Impersonal methods

I have argued for the importance of inventive methods, which are open to an encounter with difference. However, the challenge remains that many familiar sociological research methods are tied to a recognition model of thought. Qualitative research methods such as the interview and participant observation are, for example, strongly associated with a focus on interpretation and meaning making processes. This is not to say that these methods are necessarily seen as unproblematic instances of objective data collection and much attention has been paid to their intersubjective character. For Norman Denzin (2001), for example, interviews are seen as opportunities for individuals to produce representations of the world in collaboration with the interviewer. Similarly, Carol Warren (2010, p. 83) describes interview participants as ‘meaning makers’ who

convey their experiences to the interviewer through storytelling. As Denzin (1989, p. 10) explains, a ‘basic question drives the interpretive project in the human disciplines: How do men and women live and give meaning to their lives and capture these meanings in written, narrative and oral forms?’ Though the multiplicity of perspectives and meanings is acknowledged in this focus on the intersubjective construction of meaning, the subjective domain of meaning making clearly remains the key point of focus. To put it in more Deleuzian terms, the orientation of the activity of thinking to the thinking subject, defined by the unity of the faculties in the self-same being, prevents a properly transcendental mode of analysis. Again, it is the question of the ability of such a methodological orientation to grasp those emerging realities produced by differentiating forces that is at issue here and it is no surprise, given the privileging of subjective meaning making in discourses on intersubjectivity, that the construction of identity in relation to categories such as class, gender and ethnicity remains the central concern (Warren, 2010; Denzin, 2001).

Like ethnography, autoethnographic research typically takes human experience as its primary object. Carolyn Ellis, Tony Adams and Arthur Bochner (2011, p. 3) describe autoethnography as the use of 'personal experience to demonstrate facets of cultural experiences, and, in doing so, make characteristics of a culture familiar for insiders and outsiders.’ Much of the criticism of autoethnographic methods has been surrounding issues of validity and credibility (Ellis et al., 2011). Like interviews, autoethnography focuses on meaning making and the ‘insider knowledge’ of the researcher (Anderson, 2006). Autoethnographic reflections, then, are often seen as a way of further securing thought’s natural affiliation to the true. Insofar as, for the dogmatic image, method is the way of ensuring that thinking does not stray from the path of truth to which it is naturally oriented, an autethnographic approach has been celebrated as a way to open up new forms of validity in research practice (Ellis et al., 2011).

Whilst methods such as interviews and autoethnography have primarily been employed to draw out conscious experiences, I argue that they can be reappropriated for more generative purposes. Methods like autoethnography and interviewing have been closely reliant on conscious experience, due to theoretical constraints as well as practical ones, but, as J.D. Dewsbury (2010) argues, these methods need not be abandoned. He

suggests that existing qualitative research methods can be attuned to the preindividual, bodily and noncognitive through a performative methodology. Performative methodologies disrupt the habits of research that rely on the dogmatic image of thought, determining the ‘object’ of study according to what counts as thought in this image (Dewsbury, 2010). In contrast to a more representational understanding of research practice, ‘the object of study for performative research literally comes into being through being enacted in the practice of the research itself’ (Dewsbury, 2010, p. 324). ‘Part of the ethos of this type of research then is to keep the researcher alive to change and chance’ (Dewsbury, 2010, p. 324), and it is through this openness to the dynamic encounter of research that familiar methods can yield new insights.

Traditional research methods can be reconsidered in light of this performative methodology and can used in experimental ways. Dewsbury (2010) suggests an approach that incorporates paying attention to immediate and somatic experiences, whilst acknowledging the impossibility and even undesirability of completely displacing conscious processes. Sarah Dyke’s (2013) ethnographic study of Anorexia Nervosa provides a useful demonstration of this practice, in which an attentiveness to these moments of excess is cultivated. During an interview, Dyke (2013, p. 159) described an encounter with a participant who, trying to explain the circumstances that had caused her eating disorder, gestures towards this excess:

As she traced the circumstances of her own life I often sensed that something remained problematically inaccessible. She struggled to make sense, not least of all because her good and common sense conceived the body as bordered, fixed, autonomous and intentional.

