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Media International Australia

Heather Horst, Larissa Hjorth and Jo Tacchi

Abstract

This special issue of Media International Australia seeks to ‘rethink’ ethnographyand ethnographic practice. Through the six contributions, the authors considerthe variety of ways in which changes in our media environment broaden what wethink of as ‘media’, the contexts through which media are produced, used and

circulated, and the emergent practices afforded by digital media.

Ethnographic studies of media emerged in the late 1980s alongside ethnographic researchon consumption in Britain (Gray, 1992; Gillespie, 1995; Morley, 1992; Moores, 1993;Silverstone, 1990; Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992). The ethnographic turn in media andcultural studies emerged in response to an uncritical approach that constructed passiveaudiences (Ang, 1991), as well as deep criticism of the quantitative methods that wereused, especially in US communication studies, to categorise and analyse communicationactivities that eluded such methodologies (Lull, 1990). In media sociology, Silverstone(1990) called for a move towards an anthropology of the television audience, with amethodological approach that views the individual in the context of the everyday and

takes account of the home, technologies and neighbourhoods, as well as public and privatemythologies and rituals (1990: 174). This focus upon the contexts of use signalled a shiftaway from a previous focus upon typologies of individual users that often ignored thesituated complexities of everyday life (Morley, 1986). Nightingale’s article in this issuealso links the development of media ethnography with the cultural or ‘reexive turn’ inanthropology, which she suggests led to improved ethnographic practice in media andcultural studies, and the expansion of media anthropology. This is also the moment whenanthropology began to focus upon carrying out research ‘at home’ in Western and middleclass contexts where media of various forms had become pervasive. Indeed, and as DebraSpitulnik’s (1993) review of media anthropology suggests, it has become impossible toignore the seminal role of media in shaping and structuring our everyday lives (Askew

and Wilk, 2001; Ginsburg et al., 2002; Mankekar, 1999, Abu-Lughod, 2005).Media ethnography also began to move in new directions with the availability and

access to digital media and technology. The introduction of new platforms and deviceshas led to a broadening of what we understand as the sites and sources of production;ofce parks in Silicon Valley and young people’s bedrooms are as likely to be sites for the

production of media as are the more traditional sites such as newsrooms and radio stations.Moreover, and as Gabriella Coleman’s (2010) review of ethnographic approaches to digitalmedia highlights, the contexts of production and use are as important to understanding

practice as the affordances and constraints implicated in digital media technologies,however heterogeneously, in a range of cultural, social and political contexts (Horstand Miller, 2012; Tacchi, 2012). Whereas media ethnography focused upon ‘audiences’,

the pervasiveness of digital media and technology has spurred renewed attention to the particular capacities, or affordances – a concept that has its roots in the phenomenology

RETHINKING ETHNOGRAPHY:AN INTRODUCTION



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No. 145 — November 2012

of Merleau-Ponty and James Gibson (Norman, 1988) – and the constraining and enablingmaterial possibilities of media.

This special issue of Media International Australia seeks to ‘rethink’ ethnography andethnographic practice.1 Through a review of the six contributions included in this specialissue, we consider the variety of ways in which changes in our media environment broadenwhat we think of as ‘media’, the contexts through which media are produced, used and

circulated, and the worlds and practices that digital media make possible for different people. We begin this inquiry by considering how the changing media environment hasintroduced new scholars and debates to the value and practice of ethnography. We thenturn more specically to the ways in which media ethnography is being practised in lightof the new contexts of research – be they the broadcasters trying to keep pace with thechanging media environment or researchers working through what to do with the eldsiteand myriad digital data now generated. The articles in our nal set dive more deeply intothe ways the capabilities and affordances of digital media, such as camera phones, areinspiring new thinking about our construction of place and context.

Ethnography in disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts

Valued for the ability to understand and interpret everyday life, the meaning and practiceof ethnography has become increasingly diverse. Many cultural studies scholars, forexample, employ ethnography to analyse the broader contexts through which culturaltexts and scripts are produced and reproduced (e.g. Hjorth, 2009; Pertierra and Turner,2012). Others, such as those in design and HCI, view ethnographic approaches as waysto better understand and design for users of technology, programs and platforms, often

by integrating participants within the design process (Dourish, 2006; Dourish and Bell,2011; Drazin, 2012). Scholars interested in game studies and performance studies havestarted to explore the role that more participatory forms of research can elicit in ourunderstanding of the virtual and social worlds created in and through digital media(Salen and Zimmerman, 2004; Sunden, 2009). These are just a few of the areas where

ethnographic approaches are emerging.As sociologist Mario Small (2009) reminds us in his article published in the journal

