Digital placemaking and networked corporeality: Embodied mobile media practices in domestic space during Covid-19

Introduction

Mobile devices are now infused into our mundane day-to-day media and communication practices and directly affect our movement through both physical and networked environments. As Ingold (2007) has suggested, the term ‘wayfaring’ describes the way we infuse meaning into place as part of our daily routines and habits of embodied movement – we literally ‘make meaning’ as we move about in the world. Today, mobile media interfaces and online networks are an integral part of this experience, and the relation between mobile media and placemaking practices is now well-established in media studies, mobile media and communication studies and urban studies literature. But what happens when our everyday ‘movement through the world’ in a literal and physical sense is interrupted as we shift to working and schooling from home? In the context of the coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19), this article contributes to the conversation around digital placemaking by reflecting on the intertwining of geolocative and networked mobile media and everyday experiences of domestic space.

The world experienced a rapid shift in everyday mobility in the first part of 2020 with the introduction of physical isolation and quarantine measures to combat the spread of Covid-19. This swift reorganisation of public and private life, and the ‘unprecedented’ shift to working and socialising from home, provided us with an opportunity to consider the role of mobile media in this process. That is, how are mobile technologies entangled in this remaking of domestic space? How is the placemaking functionality of mobile media, the intimate body–technology relation specific to mobile media practices and ‘being-at-home’ subsequently modified by physical distancing and isolation? Reflecting on a 5-year longitudinal ethnographic study of mobile phone practices conducted in Melbourne and Perth (Australia), we returned to speak with some of our participants in the first months of ‘stay-at-home’ restrictions. Our main objective was to gather insights into their perceptions and experiences of personal privacy and place as much of our communication shifted online, and domestic space was increasingly shared and made visible via chat and videotelephony platforms such as Zoom and Teams. For many of our participants, the restrictions imposed in early 2020 radically altered their daily lives and digital placemaking practices, revealing shifting mobile–place relations within the space of the home.

As Frith and Özkul suggest, accounting ‘for the many types of mobile media that affect our lives’ goes beyond researching how smartphones are used ‘to communicate with each other and with the environment’ (2019: 293) – this process must also include the Walkman and iPod (Bull, 2000, 2005), books and newspapers (Schivelbusch, 1986), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) (Frith, 2019) and a variety of mobile screens, including tablets and laptops (Goggin, 2012). One of the key threads connecting these forms of mobile media is the ability of the user to deploy the specificities of mobile technology to curate, and to a certain extent control, their ‘spatiality and sociality’ (Campbell, 2018) in relation to others and the physical environment. In this article, we focus on mobile technologies in the context of domestic space and networked sociality during Covid-19. Participants spoke to us about their mobile phone habits and how these practices intermeshed with their use of other mobile screens such as tablets and laptops. In what follows, we offer a postphenomenological interpretation of mobile media practices at a time when physical mobility, ordinarily a key affordance of mobile devices, contracts into the space of the home, while networked and hybrid modes of interaction are amplified.

We start by providing a brief overview of our methodological and interpretative approach – drawing from postphenomenology as a useful framework for understanding the mobile–body–place relation and digital placemaking at home. Second, we consider how mobile media are ‘situated’ in the domestic environment. Third, through an analysis of participant narratives, we explore the concept of net locality (Gordon and de Souza e Silva, 2011) through the lens of embodiment and suggest that the Covid-19 context has effected a change to our experience of ‘networked corporeality’. Finally, we discuss the ambiguity of digital intimacy in the decoupling of mobile media and the body as a result of a rapid increase in both screen time and time spent at home. Throughout the article, we argue that in the context of the pandemic, mobile media use in the home is both shaping and shaped by shifting boundaries of privacy, placemaking and sociality.

Postphenomenology, ethnography and composite accounts of digital placemaking

For phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1964), the structure of our embodiment is inherently open, such that we incorporate tools and technologies as ‘fresh instruments’ into our own perceptual and corporeal organisation; in this view, our media interfaces and corresponding user habits dilate our being-in-the-world. Within the phenomenological tradition, the coupling of tools and bodies is effectively articulated by the term intercorporeality, a word that describes the irreducible relation between technics, embodiment, knowledge and perception. More recently, postphenomenologists and feminist body theorists have extended this understanding of techno-corporeal existence to account for cultural and gender specificity. As Irwin (2016: 40) explains, the term multistabilities – as one of the central overarching concepts of postphenomenology – conveys the inherent adaptability and mutability of both bodies and media engagement, depending on the contexts or situatedness of use. Our exploration of placemaking and mobile media in the domestic environment is informed by postphenomenology, which considers our contemporary engagement with mobile media as a particular kind of body–technology relation (Ihde, 1990), one that is also partially determined by individual and collective cultural variation. As Ihde argues, we don’t see through technologies (as if they grant transparent access to the world) but in partnership with them; perceiving and knowing the world is entangled in complex ways with the human–technology relation in all its dynamic multistability. In contemporary life, this ‘being-in-the-world’ is deeply embroiled with mobile media. That is, mobile interfaces co-constitute the variable boundaries of embodiment and our place in the world.

