The timing and the rhythm of my interactions with Mariam were sometimes uneven and unpredictable. Once we were in the middle of an interview chat session and she suddenly stopped replying to my messages. The next day I received a message from her saying “hi, I am so sorry about yesterday. My Internet suddenly switched off and I did not know how else to contact you.” At other times, she would initiate a conversation late in the night when I would be sitting on my sofa relaxing after a long working day. Since I had to use every opportunity I could get, I would be forced to switch into research mode.

I felt that Mariam considered our relationship as more than simply that of participant and researcher. She has, like my other Facebook friends, occasionally left birthday messages on my wall, for example. Sometimes, when I went for a longtime without contacting her, she would leave a message on my wall asking about the progress of my project, how I have been, and wishing all my loved ones and me well. When she wanted to go study abroad, she sent me a message on Facebook about that, and hoped we stayed in touch. The relationship that I had formed with Mariam had meaning to her separate from my research project. I too felt the same.

Prøitz’s Story: The Accident

“I am just longing to be w you, kiss you and caress you, will u come over tonight? <3.” This is what was contained in a text message that I had meant to send to my new partner, but which I accidentally sent to a research participant. This happened during a period when I was doing research, in October 2001. I had received a scholarship from the Norwegian phone company Telenor. I was assigned to write a master thesis on young people, gender, and text messages. I bought my first mobile phone that day, a Nokia 7110. From having expressed clear opposition to get myself a mobile telephone, I became entirely devoted to it from Day 1. I instantly experienced new ways to “be intimate” with my girlfriend Torill that I was madly in love with and physically distanced from. Simultaneously with sending flirtatious messages to Torill, I was coordinating my fieldwork with one of my 15 year old informants Tove whom I was to meet later that afternoon. The text message “I am just longing to be w you, kiss you and caress you, will u come over tonight? <3” was meant for Torill, but I sent it to Tove by accident.

Although my mobile phone was equipped with an early version of a wireless micro-browser (WAP), I primarily made use of the calendar function including notes, the contact list, and the text messaging function. All three functions soon became useful to plan, coordinate, and juggle my family and intimate life as well as my working life. There was no clear division on my mobile phone between these spheres. Research participants’ contact information was stored in the same list as friends, colleagues, and family contacts. Whenever I wanted to send a text message on this phone, I had to finish writing the message, then add the name of the recipient by scrolling through the alphabetic list of mobile phone contacts, and then press “send.” With a hasty click, one could easily send a text message to the wrong recipient whose name appeared near the intended one on the contact list. On my mobile phone list of contacts, Tove’s name appeared next to Torill’s.

As I sent the message, in a millisecond, I immediately discovered the irreversible blunder. In slow motion, I pictured the 15-year-old participant receiving my erotic and highly intimate message. I froze as I imagined my image as a serious looking researcher suddenly disintegrating in the eyes of the young participant. As the icon for “message sent” appeared on the screen, I felt my arms wither. After staring into the screen for a lengthy second, I quickly sent her a new text message apologizing for my mistake. To my relief, she immediately texted me back saying “no worries:).” My disquiet did not vanish completely, but the smiley at the end of her short text message left me feeling slightly reassured. I hoped this meant she would not quit participating in my study after all.

As I already had scheduled a meeting with her that day, I started imagining the scenario of our upcoming meeting in my head. When we met that afternoon, Tove put up a disarming smile and seemed as calm and relaxed as in our previous meeting. With a flickering look, I squeezed my clammy hands around my bag, and hasty apologized one more time. “No worries,” she replied.

Tove participated in my research for another 5 years after that incident, becoming one of key voices in my research. We never spoke again about this incident, but it has affected the way I relate to my phone ever since. Up till this day, I still maintain the habit of deleting all text message conversation threads on a regular basis. I no longer use participants’ first names in my contact list. Instead, I use codes such as “Participant 1.” I have also learned to include other additional information, such as education, interests or occupation, gender, hair color, age, or where we met.

Aligning Fieldwork Contexts

In his article, Assembling the Affective Field, Nils van Doorn (2013) describes his smartphone as having an “assembling power” during the process of his ethnographic fieldwork of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender)communities in Baltimore. He describes the diverse ways in which this single device became an actor during fieldwork—communicating with participants through phone calls and text messages, taking notes, recording interviews, and collecting photos and videos. In this regard, the smartphone served as a device for assisting him in aligning the different trajectories, and rhythms of participants’ lifeworlds and the social contexts that were the focus of his research.