Ethnography, there are fundamental differences in the ways in which ethnography is usedand approached, even in related elds in the social sciences. Depending upon their researchquestions, sociologists are more likely to encounter questions around representativenessand the types of groups/individuals included in their ethnographic research – due, at leastin part, to the stronger focus upon social policy (particularly in urban sociology) and theneed and/or desire to engage with sociologists and others who tend to value quantitativeand ‘mixed-methods’ research. By contrast, social and cultural anthropologists carryingout research very rarely have to justify their methods and approach through numbers andother quantitative metrics, given their long history of conducting eldwork in small, out-

of-the-way groups. In other words, the answer to the question ‘how many?’ and ‘who?’ inan ethnographic study would likely be different depending upon the particular problems,debates and disciplinary audiences.

In this special issue, two articles directly address the tensions and consequences ofthe kind of interdisciplinary research emerging around the study of digital media andtechnology. Writing from the vantage point of her extensive experience in conductingmedia ethnography over the past 25 years in Australia, Virginia Nightingale highlightsa broader set of issues that emerge in ethnographic studies of media and the variousdisciplinary borrowings that constitute this domain of work. Noting the death of the word‘audience’ in anthropological use of media ethnography, she suggests that anthropology

beneted from the insights of audience study to create a ‘highly fruitful and successful’

sub-eld of media anthropology. However, and with few exceptions (e.g. Couldry, 2012),she contends that this has come at the expense of theory in media and communicationstudies. As Nightingale suggests in this issue: ‘The downside of the excitement and energy



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of ethnographic media research has been the lack of attention by media and communicationtheorists to the problems confronting communication theory: specically, the need forthe development of new and more relevant communication theories.’ To date, these havelargely neglected the study of media institutions and the political economy of media.

Just as engagement with (and the hegemony of) anthropology has had consequencesfor communication studies, Heather Horst and Daniel Miller’s article on materiality and

normativity suggests that other disciplines have offered useful ethnographic insight intothe social changes that have come with digital media and technology practices. However,they contend that the preoccupation with notions of the ‘new’ and ‘change’ often fails toconsider the normative processes that shape the relationship between media, technologyand what it means to be human – the fundamental concern of anthropology. As they notein this issue:

[P]erhaps the most astonishing feature of digital culture is not the speed of technicalinnovations, but rather the speed at which society takes all of them for grantedand creates normative conditions for their use. Within months, a new capacity isassumed to such a degree that when it breaks down, we feel we have lost both a

basic human right and a valued prosthetic arm, and part of who we now are as

humans.

This can be read alongside an awareness of the increase in disciplinary voices withclaims of understanding digital media through ethnographic approaches and discussionsof the current educational climate in northern Europe and elsewhere – and specically,the broader threat to schools and departments of anthropology in the United Kingdom,which are experiencing smaller and smaller numbers of enrolments and dwindling fundingto support students and staff. Horst and Miller draw attention to the ways in which,

particularly, disciplinary concerns and frameworks (including interdisciplinary approachessuch as material culture studies) for practising ethnography can come together to reneour ability to understand the contemporary media world.

The questions and conversations around the use of ethnography reect a broader movetowards interdisciplinarity in the humanities and social sciences over the past three to fourdecades. Both Nightingale, and Horst and Miller, in their articles in this issue, incite usto reect upon the consequences of our ethnography and ethnographic practice today, andtheir implications for our relationships with disciplinary knowledge and practice. On theone hand, ethnography is inherently transdisciplinary in its focus upon everyday life and allof the messiness that entails. The exibility and openness to new tools and novel avenuesof inquiry also signal a transdisciplinary framework for practice (Boellstorff et al., 2012).Yet, as Nightingale so cogently concludes, the interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinaritythat we celebrate may also have unintended consequences. These might be caused by thedecline in attention to both the political economy of communication in media studies,and the broader questions about the consciousness of the infrastructures that underpin thegovernance of our everyday engagement in technology. It is these unintended consequencesthat we hope to begin to understand and reect upon in this special issue and throughthe next generation of media and digital ethnography.

