Visible - Uncertain - Invisible: Reflections on Team Communication Flows in Digitally Mediated Ethnographic Fieldwork
Article No.: 59, Pages 1 - 9
Abstract
Ethnographic research has seen a steadily growing use of digital media in the past decades, and a particularly drastic surge since the start of the pandemic in 2020. Based on data from our own digitally mediated ethnographic research and theories from Media and Communication Studies, this paper will discuss and illustrate three main points regarding the use of digital communication platforms for research, particularly concerning knowledge exchange within teams. First, that the different platforms we use to interact digitally are not neutral tools, but themselves laden with meaning. Second, that basic assumptions of communication are not unrestrictedly tenable in the digital sphere. And third, that hybrid fieldwork settings, where both virtual and in-situ communication flows take place, entail further complexities that need to be considered in research. Since all of these points are related to aspects of visibility, this paper proposes a model to distinguish visible, uncertain and invisible communication flows and context information, and offers a concept for reflection on the use of digitally mediated research methods based on our main findings. While our data vividly illustrates the potential of digitally mediated fieldwork for research of communication-based collaboration in HCI contexts, this paper also highlights the substantial complexities it entails.
References
[1]
Crystal Abidin. 2020. Somewhere between here and there: Negotiating Researcher Visibility in a Digital Ethnography of the Influencer Industry. Journal of Digital Social Research 2 (Feb. 2020), 56–76. https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v2i1.20
[2]
Urs Andelfinger. 2002. On the Intertwining of Social and Technical Factors in Software Development Projects. In Social Thinking―Software Practice, Yvonne Dittrich, Christiane Floyd, and Ralf Klischewski (Eds.). The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 185–204.
[3]
Mayya Azarova, Michael Hazoglou, and Eliah Aronoff-Spencer. 2020. Just slack it: A study of multidisciplinary teamwork based on ethnography and data from online collaborative software. New Media & Society 24 (Dec. 2020), 1435 – 1458. Issue 6. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820975723
[4]
Anne Beaulieu. 2010. Research Note: From co-location to co-presence: Shifts in the use of ethnography for the study of knowledge. Social Studies of Science 40, 3 (June 2010), 453–470. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312709359219
[5]
Howard S. Becker. 1986. Doing things together: Selected papers. Northwestern Univ. Press, Evanston, Ill.
[6]
Jeanette Blomberg and Helena Karasti. 2013. Reflections on 25 Years of Ethnography in CSCW. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 22, 4 (2013), 373–423. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-012-9183-1
[7]
Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie A. Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T. L. Taylor. 2012. Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
[8]
Danah Boyd. 2008. Why youth love social network sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life.In Youth, identity, and digital media, David Buckingham (Ed.). MIT Press, Cambride, MA, 119–142.
[9]
Bella Dicks, Bambo Soyinka, and Amanda Coffey. 2006. Multimodal ethnography. Qualitative Research 6, 1 (Feb. 2006), 77–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794106058876
[10]
John Farnsworth and Terry Austrin. 2010. The ethnography of new media worlds? Following the case of global poker. New Media & Society 12, 7 (Nov. 2010), 1120–1136. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809355648
[11]
Kimberly Field-Springer. 2020. Reflexive embodied ethnography with applied sensibilities: methodological reflections on involved qualitative research. Qualitative Research 20, 2 (2020), 194–212. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794119841835
[12]
Verena Fuchsberger, Martin Murer, and Manfred Tscheligi. 2013. Materials, materiality, and media. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Wendy E. Mackay, Stephen Brewster, and Susanne Bødker (Eds.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2853–2862. https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2481395
[13]
Robert W Gehl. 2016. Power/freedom on the dark web: A digital ethnography of the Dark Web Social Network. New Media & Society 18, 7 (Aug. 2016), 1219–1235. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814554900
[14]
Steve Harrison, Deborah Tatar, and Phoebe Sengers. 2007. The three paradigms of HCI. In Proceedings of the 2007 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI EA ’07 (2007).
[15]
Christine Hine. 2001. Virtual ethnography. SAGE, London.
[16]
Wing Yee Jenifer Ho. 2021. ‘I knew that you were there, so I was talking to you’: the use of screen-recording videos in online language learning research. Qualitative Research 21, 1 (Feb. 2021), 120–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794119885044
[17]
Heather Horst, Jolynna Sinanan, and Larissa Hjorth. 2021. Storing and sharing: Everyday relationships with digital material. New Media & Society 23, 4 (2021), 657–671. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820953517
[18]
Rahat Iqbal, Richard Gatward, and Anne James. 2005. A General Approach to Ethnographic Analysis for Systems Design. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Conference on Design of Communication: Documenting & Designing for Pervasive Information(SIGDOC ’05). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 34–40. https://doi.org/10.1145/1085313.1085324
[19]
Mizuko Ito. 1996. Theory, Method, and Design in Anthropologies of the Internet. Social Science Computer Review 14, 1 (April 1996), 24–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/089443939601400107
[20]
Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi, Gemma Newlands, Brian Butler, Saiph Savage, Christoph Lutz, Michael Dunn, and Steve Sawyer. 2021. Flexible work and personal digital infrastructures. 64, 7 (2021), 72–79. https://doi.org/10.1145/3419405
[21]
Panos Kostakos, Lucie Sprachalova, Abhinay Pandya, Mohamed Aboeleinen, and Mourad Oussalah. 2018. Covert Online Ethnography and Machine Learning for Detecting Individuals at Risk of Being Drawn into Online Sex Work. In 2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM). IEEE, 1096–1099. https://doi.org/10.1109/ASONAM.2018.8508276
[22]
Robert V. Kozinets. 2015. Netnography: redefined(2 ed.). Sage, Los Angeles, Calif.
