Heather Horst, Larissa Hjorth and Jo Tacchi

RETHINKING ETHNOGRAPHY: AN INTRODUCTION

Abstract
This special issue of Media International Australia seeks to rethink ethnography and ethnographic practice. Through the six contributions, the authors consider the variety of ways in which changes in our media environment broaden what we think 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 research on consumption in Britain (Gray, 1992; Gillespie, 1995; Morley, 1992; Moores, 1993; Silverstone, 1990; Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992). The ethnographic turn in media and cultural studies emerged in response to an uncritical approach that constructed passive audiences (Ang, 1991), as well as deep criticism of the quantitative methods that were used, especially in US communication studies, to categorise and analyse communication activities that eluded such methodologies (Lull, 1990). In media sociology, Silverstone (1990) called for a move towards an anthropology of the television audience, with a methodological 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 private mythologies and rituals (1990: 174). This focus upon the contexts of use signalled a shift away from a previous focus upon typologies of individual users that often ignored the situated complexities of everyday life (Morley, 1986). Nightingales article in this issue also links the development of media ethnography with the cultural or reflexive turn in anthropology, which she suggests led to improved ethnographic practice in media and cultural studies, and the expansion of media anthropology. This is also the moment when anthropology began to focus upon carrying out research at home in Western and middle class contexts where media of various forms had become pervasive. Indeed, and as Debra Spitulniks (1993) review of media anthropology suggests, it has become impossible to ignore 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 devices has led to a broadening of what we understand as the sites and sources of production; office parks in Silicon Valley and young peoples 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 Colemans (2010) review of ethnographic approaches to digital media 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 (Horst and 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

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of Merleau-Ponty and James Gibson (Norman, 1988) and the constraining and enabling material possibilities of media. This special issue of Media International Australia seeks to rethink ethnography and ethnographic practice.1 Through a review of the six contributions included in this special issue, we consider the variety of ways in which changes in our media environment broaden what 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 has introduced new scholars and debates to the value and practice of ethnography. We then turn more specifically to the ways in which media ethnography is being practised in light of the new contexts of research be they the broadcasters trying to keep pace with the changing media environment or researchers working through what to do with the fieldsite and myriad digital data now generated. The articles in our final set dive more deeply into the ways the capabilities and affordances of digital media, such as camera phones, are inspiring 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 practice of ethnography has become increasingly diverse. Many cultural studies scholars, for example, employ ethnography to analyse the broader contexts through which cultural texts 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 ways to 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 have started to explore the role that more participatory forms of research can elicit in our understanding 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 used and approached, even in related fields in the social sciences. Depending upon their research questions, sociologists are more likely to encounter questions around representativeness and the types of groups/individuals included in their ethnographic research due, at least in part, to the stronger focus upon social policy (particularly in urban sociology) and the need and/or desire to engage with sociologists and others who tend to value quantitative and mixed-methods research. By contrast, social and cultural anthropologists carrying out research very rarely have to justify their methods and approach through numbers and other quantitative metrics, given their long history of conducting fieldwork in small, outof-the-way groups. In other words, the answer to the question how many? and who? in an 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 of the kind of interdisciplinary research emerging around the study of digital media and technology. Writing from the vantage point of her extensive experience in conducting media ethnography over the past 25 years in Australia, Virginia Nightingale highlights a broader set of issues that emerge in ethnographic studies of media and the various disciplinary borrowings that constitute this domain of work. Noting the death of the word audience in anthropological use of media ethnography, she suggests that anthropology benefited from the insights of audience study to create a highly fruitful and successful sub-field 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 communication studies. 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 communication theorists to the problems confronting communication theory: specifically, the need for the development of new and more relevant communication theories. To date, these have largely neglected the study of media institutions and the political economy of media. Just as engagement with (and the hegemony of) anthropology has had consequences for communication studies, Heather Horst and Daniel Millers article on materiality and normativity suggests that other disciplines have offered useful ethnographic insight into the 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 to consider the normative processes that shape the relationship between media, technology and what it means to be human the fundamental concern of anthropology. As they note in this issue: [P]erhaps the most astonishing feature of digital culture is not the speed of technical innovations, but rather the speed at which society takes all of them for granted and creates normative conditions for their use. Within months, a new capacity is assumed 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 with claims of understanding digital media through ethnographic approaches and discussions of the current educational climate in northern Europe and elsewhere and specifically, the broader threat to schools and departments of anthropology in the United Kingdom, which are experiencing smaller and smaller numbers of enrolments and dwindling funding to support students and staff. Horst and Miller draw attention to the ways in which, particularly, disciplinary concerns and frameworks (including interdisciplinary approaches such as material culture studies) for practising ethnography can come together to refine our ability to understand the contemporary media world. The questions and conversations around the use of ethnography reflect a broader move towards interdisciplinarity in the humanities and social sciences over the past three to four decades. Both Nightingale, and Horst and Miller, in their articles in this issue, incite us to reflect upon the consequences of our ethnography and ethnographic practice today, and their implications for our relationships with disciplinary knowledge and practice. On the one hand, ethnography is inherently transdisciplinary in its focus upon everyday life and all of the messiness that entails. The flexibility and openness to new tools and novel avenues of inquiry also signal a transdisciplinary framework for practice (Boellstorff et al., 2012). Yet, as Nightingale so cogently concludes, the interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity that we celebrate may also have unintended consequences. These might be caused by the decline in attention to both the political economy of communication in media studies, and the broader questions about the consciousness of the infrastructures that underpin the governance of our everyday engagement in technology. It is these unintended consequences that we hope to begin to understand and reflect upon in this special issue and through the next generation of media and digital ethnography.