In the interview, Joanne has difficulty reconciling her understanding of her body as intentional and her experiences of bodily desires, which challenge this very understanding. Rather than seeking to settle or rectify these contradictions, or simply dismissing them as errors, Dyke’s analysis here draws out these moments of tension. It is in these moments, Dyke (2013) argues, that a greater understanding of the preindividuality of the encounter can be gained.

With an eye to becoming attuned to, and drawing out, those moments that exceed conscious awareness and the act of recognition, the empirical aspect of this project focused on unstructured interviews with mobile digital device users. I conducted eighteen interviews with individuals who identified themselves as mobile digital device users, four of whom were also mobile application (app) developers. Participants were selected using a snowball sampling technique (Bryman, 2008), with an initial contact known to me offering referral to other participants. I chose to use an unstructured interview technique, which ‘dispenses with formal interview schedules and ordering of questions’ (Minichiello et al., 1990, p. 92). Though this style of interviewing is often drawn upon with the purpose of creating a space for interpretations and meaning- making practices from participants (Minichiello et al., 1990), more importantly for my purpose this style of interview allowed discussion to shift in unexpected directions. As I will discuss later in this chapter, these unstructured interviews functioned less as data or texts to be read and interpreted and more as encounters or provocations for thought. Given my concern with an ontology of difference, the participants were not intended to serve as a representative sample and the only criteria for selection was that the participant be a mobile digital device user. Prior to the interview, participants were given an information sheet that broadly outlined the aims of the project, and I advised them that the interview would involve a discussion of their device use and habits. The participants ranged in age from eighteen to thirty-five, including ten men and eight women, though again the selection of participants was not controlled for age or gender. I included app developers in the interviews because, in addition to be being regular device users, their work experience positions them to observe habitual mobile digital device use and requires they cultivate the kind of attentiveness to the emergent capacities in these practices towards which this thesis has been oriented. This is not to say that these participants possess specific knowledge in comparison to the other participants on the basis of their identity as designers, but rather that their practices are instructive. The process of designing mobile applications requires developers to anticipate something that cannot be anticipated, and attend to aspects of the mobile digital device that, by their nature, elude our conscious awareness. I drew inspiration here from James Ash’s (2010) study of video game designers, in which he examines the

design and testing of video games. Ash (2010, p. 653) argues that experience of gameplay is ‘a relation between the code space of the game and the embodied techniques users generate in response to these environments’. Video game designers cannot act to shape action deterministically, because it is not possible to fully anticipate how the game tester and game interaction will unfold. Ash (2010) characterises gameplay as an event, in the sense that it is transformative and contingent. Like video games, the development of mobile applications involves a significant interplay between design and testing, both of the functions of the application and of the usability of those functions (Gao et al., 2014; Kaikkonen et al., 2005). Because of their role in the design and testing of apps, I was interested in the reflections of app developers and their understandings of the habitual elements of device use.

The encounter of the interview must be understood not only in terms of its in-the- moment unfolding but also in the light of the repetitions of the recordings, and the practice of transcription. All Interviews were audio recorded, except one upon the request of the participant, which was documented using notes taken down by hand. I later listened to the recordings and transcribed the interviews, whilst reflecting back on notes I had taken during the interview. Whilst these research practices are often undertaken with the purpose of carefully documenting the words exchanged in the interview with the intention of identifying common themes emerging throughout and for the purpose of validity and accuracy (Bryman, 2008, pp. 478–485), it was the generative repetition of difference in the listening that concerned me more. There were moments in the interviews that passed by unnoticed that seemed to stretch out in the recording, expanding in my memory as I typed out the words and further still as I considered what had occurred. Far beyond their actual happening in time, the interview material shifted and transformed throughout the project, with some moments seeming insignificant in situ and proving to have a far stronger echo upon re-listening.

