Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice by Sarah Pink & Heather Horst & John Postill & Larissa Hjorth & Tania Lewis & Jo Tacchi

Author:Sarah Pink & Heather Horst & John Postill & Larissa Hjorth & Tania Lewis & Jo Tacchi [Pink, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw, mobi, pdf
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2015-10-09T06:00:00+00:00

Summing up

In this chapter, we explored the various ways in which digital ethnography can provide insight into understanding relationships. From customisation outside the phone to the use of mobile phones for calls and playing games, this chapter has sought to demonstrate the multiple ways in which the digital – as both a material culture and a set of media practices – is overlaid and entwined in our maintenance of relationships. By focusing on the importance of co-presence in maintaining relationships, we have sought to demonstrate a variety of ways through which digital media and technologies can be used to create a sense of presence over space and time – whether the distances to be bridged are temporary moments of not being together as a couple or distance created through migration and transnational livelihoods. The quality of the sense of co-presence properties are intricately tied to the affordances of particular digital media and technologies – text, voice, archiving, synchronous and asynchronous communication and so on.

A particular focus of the chapter revolves around the importance of social and cultural context in defining how digital media and technologies are taken up in relationships. Throughout our ethnographic examples, the focus on mobile phones and transformation acknowledges the importance of understanding mobile phone use in the context of relationships, rather than the mobile phones’ ‘impact on’ people in different cultural contexts; it is the relationship dynamics that determine how mobile phones – of different types, basic phones, smartphones and mobile media – are taken up in each cultural, social and relationship context.

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