Mobile media matters: the ethnography and phenomenology of itinerant interfaces

Digital ethnography has emerged as one response to the study of digital, mobile, and networked media in everyday life. As proponents of the approach argue, there is no one method but rather such research is methodologically innovative or “mixed,” transdisciplinary, empirical, contextual, and cross-cultural. Digital ethnography may include but is not limited to “virtual ethnography” (an approach that is adaptive to online environments as important sites of exploration), and more broadly focuses on how our engagement with digital media and technological interfaces congure the ways we attend to, communicate, and perceive the world. As we suggest (and as others have suggested), it need not always be media-centric in its analysis of the way digital interfaces are imbricated in and across everyday practices. Moreover, as Horst et al. (2012, 86-7) have noted: The pervasiveness of digital media and technology has spurred renewed attention to the particular capacities, or aordances-a concept that has its roots in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and James Gibson (Norman 1988)—and the constraining and enabling material possibilities of media.