Throughout the interviews and afterwards while putting together the transcripts, I also documented moments where participants would laugh, pause, struggle to explain and engage in other expressions that fail to land on distinct words. I took down notes during all interviews related to aspects of the conversation that would not be picked up on the recording device, including gestures, movements, and facial expressions. I noted, too,

those moments when participants would reach for their device, often left on the table during the interview, sometimes to explain something, sometimes just to touch it. Sometimes I would ask them to show me something specific, and other times participants would show me things without prompting. This provided an opportunity to observe the physical entanglement of user and object, and it was these brief moments that elicited some of the most unexpected aspects of the interview. I documented these moments in my notes and incorporated them into the transcripts of the interviews. Given the interest in the impersonal mode here, the interviews were broadly concerned with participants’ device use and practices, rather than with their interactions with other human subjects through the mobile digital device. Though the interviews were somewhat informed by a list of general questions I had in mind, they were by no means limited to these questions and were driven almost entirely by the conversation as it unfolded. The aim of these questions was not to necessarily gain answers to preformed questions, but rather to get the participant talking more about their everyday routines with the smartphone. The difficulty of conducting an interview about something that many participants saw as unremarkable meant that it was not always possible to get detailed answers to direct questions. Often participants had a sense that the more important and interesting aspects of the issue were related to whether the smartphone or tablet was a ‘good thing’ or not. It was easier to understand the routines established around mobile digital devices by asking participants questions that might elicit a narrative, rather than an ‘answer’ as such. Minichiello et. al (1990, pp. 107–145) describe this as a ‘storytelling’ technique, which involves using questions that require the participant to go beyond a descriptive answer, to explain themselves in further depth. Though this technique can be problematic in its tendency to encourage participants to reform their experiences as linear narratives (Minichiello et al., 1990, pp. 107–145), it can also assist in garnering more detailed accounts when participants might not see the need to expand. For example, participants often responded to a query about when they first use their smartphone during the day with a self-deprecating joke about how ‘terrible’ it was that they woke up to the device. While their perception of what was healthy and not healthy was not a primary concern for this project, asking them to expand on why they felt bad about using their device first thing in the morning opened

up the discussion and allowed the participant to expand their explanation, often leading to them discussing in more depth those moments where they felt their device-use was ‘out of hand’. I found this to be a useful practice, even though the interest of this project was in relations between human and device, not a human subject’s interpretation of their behaviour, as it was in these moments that participants would commonly grasp for the words to describe the often-contradictory desires they felt for the device and what they ‘know’ to be healthy. In particular, offering participants the space to describe practices that they thought of as inappropriate allowed me to observe the interactions with their device that were uneasy or cause discomfort. Moments of confusion or error or contradiction on the part of the participant, moments that might conventionally be discounted as insignificant, became increasingly significant. These rich narratives provided a greater understanding of the intimacy between user and device when the participant might initially be hesitant to describe the relationship in such terms.

Despite using these techniques, there were certainly difficulties in the interviews in encouraging participants to discuss these everyday practices in depth. Some interviews became quite uncomfortable as I attempted to leave breaks in the conversation to allow participants to expand on their point further. Some participants were anxious to establish that they did not need the smartphone or tablet, and that their relationship with the device was healthy, and this is a phenomenon I discuss further in Chapter 5. This anxiety about being seen as abnormal was sometimes a point of tension in the interviews as participants sought to downplay their involvement with the devices. However, these points of tension provided opportunities in which participants would recount details of intimate moments with the device, and though these may be explained for the purpose of illustrating what one ought not to do these moments also caused participants to dwell on these intimacies further. As Dewsbury (2010) insists, we too often encounter the world through those familiar modes of thought that confirm our representational view of the world, and we must acknowledge the impossibility of completely overcoming these limitations. However, Dewsbury (2010) urges that we must continue to fail, and ‘fail better’, since it is only the dogmatic image of thought that renders the very idea of failure in research practice inadmissible. Indeed, it was moments of error, confusion, pause, awkwardness, failure, humour and tension that

have constituted the empirical spark of this thesis. The interviews and the processes of repetition in the listening and relistening afterwards, allowed me to dwell on the moments of tension that suggested that new forms of intimacy with the device were emerging.