Ethnographic practice and praxis

In the previous section, we considered the impact and influence of new disciplinary perspectives and voices for our understanding of ethnography. Here, we turn to the ways in which different ethnographic places (Pink, 2009) shape the practice of media ethnography. Nick Couldry built on the practice turn in sociology, and drew on work in media 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 determine where we need to be to obtain the best vantage point on medias 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 media research, to consider how media fits, or does not fit, 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 (Bruchler 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 defining the possibilities and 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 and sociology, the co-authors address a number of common questions and misperceptions about ethnography as a method and practice. Defining ethnography as an adaptive and flexible approach to understanding particular research questions, they highlight the use of multiple methods or tools to address different phenomena, as well as the value placed upon etic and emic perspectives. Moreover, they stress that the rigour of ethnography comes through the experience of being in fieldwork (noting that there are no shortcuts!). It is this sense of being in fieldwork what anthropologists might have termed participant observation in the past that they view as the key to contextualising interviews and other elicitation methods researchers employ to understand a particular phenomenon. Moving outside academic research and into industry, Nafus and Anderson (2009) write about the changing practice of ethnography as they experienced it working for the leading technology company, Intel (see also Drazin, 2012). Ethnography is written on walls as project spaces materially combine, display and think through knowledge about and for the technology artefacts and practices they are seeking to design and/or understand. In their experiences 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 a shift 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 collected or created in the process. The important decentring for Nafus and Anderson is shifting the locus of knowledge from the single ethnographer to a collaborative, external, visible and moving artefact. The construction of knowledge here is open to a range of participants, across a range of disciplines, including social scientists, designers, engineers and business managers. There is a movement from field research through to brainstorming sessions, toward a transitory existence as a material artefact on the office wall. From within the institutional setting of the Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC) offices in Sydney, Jonathon Hutchinson conducts his own ethnographic exercise in understanding 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 in an ABC online collaboration project. He studies the user-generated content project, ABC Pool, and uses participant observation to study collaborative activities enacted by what he defines as a community of practice. The activities and interaction of this community are governed and controlled by the guidelines and institutional culture of the ABC. Huchinsons 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 reflexive ethnographer and action researcher, he draws on concepts from the philosophy of knowledge to describe the different expertise positions he inhabits in his combined role interactional, contributory and referred expertise. There is a sense of the ethnographer taking on somewhat fixed positionalities, in a reasonably static, guidelines-bound and knowable community. The challenges of conducting ethnographic and action research in corporate sites and communities 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 practice has 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 in internet 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 it across connecting online and locality-based realities, such as through the five routines they chronicle: catching up, sharing, exploring, interacting and archiving. Postill and Pink call the approach they put forward internet-related ethnography, indicating that they are focusing on intensities of social media activity and their repercussions across the messy web, as well as in face-to-face contexts. They engage with internet practices and contexts, but resolve not to stop there. Importantly, Postill and Pink are less constrained than Hutchinson by the problem of reflexivity and positioning as ethnographers, partly due to their training as anthropologists and the intense debates within their discipline in the 1980s that developed notions of ethnography as contestable truth and contingent knowledge (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). The person of the ethnographer is nevertheless clearly visible, and ever more so in his or her role within the ethnographic place. Yet Postill and Pinks approach to social media ethnography 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 that ground ethnographers understandings

