Sarah Pink Heather Horst John Postill Larissa Hjorth Tania Lewis Jo Tacchi ISAGE LosAn geles1L ondo1n NeDwe lh1 Singapore1 WashingtDCo n ISAGE Los Angeles 1 London 1 New Delhl Slngapore 1 Washington DC SAGE Publications Ud © Sarah Pink, Heather Horst, John Postill, Larissa Hjorth, 1 Oliver's Yard Tania Lewis and Jo Tacchi 2016 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP First published 2016 SAGE Publications lnc. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research 2455 Teller Road or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted Thousand Oaks, California 91320 under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in SAGE Publications India Pvt Lid any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission B 1/1 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic Mathura Road reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences New Delhi 110 044 issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ud sent to the publishers. 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483 Editor: Jai Seaman Llbrary of Congress Control Number: 2015936011 Production editor: lan Antcliff Marketing manager: Sally Ransom Brltlsh Llbrary Cstalogulng In Publlcatlon data Cover design: Shaun Mercier Typeset by: C&M Digitals (P) Ud, Chennai, India A catalogue record for this book is available from Printed and bound in Great Britain by the British Library CPI Group (UK) Ud, Croydon, GRO 4YY ISBN 978-1-4739-0237-4 ISBN 978-1-4739-0238-1 (pbk) AtS AGE we takseu stainiatbsyie lriouMsloys.to fo urp roductasr ep riendti nth e UK usign FSC papers and boards. When we prinotv ersewaes e nsurseu stainapbalpee rasre useda sm easuredb yt heE gmontg radign system. We undertakaen a nnuaalu dittom onitoourr s ustainability. Contents List of Figures vii Author Biographies ix Acknowledgements xi 1 Ethnography in a Digital World 1 2 Researching Experiences 19 3 Researching Practices 41 4 Researching Things 59 5 Researching Relationships 79 6 Researching Social Worlds 101 7 Researching Localities 123 8 Researching Events 147 References 167 lndex 197 List of Figures 2.1 The Energy & Digital Living website and its video clips 27 2.2 Pink and Leder Mackley's work is discussed on the Energy & Digital Living website 28 2.3 Woman talking on her smartphone 31 2.4 The family's understanding of the iPad as a family device included the cats as users of it 35 2.5 The haptic screen is not only for the human species, as the participants in Hjorth and Richardson's research found 36 3.1 Digital media in everyday life 47 3.2 Ubiquitous digital media 48 3.3 Fan Fiction genres of participation, Diary Study 2006 51 3.4 Permablitz involving converting lawn into raised beds for growing vegetables 54 4.1 Using digital video re-enactments: A participant's measure of detergent and her preferred machine setting 70 4.2 Image of the Haiti-Dominican Republic border 73 4.3 Bronte's portable kit 75 5.1 The mobile located: Helio Kitty entangles the mobile relationship 88 5.2 Girlfriend always present: The screen saver eye 89 5.3 The mobile phone as an intimat e object in Jamaica 91 5.4 Mobile, yet still in China 95 6.1 Postill follows the participants in his research online, and writes about this on his blog 113 6.2 'Cosplayers' are inspired by various forms of popular culture 115 6.3 Cosplay is also part of an events culture 116 6.4 Attention to detail in cosplay costumes 117 viii digital ethnography 7.1 As a physical locality, Subang Jaya is a residential neighbourhood near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 133 7.2 Online activity, Subang Jaya, Malaysia 133 7.3 Mapping Corporate Capitalism in Silicon Valley 137 7.4 The sea itself, Northern Spain 141 7.5 The Maritime Heritage Centre, Northern Spain 141 8.1 Watching TV with Sushila's family 154 8.2 Shibuya: Underground Streams 157 8.3 Keitai Mizu (Mobile Water) game 158 8.4 Keitai Mizu players 159 Author Biographies Sarah Pink is Professor of Design and Media Ethnography, and Director (2015-present) of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Her interdisciplinary work combines design, ethnography and digital media. She is Visiting Professor in Social Sciences in the School of Design and School of Civil and Building Engineering at Loughborough University, UK; Visiting Professor in Applied Social and Cultural Analysis at Halmstad University, Sweden; and Guest Professor on the Visual and Media Anthropology programme at the Free University, Berlín, Germany. Her research is funded by a range of research councils and through collabo­ ration with industry partners. Her recent books include Situating Everyday Life (2012), Advances in Visual Methodologies (ed., 2012), Doing Visual Ethnography (3rd edn, 2013) and Doing Sensory Ethnography (2nd edn, 2015). Heather Horst is Associate Professor and Director, Research Partnerships in the College of Design and Social Context and a Founding Director (2012-2015) of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She is interested in how digital media, technology and other forms of material culture mediate relationships, communication, learning, mobility and our sense of being human. Her books examining these themes include The Cell Phone (with D. Miller, 2006), Living and Leaming with New Media: Findings from the Digital Youth Project (with M. Ito et al., 2009), Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out (with M. Ito et al., 2010) and Digital Anthropology (co-ed. with D. Miller, 2012). Her current research explores transformations in the telecommunications industry and the emergence of new mobile media practices such as mobile money, mobile music and locative media in the Asia-Pacific region. John Postill is Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, and Digital Anthropology Fellow at University College London (UCL). From 2010-11, he was Senior Research Fellow at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute IN3, x digital ethnography Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC, Open University of Catalonia), Barcelona, Spain. His publications include Localizing the Internet (2011), Media and Nation Building (2006), and the co-edited volume Theorising Media and Practice (co-ed. with B. Brauchler, 2010). Currently, he is conducting anthropological research on new forms of digital activism and civic engagement in Indonesia, Spain and globally. Larissa Hjorth is Professor and a Founding Director (2012-2013) of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She is an artist and digital ethnographer who studies the sociocultural dimensions of mobile media and gaming cultures in the Asia-Pacific. Her books include Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific (2009), Games & Gaming (2011), Online@AsiaPacific (with M. Amold, 2013), Understanding