Ethnographic practice and praxisIn the previous section, we considered the impact and inuence of new disciplinary

perspectives and voices for our understanding of ethnography. Here, we turn to theways in which different ‘ethnographic places’ (Pink, 2009) shape the practice of mediaethnography. Nick Couldry built on the ‘practice turn’ in sociology, and drew on work inmedia anthropology to push us to consider thinking about media as practice. He encouraged

scholars to ‘listen beyond the echoes of the media process’ (2006: 7) in order to determinewhere we need to be to obtain the ‘best vantage point on media’s contributions (good and bad) to contemporary life’ (2006: 2). Media research has focused upon media texts and



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media institutions (including audiences), but Couldry suggests it is time to ‘decentre’ mediaresearch, to consider ‘how media ts, or does not t, into the rest of our lives’ (2006:30). This helps us to move beyond the functionalist approach of some media research,acknowledges the complexity and variability of practice, and explores the relationships

between media practices and non-media practices (Bräuchler and Postill, 2010).As ethnography continues to move into new areas of inquiry and different terrains, a

number of scholars have responded by questioning, challenging and dening the possibilitiesand parameters of ethnographic practice. For example, Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi,Celia Pearce and T.L. Taylor (2012) analyse the use of ethnography to study virtual worlds.Alongside introducing the many genealogies of ethnographic practice in anthropology andsociology, the co-authors address a number of common questions and misperceptions aboutethnography as a method and practice. Dening ethnography as an adaptive and exibleapproach to understanding particular research questions, they highlight the use of multiplemethods or tools to address different phenomena, as well as the value placed upon eticand emic perspectives. Moreover, they stress that the rigour of ethnography comes throughthe experience of ‘being in eldwork’ (noting that there are no shortcuts!). It is this senseof ‘being in eldwork’ – what anthropologists might have termed ‘participant observation’

in the past – that they view as the key to contextualising interviews and other elicitationmethods researchers employ to understand a particular phenomenon.

Moving outside academic research and into industry, Nafus and Anderson (2009) writeabout the changing practice of ethnography as they experienced it working for the leadingtechnology company, Intel (see also Drazin, 2012). Ethnography is ‘written on walls’ as

project spaces materially combine, display and think through knowledge about and for thetechnology artefacts and practices they are seeking to design and/or understand. In theirexperiences as social scientists within Intel, the social relations that make up ethnographic

practice happened in the interstices between text, visual materiality and orality. It is ashift from the self as the instrument of knowing (following Ortner, 2006) to a decentred self, where knowledge is constructed on a whiteboard with marker pens, post-it notes,

photographs and any other visual, audio visual and material objects that have been collectedor created in the process. The important decentring for Nafus and Anderson is shifting thelocus of knowledge from the single ethnographer to a collaborative, external, visible andmoving artefact. The construction of knowledge here is open to a range of participants,across a range of disciplines, including social scientists, designers, engineers and businessmanagers. There is a movement from eld research through to brainstorming sessions,toward a transitory existence as a material artefact on the ofce wall.

From within the institutional setting of the Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC)ofces in Sydney, Jonathon Hutchinson conducts his own ethnographic exercise inunderstanding what constitutes knowledge and expertise from a range of vantage points.Hutchinson uses a combination of ethnography with action research, to match his combined

roles of doctoral student undertaking ethnographic research, and community manager inan ABC online collaboration project. He studies the user-generated content project, ABCPool, and uses participant observation to study collaborative activities enacted by what hedenes as a community of practice. The activities and interaction of this community aregoverned and controlled by the guidelines and institutional culture of the ABC. Huchinson’s

position as community manager places him at an interesting intersection between the pool participants, pool staff, the broader ABC production staff and the ABC as an institution.In his article, in order to try to unpack his position as a reexive ethnographer and actionresearcher, he draws on concepts from the philosophy of knowledge to describe thedifferent expertise positions he inhabits in his combined role – interactional, contributoryand referred expertise. There is a sense of the ethnographer taking on somewhat xed

positionalities, in a reasonably static, guidelines-bound and knowable ‘community’.The challenges of conducting ethnographic and action research in corporate sites andcommunities discussed by Hutchinson can be contrasted with the sense of movement and



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openness that Nafus and Anderson introduce, and the way Postill and Pink write about‘doing’ social media ethnography. For Postill and Pink, the place of ethnographic practicehas expanded across the internet and into particular locations through ‘digital sociality’,wherein places emerge through collaborative, participatory, open and public engagement.They also deliberately depart from dominant paradigms of ‘network’ and ‘community’ ininternet research, focusing instead on movement and sociality. In a sense, this is about

how (social) media ethnographers use the affordances of social media to understand itacross ‘connecting online and locality-based realities’, such as through the ve routinesthey chronicle: catching up, sharing, exploring, interacting and archiving. Postill andPink call the approach they put forward ‘internet-related ethnography’, indicating thatthey are focusing on ‘intensities’ of social media activity and their repercussions acrossthe ‘messy’ web, as well as in face-to-face contexts. They engage with internet practicesand contexts, but resolve not to stop there.