Through routine use, mobile devices have become part of the dynamics of embodied experience and entered into an ever-present, intimate and habitual relationship with the body. The materiality of mobile media use, and the diverse ways we embody handheld small screens, affords a range of different attitudes, postures, motilities and body–space relations – practices and behaviours that took on a different significance during the Covid-19 crisis. In what follows, our postphenomenological focus allows us to investigate how mobile media as digital placemakers are being co-opted and enmeshed in a new kind of being-in-the-world, where our experience of place and sociality is intertwined with the imperatives of physical distancing and retreating to the safety of the home. In other words, as many people began spending most of their time at home in the first months of the pandemic in Australia, the relation to home as ‘place’ was modified by and through mobile media practices.

Our methods aimed to capture the embodied intimacy of mobile devices and how they are integral to our sense of privacy and place. Ethnographic work was conducted in early 2020 via Zoom, however, the research is connected to a much larger project that took place in Perth and Melbourne from 2016 to 2020, which included a total of 79 participants across both cities (51 women and 28 men) with ages ranging from 19 to 70 years. The larger research project investigated embodied experiences of mobile media use in urban space and considered how the geolocative and network functionality of mobile devices impacts upon everyday perceptions of safety, risk and personal privacy (Hardley, 2019; Hardley and Richardson, 2019).

Throughout the project, data collection included online surveys, face-to-face semi-structured interviews and activities, photo diaries and urban walks during which participants reflected on their embodied mobile phone practices in public. During Covid-19 restrictions, additional interviews were conducted, and it is these additional interviews that inform this article. Online video platforms such as Skype and Zoom have been shown to be an effective research tool for conducting qualitative interviews (Archibald et al., 2019; Licoppe and Morel, 2012; Weller, 2017). Where possible, we reconnected with participants from our earlier ethnographic research to reflect on their experiences before and during the pandemic, and as such there was a ‘familiarity’ or certain ‘knowingness’ between us as researchers and our participants. This familiarity, despite our conversations being online, engendered a perceptual and communicative sense of intimacy. We considered this unique research setting as congruent with our previous embodiment-focused ethnographic approach – an approach which sought granular insights into familiar, habitual and routine activities in everyday life.

Our interpretation of the data applies a similar approach to vignettes as described by Berry (2017) in her book on creative practice and mobile media. For Berry, vignettes are a way of ‘braiding’ accounts of participant experience together (2017: xv). Similarly, our retelling of participant narratives in this article are a means to explore, assemble and map observations from the ethnographic data, so as to elucidate the broader implications of mobile media use in the enactment of privacy in domestic space. This technique of knitting together observations drawn from multiple participants is also a strategy used by a number of qualitative researchers in the field of digital ethnography and mobile media (Humphreys and Watson, 2009; Pink and Leder Mackley, 2013; Markham, 2012). Like Markham's ‘composite accounts’ (2012: 334) our representation of participant experiences and perceptions in this article provide an experiential ‘feel’ for the people, places, events and atmospheres described. That is, the stories we tell are interpretative tools that serve to illuminate and coalesce themes that emerged within and throughout the research process. While no parts of our interpretive analysis are fictionalised, they are at times a blended construction of several participants’ experiences.

Mobile media in the domestic sphere

Mobile technologies are unique because we use them in very personalised, ritualised and familiar ways at home and also take them with us into public space – this distinguishes mobile phones from other domestic technologies, even laptops to a certain extent, because although the latter are also portable, they are more cumbersome due to their size and lack of easy use when literally ‘on the move’. In Ambient Play, Hjorth and Richardson (2020) consider how mobile media and games are now integral to our experience of being ‘at home’, transforming ‘the spatial composition and emotional cadence’ of domestic space (2). While some devices (such as the family iPad) might reside in communal areas, and often be sites of contestation and collaboration, mobile phones are often more private interfaces that ‘belong’ to individual householders as conduits of interpersonal communication and gameplay (Hjorth and Richardson, 2020). Across these multistable use contexts, a postphenomenological perspective can be used to interpret the everyday embodied, spatial and situated aspects of this mobile–body relation. Here, we apply this approach to explore how the dynamics of mobile media use in the home has shifted to accommodate new quotidian practices as an effect of the pandemic.