In a similar manner, our respective fieldwork devices served to assemble different components of our ethnographic fieldwork process. The smartphone makes it possible to reconfigure time, space, and cultural context in complex ways in Prøitz’s everyday research counters. The functionality of these smartphones overlaps with uses of other devices, including, for example, voice recorders, music players, cameras, and email. This is becoming more complex, as new devices come equipped with various functionalities and applications, such as Twitter, YouTube, Google Maps, and the ocean of other apps that smartphones carry today. The mobile phone was implicated in a variety of ways in her fieldwork. As part of her strategy to generate research data, she used the method of elicitation, to collect a sample of her participants’ SMS communication. She did this by asking her participants to forward to her the conversation logs of their SMS conversations. It was a longitudinal study carried out between 2001 and 2005. Besides the archived messages, her phone was also contained the contact information of her participants. During the period of her fieldwork, she used her phone for some logistics tasks such as calling or texting participants to schedule meetings or reminding participants of these meetings.

Similarly, in Mainsah’s fieldwork, Facebook played a key role in aligning a diverse set of processes and contexts related to his research. Facebook helped in regulating research relationships between him and participants. The IM function of Facebook rendered possible synchronous communication whenever he and the participants were online at the same time. Since Facebook also offers a messaging service similar to email, which functions asynchronously, he could leave messages when participants were not online. The same message function served as archives of interviews using this function, as well as other communication with regard to scheduling meetings and follow-ups. In addition, Facebook constituted a shared space between the participants and Mainsah. Sometimes Mainsah initiated conversations by “liking” participants’ photos or posting comments on the contents of their profile news feed.

The role of digital technologies in our research was a good illustration of how digital technologies serve simultaneously as communicative media, networks of connections, and as sites of social construction (Baker, 2013; A. N. Markham, 2004). Similarly, Sally Baker (2013) conceptualizes different ways in which Facebook can be used in ethnographic research: as a communicative medium used to communicate with participants across time and space (to schedule meetings, conduct interviews, and to collect supplementary information), as data (including participants’ social media status updates, message logs, photos and videos, interview audio recordings), and as context, that is, a shared observable space that fed into and shaped what we generated as data in our fieldwork. Facebook constituted such a shared and observable space because Mainsah and his research participants’ Facebook profiles were visible to each other, and when they, for example, “like” or comment on each other’s profiles, this added to the observable context.

The Labor of Research

The temporal proximity that is a feature of doing fieldwork in mediated settings can serve both as a resource and as a constraint for the researcher (Boellstorff, 2012; A. Markham & Stavrova, 2016). If one is carrying out fieldwork on, say, an online community, one does not need to travel anywhere. As Sundén (2012) has pointed out, the fact that the world one is researching is never further away than an Internet connection and a computer with the appropriate software creates a particular closeness to the field. Fieldwork devices such as the smartphone and the computer can provide ready access to archived materials from fieldwork. A common part of ethnographic fieldwork practice involves researchers using objects such as fieldnotes, photos, audio recordings, or letters to affectively reengage with fieldwork experiences and events. At anytime, revisiting audio files, photos, and videos collected during fieldwork can retrospectively allow the researcher to recall experiences and events. In our case, the social and mobile technologies that we used in our research served as logistical tools for organizing fieldwork activities and for communicating with participants. In addition, they served as an archive that contained interview files, photos, message logs, and screen shots. They equally constituted a space for observing and interacting in participants’ online worlds (as in the case of Facebook). This perhaps explained why our devices sometimes engendered in us the feeling of conducting fieldwork in a situation where “one effectively and affectively carries ‘the field’ around in one’s pocket at any given time or place” (van Doorn, 2013, p. 390). The technological devices that we used in our fieldwork became a hybrid space that contained materials and information associated with both fieldwork and “non-fieldwork.” Kraemer (2016) argues that “digital communication technologies do not dissolve boundaries between field and home, but they can bring disparate worlds into close proximity” (p. 123). Because of the way we used our technological devices, it was difficult for us to control or stabilize the boundaries between the spheres of “the personal” and “the professional,” or those of “work” and “nonwork” (van Doorn, 2013, p. 392), during our fieldwork. Our devices contributed to creating a situation in which these spheres converged, and, at times, collided. In ethnographic research, considering these spheres as properly separable in the first place is a fallacy.