Importantly, Postill and Pink are less constrained than Hutchinson by the ‘problem’ ofreexivity and positioning as ethnographers, partly due to their training as anthropologistsand the intense debates within their discipline in the 1980s that developed notions ofethnography as contestable truth and contingent knowledge (Clifford and Marcus, 1986).

The person of the ethnographer is nevertheless clearly visible, and ever more so in hisor her role within the ethnographic place. Yet Postill and Pink’s approach to social mediaethnography resonates with trends occurring in industry and other interdisciplinary contexts.It highlights a shift from the traditional ethnographic concern with holism toward openness,sociality and movement, recognising and validating the hybrid forms of sociality thatground ethnographers’ understandings

Ethnographic perspectives of mobile camera phones: Place, powerand co-presenceWhereas the previous sections focused upon changes in conceptual frameworks and

practices of ethnographic studies of media, this section turns our attention to the affordancesof one form of media and technology: mobile camera phones. From the early work ofMimi Ito in Japan, Dong-Hoo Lee in South Korea and Ilpo Koskinen in Finland, camera

phone ethnographies have expanded the tools and methods for ‘doing ethnography’ inanthropology, media and cultural studies. Alongside providing new maps of place forethnographic practice in which online and ofine boundaries are blurred, camera phonesincreasingly are a method and subject of study. With almost all phones coming with acamera, and with the burgeoning of smartphones heralding new forms of locative andsocial contexts for image sharing, camera phones are both tools for, and of, place-making

practices. Epitomising the user-created content (UCC) evolution, camera phones haveattracted much praise and criticism for their ability to provide a lens into sociocultural,

political and economic domains. The ubiquity of the camera phone – accompanied by thegrowth in online, locative and social sharing sites – has transformed it into a key UCC tool.Camera phones have always been a tool for, and of, banality (Koskinen, 2007). Through

their ubiquity, intimacy and taken-for-grantedness, camera phones provide insight into the banalities of the everyday. While this banality can be seen as extending the conventionsand genres of earlier photographic tropes (i.e., Kodak, Hjorth, 2007), they also signicantlydepart from them (Chesher, 2012). Camera phones are banal not only in relation to muchof the visual content of the images, but also because of their almost tacit and embedded

position in everyday life. Camera phone practices remind us that seemingly banal thingsare deeply embedded in the naturalisation of power (Morris, 1988), and in fact it is theirvery banality that gives them authenticity. As Burgess notes, user-created content, like

camera phone images, resonates because of its ‘vernacular creativity’ currency (2007).From citizen journalism to the Arab Spring, the immediate, amateur and raw images ofcamera phones – rather than professional pictures – were the most circulated. In moments



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of longing, disjuncture or change, it is often the mobile phone that is at hand to document

and share content.

Camera phone practices have been shown to foreground the social and emotional

dimensions of place as a contested space between the lived and imagined, physical and

psychological realms. Wanning Sun’s article in this issue explores the plight of China’s

burgeoning rural migrant working class, and the raising of political consciousness

through digital literacy. Sun draws on sustained interaction with a dozen migrant activistsin Beijing from 2009 to 2011 to consider ‘the potential of digital media to construct

collective self-ethnography, as well as its capacity to effect political socialisation and

social change’. Camera phones, as part of mobile media, have been shown to play an

important role in helping China’s migrant workers gain forms of national and global

visibility unimaginable for previous generations (Qiu, 2009). Through UCC mobile media,

and especially camera phone images and videos, the migrant working class has been

able to articulate its struggles. Sun’s contribution sits alongside recent events such as the

closing of the Foxconn factory in September 2012. Foxconn, the world’s largest contract

maker of electronic goods, including iPhones and iPads, is currently under investigation

for poor working conditions. Foxconn rst came to global attention when workers began

to document – through camera phone images and poetry – the inhumane conditions thathad led to numerous suicides (Qiu, 2012). There are many Foxconns in China, and Sun’scontribution embodies the tension between mobile media as a source of exploitation and

a site for empowerment and media literacy.

