Postphenomenology, Ethnography, and the Sensory Intimacy of Mobile Media

This chapter offers an account of the theoretical and methodological approach that was applied to a three-year multi-city research project into domestic practices around digital media, mobile media, and games (in collaboration with Larissa Hjorth, RMIT University). I first provide some conceptual background by explaining an ethnographic approach to media use in everyday life in terms of the “sensory turn” in theory, situated loosely under the rubric of new materialism and deeply informed by postphenomenology, an area first theorized by Don Ihde. In particular, I identify the particular insights that a postphenomenological method can offer haptic media studies and ethnographic research, as it considers how digital and mobile media are literally “realized” or “corporealized” through the body. Our research clearly shows that the bodily methods of interfacing with the materiality of the mobile screen are of paramount importance to participants’ engagement. Mobile games and media interfaces are evidently integral to our embodied ways of knowing, and ethnographies of mobile media must adeptly traverse and interweave material, corporeal, networked, online, and offline contexts. These new “techniques of the body” at play must be accounted for if we are to interpret the complexities and intentionalities of mobile media use.