[23]
Lucio La Cava, Sergio Greco, and Andrea Tagarelli. 2021. Understanding the growth of the Fediverse through the lens of Mastodon. http://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.15473v1
[24]
Jessica Lingel. 2012. Ethics and dilemmas of online ethnography. In CHI ’12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems(CHI EA ’12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 41–50. https://doi.org/10.1145/2212776.2212782
[25]
Paul Benjamin Lowry, Nicholas C. Romano, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, and Randy W. Guthrie. 2009. The CMC Interactivity Model: How Interactivity Enhances Communication Quality and Process Satisfaction in Lean-Media Groups. Journal of Management Information Systems 26, 1 (2009), 155–196. https://doi.org/10.2753/MIS0742-1222260107
[26]
Francisco Martinez, Eva Berglund, and Adolfo Estalella. 2020. Anthropology Of/At/From Home: Introduction. entanglements- experiments in multimodal ethnography 3, 2 (Dec. 2020), 39–43. https://entanglementsjournal.org/anthropology-of-at-from-home-introduction/
[27]
Andrii Matviienko, Abdallah El Ali, Christin Hilmer, Yannick Feld, Wilko Heuten, and Susanne Boll. 2018. Designing Metaphor-Based Ambient Tangible Artifacts to Support Workspace Awareness. i-com 17, 3 (2018), 219–235. https://doi.org/10.1515/icom-2018-0024
[28]
Moira McGregor, Nicola J. Bidwell, Vidya Sarangapani, Jonathan Appavoo, and Jacki O’Neill. 2019. Talking about Chat at Work in the Global South: An Ethnographic Study of Chat Use in India and Kenya. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems(CHI ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1 – 14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300463
[29]
Dieter Mersch. 2020. Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980). In Technikanthropologie, Martina Heßler and Kevin Liggieri (Eds.). Nomos, Baden-Baden, 183–191.
[30]
Daniel Miller. 2011. Tales from Facebook. Polity, Cambridge.
[31]
Tim Mosig, Sebastian Schmid, Sina Plietzsch, Thomas Traber, Sandra Dij, and Claudia Lehman. 2020. The Paradox of Choice in Online Collaboration: Platforms and Tools. In The ISPIM Innovation Conference – Innovating in Times of Crisis. LUT Scientific and Expertise Publications.
[32]
Frauke Mörike. 2021. Nicht vor Ort und doch dabei: Virtuelle Ethnografie als Lehr-/Lernmethode in der Arbeitswissenschaft. In Arbeit HumAIne gestalten - 67. Kongress der Gesellschaft für Arbeitswissenschaft, 3.-5. März 2021. GfA-Press, Dortmund, B.3.4.
[33]
Shani Orgad. 2005. From online to offline and back: Moving from online to offline relationships with research informants.In Virtual Methods. Issues in Social Research on the Internet, Christine Hine (Ed.). Bloomsbury Academic, Oxford, 51–66.
[34]
Elizabeth R. Petrick. 2020. A Historiography of Human–Computer Interaction. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 42, 4 (2020), 8–23. https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2020.3009080
[35]
Sarah Pink, Heather A. Horst, John Postill, Larissa Hjorth, Tania Lewis, and Jo Tacchi. 2016. Digital ethnography: principles and practice. SAGE, Los Angeles ; London ; New Delhi ; Singapore ; Washington DC.
[36]
Anna Lisa Ramella. 2021. Mit Bands auf Tour: Eine Medienethnographie des Unterwegsseins. transcript Verlag.
[37]
David Randall, Mark Rouncefield, and Peter Tolmie. 2005. Fieldwork And Ethnography: A Perspective From CSCW. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 30 (2005), 189 –– 214. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-020-09388-8
[38]
Mohja Rhoads. 2010. Face-to-Face and Computer-Mediated Communication: What Does Theory Tell Us and What Have We Learned so Far?Journal of Planning Literature 25, 2 (2010), 111–122. https://doi.org/10.1177/0885412210382984
[39]
Christopher Ricks. 1967. The style is a viscous fog, through which loom stumbling metaphors. In Marshall McLuhan : hot & cool, Gerald Emanuel Stearn (Ed.). The New American Library Inc., New York, 211–218.