China also features in Sarah Pink and Larissa Hjorth’s article in this issue on the urban

Generation Y, ba ling hou. Through location-based service games (LBS), new practices

and relationships are emerging. While the ofcial game, Jiepang, consists of players

gaining prizes by going to certain shops, it is the unofcial game play of intertwining

images with places – motivated by guanxi (an ambiguous term referring in part to social

connections) – that is most popular and has become the key space through which practices

of ‘emplaced visuality’ emerge. With LBS, like Facebook Places, Foursquare and Jiepang,

we see the overlay of place with the social and personal that superimposes the electronicon to notions of geography in new ways. By sharing an image and comment about a place

through LBS, users can create different ways to experience and record journeys, and inturn impact upon how place is recorded, experienced and remembered (Hjorth and Arnold,

2013; Hjorth and Gu, 2012). Within LBS camera phone images, place becomes a process

of perpetual oscillation between ‘placing’ (that is, actively situating or contextualising

phenomena) and ‘presencing’ (that is, ‘being there’ through telepresence, co-presence,

located presence and net-local presences) (Richardson and Wilken, 2012). The rise of

‘emplaced’ rather than ‘networked’ visuality apparent with LBS camera phone practices

is a manifestation of the changing performance of co-presence (Hjorth and Arnold, 2013).

As illustrated by Sun, and by Pink and Hjorth, the ambiguities of place are further

amplied by mobile media. Viewed as unbounded and relational, place involves a perpetual

process of ‘placing’ across a variety of presences that involves what Tim Ingold (2008)

characterises as entanglement. As social geographer Doreen Massey notes, maps provide

little understanding of the complex elusiveness of place as a collection of ‘stories-so-far’(Massey, 2005). Camera phone images by LBS reect disjuncture as much as presence,

and can be argued to provide ‘stories-so-far’. In LBS camera phone images, we see that

place is a notion that is tied as much to intimacy as co-presence; just as intimacy is always

mediated, so too are notions of place. The rise of ‘emplaced’ rather than ‘networked’

visuality in LBS camera phone practices is a response to the changing cartography of co-

presence, whereby binaries between online and ofine experiences don’t hold. Moreover,

given that these images are so much bound to a specic experience of place, they reectan intersection of senses that is not just visual. In these changing visual and multisensorial

cartographies, ethnography is both inuencing, and being inuenced by, these phenomena.



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ConclusionThis special issue brings together a collection of work that starts to demonstrate the rangeand practices of contemporary ethnographies of media. These ethnographic practices shapeand are shaped by the contexts of study – ethnographic places – and the disciplinary andinterdisciplinary knowledge(s) within which we, as scholars, are embedded. Ethnography,all contributors agree, allows us to understand the world in useful and insightful ways.

Yet these articles draw our attention to the critical need to think through how ethnographyis practised, reect upon the implications of the places it creates and the vantage pointsit takes, and to widen the reexive lens that ethnography insists upon to encompass ourvarious positionings within and across disciplines, theories and broader methodologies. Aswe study the practices, places and power of digital media, we must, as Nightingale suggests,invest in the creation and dissemination of new contemporary media and communicationtheories. We hope this special issue will help to build a critical focus that challenges usto think about our ethnographic practices, place them within a wider frame, and use themto provide insightful commentaries on digital lives, as we consider both the contexts andaffordances of new and social media. We conclude this introduction by inviting readersto collaborate in this enterprise, to ensure that the ethnographic practices that bring us

together allow us to propagate and debate theories of equal investment and note.

Note

1 We are also embarking upon a set of inquiries around ethnography through the recent formationof the Digital Ethnography Research Centre in the School of Media and Communication atRMIT University. To learn more, visit http://digital-ethnography.net.

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Heather A. Horst is a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in the School of Media and

Communication and Co-Director, Digital Ethnography Research Centre, RMIT University.

Larissa Hjorth is an artist, digital ethnographer. She is Associate Professor in the Games Programs,

School of Media and Communication and Co-Director, Digital Ethnography Research Centre, RMIT

University, Melbourne.

Jo Tacchi is Deputy Dean of Research and Innovation in the School of Media and Communication,

RMIT University, Melbourne

Documents

MIA ED Intro 1