Ethnographic perspectives of mobile camera phones: Place, power and co-presence

Whereas the previous sections focused upon changes in conceptual frameworks and practices of ethnographic studies of media, this section turns our attention to the affordances of one form of media and technology: mobile camera phones. From the early work of Mimi 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 in anthropology, media and cultural studies. Alongside providing new maps of place for ethnographic practice in which online and offline boundaries are blurred, camera phones increasingly are a method and subject of study. With almost all phones coming with a camera, and with the burgeoning of smartphones heralding new forms of locative and social contexts for image sharing, camera phones are both tools for, and of, place-making practices. Epitomising the user-created content (UCC) evolution, camera phones have attracted 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 the growth 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 conventions and genres of earlier photographic tropes (i.e., Kodak, Hjorth, 2007), they also significantly depart from them (Chesher, 2012). Camera phones are banal not only in relation to much of 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 things are deeply embedded in the naturalisation of power (Morris, 1988), and in fact it is their very 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 of camera 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 Suns article in this issue explores the plight of Chinas burgeoning rural migrant working class, and the raising of political consciousness through digital literacy. Sun draws on sustained interaction with a dozen migrant activists in 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 Chinas 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. Suns contribution sits alongside recent events such as the closing of the Foxconn factory in September 2012. Foxconn, the worlds largest contract maker of electronic goods, including iPhones and iPads, is currently under investigation for poor working conditions. Foxconn first came to global attention when workers began to document through camera phone images and poetry the inhumane conditions that had led to numerous suicides (Qiu, 2012). There are many Foxconns in China, and Suns contribution 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 Hjorths 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 official game, Jiepang, consists of players gaining prizes by going to certain shops, it is the unofficial 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 electronic on 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 in turn 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 amplified 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 reflect 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 copresence, whereby binaries between online and offline experiences dont hold. Moreover, given that these images are so much bound to a specific experience of place, they reflect an intersection of senses that is not just visual. In these changing visual and multisensorial cartographies, ethnography is both influencing, and being influenced by, these phenomena.
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Conclusion

This special issue brings together a collection of work that starts to demonstrate the range and practices of contemporary ethnographies of media. These ethnographic practices shape and are shaped by the contexts of study ethnographic places and the disciplinary and interdisciplinary 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 ethnography is practised, reflect upon the implications of the places it creates and the vantage points it takes, and to widen the reflexive lens that ethnography insists upon to encompass our various positionings within and across disciplines, theories and broader methodologies. As we 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 communication theories. We hope this special issue will help to build a critical focus that challenges us to think about our ethnographic practices, place them within a wider frame, and use them to provide insightful commentaries on digital lives, as we consider both the contexts and affordances of new and social media. We conclude this introduction by inviting readers to 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 formation of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. To learn more, visit http://digital-ethnography.net.

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Horst, H. and Miller, D. (eds) 2012, Digital Anthropology, Berg, London. Ingold, T. 2008, Bindings Against Boundaries: Entanglements of Life in an Open World, Environment and Planning A, no. 40, 17961810. Koskinen, I. 2007, Managing Banality in Mobile Multimedia, in R. Pertierra (ed.), The Social Construction and Usage of Communication Technologies: European and Asian Experiences, Singapore University Press, Singapore, pp. 4860. Lull, J. 1990, Inside Family Viewing: Ethnographic Research on Televisions Audiences, Routledge, London. Mankekar, P. 1999, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Massey, D. 2005, For Space, Sage, London. Moores, S. 1993, Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consumption, Sage, London. Morley, D. 1986. Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure, Comedia, London. 1992, Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies, Routledge, London. Morris, M. 1988, Banality in Cultural Studies, Discourse, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 329. Nafus, D. and Anderson, D. 2009, Writing on Walls: The Materiality of Social Memory in Corporate Research, in M. Cefkin, Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research in and of Corporations, Berghahn Books, New York, pp. 13757. Norman, D. 2002, The Design of Everyday Things, Basic Books, New York. Ortner, S. 2006, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Pertierra, A. and Turner, G. 2012, Locating Television: Zones of Consumption, Routledge, London. Pink, S. 2009, Doing Sensory Ethnography, Sage, London. Qiu, J.L. 2009, Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 2012, Network Labor: Beyond the Shadow of Foxconn, in L. Hjorth, J. Burgess, and I. Richardson (eds), Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone, Routledge, New York, pp. 17389. Richardson, I. and Wilken, R. 2012, Parerga of the Third Screen: Mobile Media, Place, and Presence, in R. Wilken and G. Goggin (eds), Mobile Technologies and Place, Routledge, New York, pp. 18197. Salen, K. and Zimmerman, E. 2004, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Silverstone, R. 1990, Television and Everyday Life: Towards an Anthropology of the Television Audience, in M. Ferguson (ed.), Public Communication: The New Imperatives, Future Directions for Media Research, Sage, London. Silverstone, R. and Hirsch, E. (eds) 1992, Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, Routledge, London. Small, M. 2009, How Many Cases Do I Need? On Science and the Logic of Case Selection in Fieldbased Research, Ethnography, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 538. Spitulnik, D. 1993, Anthropology and Mass Media, Annual Review of Anthropology, no. 22, pp. 293315. Sunden, J. 2009, Play as Transgression: An Ethnographic Approach to Queer Game Cultures, in Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory: Proceedings of DiGRA 2009. Tacchi, J. 2012, Radio in the (i)Home: Changing Experiences of Domestic Audio Technologies in Britain, in L. Bessier and D. Fisher (eds), Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century, New York University Press, New York. Heather A. Horst is a Vice Chancellors 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
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