Over the past 50 years, the relation between domestic space and media technologies has undergone a significant transformation. At the end of the millennium, Silverstone and Hirsch (1992) suggested that our ‘everyday spatiality’ became meshed with emerging televisual routines, as we habitually coalesced and separated around screen interfaces in living rooms, bedrooms and also progressively in public places such as pubs and bars. Once a domain where householders came together for leisure and media entertainment, the home has become increasingly fragmented in tandem with the privatisation, personalisation and portability of media interfaces. For Livingstone,

While the privatisation of leisure increasingly keeps the family together at home, the cultural process of individualisation increasingly pushes them apart, resulting in a diversification of leisure lifestyles within the home, in which the diversification of media plays a key role. (2002: 134)

Our inquiry is informed by mobile media studies, which focuses on the spatially and socially transformative capacity of the mobile interface (de Souza e Silva and Sheller, 2014; Farman, 2012, 2015; Frith, 2014; Frith and Kalin, 2016; Gordon and de Souza e Silva, 2011). Across much of this work, as Hjorth and Richardson (2020) point out, there has been limited attention on the use of mobile media, and mobile phones more specifically, as placemakers within domestic environments. As Wellner writes ‘the domestication of cell phones might be considered paradoxical because cell phones are mostly used outside of the home, while domestication implies a strong connection to the home and the activities conducted within this domain’ (2016: 55). Yet mobile media are as ever-present in the home as they are in public spaces and integral to our domestic placemaking practices (Nansen and Wilken, 2019). Over a decade ago, Chan’s (2008) study revealed that while mobile games may be played in non-domestic contexts, they are also often played in the private space of one’s bedroom, and as noted, subsequent research has similarly identified how the mobile touchscreen has become a home-based portal for networked and co-located sociality and play (Hjorth and Richardson, 2014). Informed by and contributing to this work, in the discussion that follows our aim is to consider how embodied and affective mobile phone practices shifted for some of our Australian participants during enforced ‘stay-at-home’ directives as an effect of the pandemic. While acknowledging that this experience varied widely across the population, depending on location and the adaptability of work and care practices, among other factors, our focus is primarily on those who were constrained to work, study or care from home. We explore how the mobile phone is intervolved in the remaking of the home as a focal site for the ‘happening’ of net locality and how our affective and intimate attachment to the device shifted as the dynamics between public and private space, work and leisure and networked and face-to-face interaction were quite suddenly reconfigured.

Networked corporeality in the Covid-19 context

Mobile media’s capacity to facilitate co-presence combined with geolocative functionality imbue mobile practices with a hybrid sense of locality and placemaking, combining our experience of physical place with online networked information. As we move through cities and urban environments, we depend on the assistance of geolocative maps, and our knowledge about place is augmented by mobile apps (Farman, 2015; Gazzard, 2011; Oleksy and Wnuk, 2017). Gordon and de Souza e Silva (2011) refer to this as the merging of physical, digital and social layers; that is, the generation of net-local space or net locality. Their description of net locality ‘implies a ubiquity of networked information – a cultural approach to the web of information as intimately aligned with the perceptual realities of everyday life. We don’t enter the web anymore; it is all around us’ (Gordon and de Souza e Silva, 2011: 2–3). For Farman, as we traverse the urban environment, we actively produce space ‘both materially and across digital networks’ (2012: 140–141). That is, the way we move through space and attach meaning to place is performed in partnership with networked mobile media. But what happens to the concept and experience of net locality in the domestic context? Central to this question is the relationship between the hybrid experience of net locality and embodiment, within the contexture of the home.

For some of our participants, during Covid-19 restrictions the hybrid experience of distributed and networked presence uncomfortably reconfigured the dynamics of public–private relations within the home. De Souza e Silva and Frith note that ‘the home is where people can retreat from public life’ (2015: 55); conversely, Massey describes home offices as ‘places-within-places’ in which there is ‘decidedly a one-way invasion…an invasion of home by work but not vice versa’ (2005: 179). Both of these notions were disrupted by ‘stay-at-home’ restrictions, which resulted in modified media practices and perceptions as domestic space increasingly became the primary site of net locality.

