Doing audio/visual/sensory ethnography with and on smartphones – a possible roadmap for an expanded ethnography

ABSTRACT

This article explores the intersection between smartphones and audio-visual-sensory ethnographies. The text opens with a brief introduction addressing the possible consequences of the growing spread of smartphones for the practice of ethnography. It then proceeds to reflect on some theoretical assumptions that underpin work in the area of digital visuality before finally unpacking the terrain of smartphone ethnography. The latter is address along three main dimensions: the smartphone as an object of research interest, as a mediator and as an assistant. Addressing these areas one by one the contribution looks first into the culturally situated meaning of smartphones and how this can be studied; it then explores its possible role as a producer of new forms of collaboration and participation; finally, it investigates the potential of smartphones to function as multimodal research assistants (allowing also for a decentring of our senses and awareness). This article constitutes a call for an expanded ethnography able to respond to the expanded set of mediations that make up lives in contemporary (post)digital habitats while responding to established visual research methodologies.

KEYWORDS:

• smartphone ethnography
• expanded ethnography
• visual studies
• multimodal ethnography
• visual ethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.buymobiles.net/blog/1-43-trillion-photos-were-taken-in-2020-but-how-many-of-them-were-captured-on-our-mobile-phones/#:~:text=A%20whopping%2090.9%25%20of%20these,made%20up%20a%20measly%201.8%25.

2 Despite disagreeing with the dualistic structure that lies at the core of Byung-Chul Han’s work I find the concept ‘terrane’ a poetic alternative to more consolidated terms such as material, real, etc.

3 Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s latest documentary De Humani Corporis Fabrica offers an exploration of the technologies that have made the exploration of the human body from the inside possible.

4 For an extensive insight into elicitation techniques see Pauwels (2015).