Social Media (with S. Hinton, 2013), Gaming in Social, Locative and Mobile Media (with I. Richardson, 2014). She has co-edited The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media (with G. Goggin, 2014), Gaming Cultures and Place (with D. Chan, 2009), Mobile Technologies (with G. Goggin, 2009), Art in Asia-Pacific (co-ed. with N. King and M. Kataoka, 2014) and Studying Mobile Media (with J. Burgess and I. Richardson, 2012). Tania Lewis is an Associate Professor at the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melboume, Australia. She has published across a wide range of areas, including lifestyle media and consumption, and grassroots green movements. Her books indude Telemodemities (co-authored with F. Martin and W. Sun, forthcoming 2016), Green Asia (ed., forthcoming 2016), Lifestyle Media in Asia (co-ed. with F. Martin, forthcoming 2016), Smart Living (2008), Ethical Consumption (co-ed. with E. Potter, 2011) and TV Transformations (ed., 2009). Jo Tacchi is Professor and Director of Research and Innovation and Deputy to the President of RMIT Europe in Barcelona. She is trained as a social anthropologist and studies media, communication, development and social change, the senses and emotions, and everyday digital life. She has leda number of multi-country projects with partners such as United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Intel and KPMG. She has conducted research mostly in South Asia. Her most recent book is Evaluating Communication for Development (with J. Lennie, 2013). Acknowledgements This book has been a collaborative work, and we are grateful to our co-authors for the work and ideas that they have contributed towards its making. However, the biggest thanks of all is to the people who made this book possible -that is, to the people from across the world who participated in the various different research projects that we and our co-authors discuss in this book, from Asia, Europe, the USA and Australia. Their generosity in giving their time and knowledge to the projects we discuss here is of immeasurable value. Sorne participants in research wish to have their real names given and others to be anonymous. Real names are used where this was agreed with the participants. Second, we thank all the co-researchers and co-authors who have collaborated in the projects and publications discussed in this book. We have cited their published work and acknowledged their contributions where relevant in the text of this book and give details below. We would also like to thank the School of Media and Communication and the College of Design and Social Context at RMIT University for the support of this pro­ ject and the Digital Ethnography Research Centre, the intellectual space that has been core to the development of the book. Spearheaded by Jo Tacchi who was Deputy Dean of Research and Innovation in the School of Media and Communication at the time, RMIT actively began recruiting for a concentration in media and digital ethnography in 2011. This led to the founding of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC) by Larissa Hjorth and Heather Horst in December 2012; Tania Lewis, Sarah Pink and John Postill joined DERC shortly afterwards. Since this time, we have researched, written and worked together in various configurations. The motivation for this book carne from our desire to think through what we as a collective might say about digital ethnography, given our different research tapies, sites, and trajectories as well as different disciplinary influences. At the same time, it is also a positioning statement for DERC and an exploration of this new field. xii digital ethnography Finally, we thank all Sage's editors who have supported and encouraged this project from the outset - in particular, Chris Rojek and Jai Seaman. During the development of our ideas for this book, we received important feedback and advice from Tom Boellstorff, Graeme Turner, Scott McQuire and Supriya Singh¡ their insights fundamen­ tally shaped our approach to the book and our contribution to the field. We have also benefitted enormously from the support of Erin Taylor and Luke Gaspard who worked with us in its final stages of preparation. In particular, we are grateful for Erin's insight­ ful comments, pointing out to us things that we could no longer see ourselves, and her encouraging presence at the end of the journey of writing, made a pivota! difference. The research discussed in this book was funded through a variety of sources: Heather Horst's research was funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation under the 'Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures' project, the Institute for Money, Technology and Financia! Inclusion, Irvine, the Department for International Development (UK) and a Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellowship at RMIT University. Institutional sup­ port for her research has also come from the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California, the Institute for the Study of Social Change at University of California Berkeley, the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub at the University of California, Berkeley and the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Tania Lewis's research into lifestyle television, 'The role of lifestyle television in transforming culture, citizenship and selfhood: China, Taiwan, Singapore and India', was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (2010-14), working with Research Associate Kiran Mullenhalli. Sarah Pink's research into energy and digital media was part of the Low Effort Energy Demand Reduction (LEEDR) project at Loughborough University, UK. LEEDR was jointly funded by the UK Research Councils' Digital Economy and Energy pro­ grammes through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (grant number EP/1000267/1) for 2010-14, and undertaken with Kerstin Leder Mackley and Roxana Morosanu. Her research into standby mode in Australian households was undertaken with Yolande Strengers and funded by the Design Research Institute, RMIT University. Pink's 'Slow food and Cittaslow UK: changing local lives?' was funded by the Nuffield Foundation, UK (2005-07), and supported by her stay at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, UOC, Barcelona in 2010-11 and RMIT University in 2012-13. Larissa Hjorth would like to acknowledge the Australian Research Council dis­ covery (with l. Richardson) Games of Being Mobile: Mobile Gaming in Everyday Life (DP140104295), the Australian Research Council Linkage Grant (with H. Horst and S. Pink) Locating the Mobile with lntel (LP130100848) and Australian Research Council Linkage Grant Spatial Dialogues: Public Art and Climate Change (LP100200088 with Grocon and Fairfax).