Lori, a 70-year-old fine art student in Melbourne, reflected on her reticence to display or ‘make public’ personal features of her home during Zoom classes and preferred to have video turned off or sit in front of a nondescript wall:

I don’t like the idea of people I don’t know seeing into my home, looking at my bookshelves or artwork, things that are very personal to me. But I also wanted to really engage with the class, I didn’t just want to turn my video off and be a blank screen to other students and the teacher.

As Gordon and de Souza e Silva reflect in their conclusion to Net Locality: ‘We do not leave our bodies, even momentarily, for digital interactions. And increasingly, we do not leave the context of our locality in order to interact with and within digital networks’ (2011: 179). Net locality thus ‘denotes a shift in the way we understand the Internet’ and ‘comprises more than only location-aware technology users. They include not only all people and things that are physically nearby, but also people and things remotely connected to those spaces’ (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2015: 169, emphasis added). For Lori, the spatial organisation of her home was disrupted and reconfigured as she was forced to quite literally ‘remake’ space for her online classes. Boundary crossings and mergers occurred – her class experience became hybridised or ‘net-local’ as it coalesced across domestic and networked space. Perhaps more significantly, in terms of the net-local couplet, her home became the site of the ‘local’ (where usually this is designated as public or urban place). For Lori, as with many of our participants, the collapse of online networking and net locality into the home meant renegotiating domestic space as digital place and situating oneself and one’s things in ways that maintained a sense of personal privacy – a sense that one’s home is one’s own. In this way, our participants enacted a home-specific mode of networked corporeality.

The experience of another of our participants, Luca, also highlights how net locality is always embodied. Luca described how she submitted a question to the ABC television programme Q+A, a forum where a preselected panel of experts respond to questions from the audience, addressing public concerns across a range of social, economic and political issues. During ‘stay-at-home’ restrictions, in the absence of an audience people were encouraged to submit questions by uploading a video. Following the new Q+A guidelines, Luca filmed her question outdoors in landscape mode. She recorded her question in the front yard with her mobile phone, careful to position a large shrub behind her so that any distinguishing features of her house were concealed, stating: ‘There’s no way I’d want everyone to see where I live, or even what my house looks like, it would be an invasion of privacy and also a safety issue’. During our interview, she carried her laptop (and us, co-presently) outside to reconstruct the placement of her body for the Q+A recording and said: ‘See, if I’m like this, then you can look straight through my bedroom window. And if I’m like that then you can see my house number on the front door’. For Luca, sharing her home video to Q+A, knowing her submission could be broadcast publicly, resulted in a deliberate curation that revealed her general location (i.e. she identified herself as a Melbournian), while concealing her exact location (i.e. neighbourhood, street, house number). That is, she positioned herself (with the co-option of the shrub) so as to render the home a generic or non-identifiable net-local setting, showing an embodied awareness of the conflictual relation between place, privacy, video-sharing and networked communication. Here, in Luca’s media practice, the material stuff of the world (human body, vegetation, built environment) becomes complexly entangled with the digital (mobile interface, online networks and social media platforms). ¹

Of course, taken as discrete acts, our participants’ practices of personal media curation are not necessarily specific to the pandemic context; for many they have become increasingly de rigueur as we now enthusiastically upload and live-stream our personal lives to an array of social media platforms. In Farman’s (2012) words, social proprioception – our ambient awareness of the perpetual and distributed presence of others online – involves a sensory and spatial ‘dilation’ that is now a habitual and mundane aspect of our daily lives. That is, our experience of co-presence now routinely includes forms of net-local-mediated social touch (Paterson, 2007), taking place at the coincidence of online spaces, our situated and embodied perception and the material and local context. So too, locative media are now part of our culturally inflected practices of privacy and placemaking, both individually and collectively, and inform embodied strategies of privacy and safety. Yet the stories of Lori and Luca reflect a significant change in our everyday media practices – both mobile and otherwise – or at least point to a heightened sense of the relation between social proprioception and domestic privacy, as we are constrained to shift ordinarily face-to-face interactions in public to online video modalities in the home. During Covid-19 restrictions, our participants have undoubtedly experienced the increased exposure and accessibility of their bodies (or faces) and homes to online spaces, which in turn has resulted in a changed experience of networked corporeality. As our domestic environments became more ‘saturated’ with net locality, we are perhaps adapting and habitualising new embodied strategies of framing, curation and digital placemaking.

In the final section, we turn to the intimacy of mobile media and how the embodied coupling of the body and mobile phone is at times quite radically altered when we are sequestered by necessity in the space of the home.