[40]
Jessica Rietze, Isabell Bürkner, Anne Pfister, and Rainer Blum. 2021. Online Focus Groups with and for the Elderly: Specifics, Challenges, Recommendations: Online-Fokusgruppen mit und für Senior*innen: Besonderheiten, Herausforderungen, Empfehlungen. In Mensch und Computer 2021(MuC ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 194–198. https://doi.org/10.1145/3473856.3474300
[41]
David Rozas, Jorge Saldivar, and Eve Zelickson. 2021. The platform belongs to those who work on it! Co-designing worker-centric task distribution models. In 17th International Symposium on Open Collaboration(OpenSym 2021). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479986.3479987
[42]
Judith Schlehe. 2008. Qualitative ethnographische Interviews. In Methoden ethnologischer Feldforschung, Bettina Beer (Ed.). Reimer, Berlin, 91–112.
[43]
Gabriele de Seta. 2020. Three lies of digital ethnography. Journal of Digital Social Research 2, 1 (Feb. 2020), 77–97. https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v2i1.24
[44]
Jolynna Sinanan. 2017. Social Media in Trinidad. UCL Press, London. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787350939
[45]
Cornelia Sinderman, Bernd Lachman, Jon D. Elha, and Christian Monta. 2021. Personality associations with Whats App usage and usage of alternative messaging applications to protect one’s own data.Journal of Individual Differences 42, 4 (Jan. 2021), 167–334. https://doi.org/10.1027/1614-0001/a000343
[46]
Simon Ullrich. 2020. Being ”here”, researching ”there”: Reflecting on Temporal and Spatial Remoteness in Ethnography. http://www.hsozkult.de/event/id/event-93210
[47]
Aleksandra Urman and Stefan Katz. 2020. What they do in the shadows: examining the far-right networks on Telegram. Information, Communication & Society 25, 7 (2020), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1803946
[48]
Roopa Vasudevan. 2021. Share and share unlike: Reciprocity, corporate power, and the open source ethos. New Media & Society(2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211038350
[49]
Ted L. Wattenberg. 2005. Online focus groups used as an accessible participatory research method. In Proceedings of the 7th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility(Assets ’05). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 180–181. https://doi.org/10.1145/1090785.1090819
[50]
Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin Bavelas, and Don D. Jackson. 1967. Pragmatics of human communication: A study of interactional patterns, pathologies, and paradoxes. Norton, New York.
[51]
Mariëlle Wijermars and Tetyana Lokot. 2022. Is Telegram a “harbinger of freedom”? The performance, practices, and perception of platforms as political actors in authoritarian states. Post-Soviet Affairs 38, 1-2 (2022), 125–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2022.2030645
[52]
Sara Wolf, Frauke Mörike, Simon Luthe, Ilona Nord, and Jörn Hurtienne. 2022. Spirituality at the Breakfast Table: Experiences of Christian Online Worship Services. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ’22 Extended Abstracts). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1 – 7. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3519856
[53]
Miriam Yom and Thorsten Wilhelm. 2004. Web Usability-Tests mit qualitativen Methoden am Beispiel von Online-Fokusgruppen (Web Usability-Testing and Qualitative Methods – A Case-Study with Online-Focus Groups). i-com 3, 1 (Jan. 2004), 22–28. https://doi.org/10.1524/icom.3.1.22.32966
Index Terms
- Visible - Uncertain - Invisible: Reflections on Team Communication Flows in Digitally Mediated Ethnographic Fieldwork
Recommendations
On becoming a sociomaterial researcher: Exploring epistemological practices grounded in a relational, performative ontology
AbstractWhat is the role of the researcher in a world that is continuously enacted and reconfigured in sociomaterial practices, a world in which subject and object, structure and agency, body and mind, knower and known, are assumed to be ...
Highlights- The paper contributes to the development of epistemological practices available to draw upon for researchers assuming a sociomaterial approach.
Who is “I”?: Subjectivity and Ethnography in HCI
CHI '24: Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsHCI research applies ethnographic methods to understand and represent practices that involve the use of interactive systems. A subdomain of this work is interpretivist ethnography, which positions the researcher's perspectival view [37] as central to ...
Bridging Work Practice and System Design: Integrating Systemic Analysis, Appreciative Intervention and Practitioner Participation
This article discusses the integration of work practice and system design. By scrutinising the unfolding discourse of workshop participants the co-construction of work practice issues as relevant design considerations is described. Through a mutual ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
October 2022
1091 pages
ISBN:9781450396998
DOI:10.1145/3546155
Copyright © 2022 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 08 October 2022
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
- Research
- Refereed limited
Conference
NordiCHI '22
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 379 of 1,572 submissions, 24%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 87Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)26
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4
Reflects downloads up to 10 Feb 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign inFull Access
View options
View or Download as a PDF file.
PDFeReader
View online with eReader.
eReaderHTML Format
View this article in HTML Format.
HTML Format