There is a rich volume of research that has recognized the emotional energies deployed in the process of research (Dickson-Swift, James, Kippen, & Liamputtong, 2009; Holland, 2007; Hubbard, Backett-Milburn, & Kemmer, 2001; Mainsah & Prøitz, 2015; Nutov & Hazzan, 2011). Some authors have framed this as emotional labor (Bloor, Fincham, & Sampson, 2010; Hochschild, 1983). Nutov and Hazzan (2011) describe emotional labor as the effort qualitative researchers invest in expressing or coping with emotions so as to achieve objectives pertaining to research. Coffey (1999) points out that as qualitative researchers,

we can and do feel joy, pain, hurt, excitement, anger, love, confusion, satisfaction, loss, happiness and sadness. Emotional connectedness to the processes and practices of fieldwork, to analysis and writing, is normal and appropriate. It should not be denied or stifled. It should be reflected upon, and even seen as a fundamental feature of well-executed research. (p. 158)

In this regard, we could see our emotional labor manifested in Mainsah’s work where he needed to to manage research relationships through Facebook. The architectural affordances of the site played a major role in configuring his relationship with participants. Fieldwork on Facebook and proximity to participants implied constantly having to manage the consequences of collapsing contexts. This left him feeling sometimes exposed and vulnerable.

Stine Bengtsson (2014) describes her impressions of the often spontaneous and impulsive organization of time while studying a virtual community in Second Life. She tells how she would sometimes get sent unplanned group invitations to parties and other events, which would arrive in late on Friday and Saturday evenings or nights. She points out that

even the most devoted researcher can find it problematic to leave family and friends alone at the dinner table from time to time to go to the room next door to join in a spontaneous get together in a virtual world as part of one’s research project. (p. 873)

Mainsah had a similar experience of adjusting to the uneven rhythm and temporal structure of his fieldwork interactions. The timing of interactions between him and his with participants on social media was often spontaneous. He sometimes would find himself having to engage in unplanned exchanges with participants, since he was never sure when the next opportunity would arise. Every time he logged onto Facebook during the period of his fieldwork, he was always aware there was a possibility that participants could initiate a conversation. Sometimes these conversations took place late in the night, beyond his usual working hours. We suggest that there is a small degree of affective labour required when conducting research in digitally mediated settings and through social and mobile media. Being at several locations at once, and socializing with people in different social contexts have become a normal part of our media culture today, although generally intensified by social and mobile media technologies. However, some researchers might find it easier than others to navigate the uneven rhythms and spatiotemporal structures of such research contexts.

In Prøitz’s case, emotional labor manifested itself in the ways in which she had to deal with feelings of red-faced embarrassment after accidentally sending a highly personal text message meant for her girlfriend to a research participant. In the researcher–researched relationship, the focus is usually on the life of the researched. In the case of the accidentally sent message, the mobile phone device turned the focus to the personal life of the researcher in a sudden and abrupt manner. Emotional labor was evident in Prøitz’s feelings of anxiety over the potential challenge to her identity and authority as a researcher. She had to deal with her doubts over how to reestablish the contours of her research relationship with the participant, after the incident. Thus, although her mobile phone helped in the organization of research, it also introduced an element of messiness.

We have earlier on referred to literature that identifies persistence—the fact that content continues to be available beyond the moment that it is created—as one of the main affordances of networked publics created by social and mobile media. Doing ethnographic research with devices such as the mobile phone might sometimes mean having to manage the consequences of all sorts of experiences and traces of past events that are left on it. In this regard, the device might become a location that assembles traces of past challenging and emotionally charged moments in the process of research. Prøitz’s phone, for example, contained a record of her accidentally sent text message archived with the message logs of other exchanges with her research participants. Part of her strategy for managing the potential messiness of fieldwork after the incident with the text message involved regularly deleting text message conversation threads and rearranging her contact lists to distinguish research-related contacts from other ones.

Conclusion

As digital networked technologies increasingly become an integral part of daily life for researchers, and the worlds, peoples, and places they study, we must now contend with the reality that they are bound to produce new and complex forms of intimacy. We have tried, in this article, to reflect on the experience of conducting ethnographic research in a context where digital communication technologies have contributed in bringing disparate worlds into close proximity. Doing research in situations where different spheres of the researcher’s world are brought into close proximity requires dispensing a considerable amount of affective energy to manage the unstable rhythms and temporal structures of ethnographic fieldwork practice.

When researchers use digital devices and media both as subject of study and research tools (social media, chat, mobile phone, text messages), these devices become a central location where different components of fieldwork practice are aligned. In this vein, we have used a couple of ethnographic vignettes to narrate intimate experiences of fieldwork encounters in which different spheres of the researcher’s world come into collision, and where fieldwork boundaries are constantly shifting.

By reflecting over these experiences, we have hoped to add new insights onto old debates about the role of communications technologies in the changing nature of the ethnographic field. We have also tried to contribute to debates about the methodological opportunities and challenges of researching in new media.