An uncoupling of bodies and mobile phones

Overwhelmingly, during Covid-19 our participants experienced some form of detachment from their mobile phone, both physically and affectively, as other interfaces – desktop computers, laptops, tablets and iPads – became the preferred, predominant or required modalities of networked interaction. It is important to acknowledge, however, that these changes and challenges were experienced differently; a reduction in mobile phone use was more present for those working, studying and caring from home. Such disparities are reflective of the multistable ontology of human–technology and mobile–body relations. Nevertheless, for many participants the mobile phone receded as an ever-present conduit of social proprioception. Several commented that at times they lost their phone ‘somewhere in the house’ or that they forgot to recharge it. For others, the ‘screen fatigue’ resulting from an increase in hours spent online meant that they used their phone less often or deployed their device’s communicative functionality in different ways. For many, the locative affordances of their phone (e.g. as a navigational device) became largely superfluous.

Mobile phones are intimate on material, corporeal, personal, emotional and social registers; we carry them on our bodies as ever-present conduits to friends, family and online worlds more expansively. Akin to net locality, mobile intimacy can be understood as the layering of place, technology and social relations – however, the term explicitly recognises that mobile media shift intimacy as a ‘private’ activity (e.g. calling someone from a landline at home) to a geographically dispersed ‘publicness’ (connecting with intimate others anywhere anytime). To borrow from Groening (2010), the personal is now ‘radically mobile’, whereby the affordances of mobile media allow us to carry our ‘worlds’ about with us and share our digital placemaking practices with others in the network: the mobile interface quite literally mobilises and activates the private and the personal in the public domain while we are surrounded by ‘familiar strangers’ (Paulos and Goodman, 2004). This activation of private space in public often deploys the mobile device as a proxy ‘do not disturb’ sign – a mode of media distraction that has now become the collective and familiar habit of urban bodies.

In the Covid-19 stay-at-home context, such bodily and affective intimacies and habitudes of everyday mobile phone practices – discussed at length by mobile media theorists (Farman, 2012; Hjorth and Lim, 2012; Richardson, 2009) – underwent an uncoupling. Ollie, a 22-year-old tertiary student from Perth stated:

I spend all day on my laptop, the last thing I want to do is look at a tiny mobile phone screen. These days I use it mainly for texting friends and family, but not much else. I don’t even need it as an alarm anymore [laughs].

Conclusion

In this article, we have explored the intersection of mobile media practices, placemaking as a hybrid experience that coalesces digital and material worlds, perceptions and negotiations of the public–private relation in domestic contexts and the corporeal intimacy of mobile phone use. We suggested that, with the rapid increase in time spent at home in the first months of Covid-19, our habitual engagement with mobile media has undergone significant change. Drawing on ethnographic data and informed by postphenomenology, we offered some insights in terms of how our embodiment and experience of mobile media has altered as a consequence of the imposition of ‘stay-at-home’ restrictions. The sudden shift to working, studying and caring from home for many of our participants provided a unique opportunity to document how the mobile phone was (re)domesticated as part of this process. Through participant narratives, we investigated the embodied intimacy of mobile media in our day-to-day media and communication practices, the way they are integral to the performance and negotiation of privacy and how they are differently entangled in the making, and sharing, of domestic space. In our analysis, the concept of net-local space or net locality was key to addressing the placemaking functionality of mobile media and was particularly useful in terms of understanding and interpreting how the imperative to be-at-home subsequently skewed the public–private relation. Within the home, the net-local affordances of mobile media gave way to different digital placemaking enactments and performances of privacy that involved careful choreographies of revealing and concealing.

Across our participant experiences, networked media interfaces, mobile and otherwise, opened up new pathways of incursion into domestic privacy, requiring deliberate strategies and regulation of what is appropriate to share and what is not. For some, the transition of the ‘place’ of the home into the focal site of net locality enhanced social affinity and modalities of being together, while for others the risk of unwanted boundary crossing and discomfiting collisions between public and private space were heightened. Throughout our research, as we have observed the shifting relation between mobile phone practices and placemaking during the ‘stay-at-home’ restrictions, in contrast to the experience and perceptions of net locality and (mobile) privacy prior to the pandemic, we are reminded again that the boundaries between public and private are not dichotomous but ‘fluid and permeable’ (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2015: 54–55). Our participants’ experiences and the way they managed mobile and networked media during the ‘stay-at-home’ restrictions reinforce the importance of investigating – ethnographically and in situ ‘as it happens’ – both the ongoing recalibration of mobile technologies in the home and the complex role of locative mobile media in the multistable process of placemaking.