Reconstruction 9.1 (2009)

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Technology and Women's Lives: Queering Media Ethnography / Irmi Karl

Abstract: This article offers a re-examination and re-articulation of ethnographic approaches towards the study of media audiences and the consumption and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). In particular, it aims to highlight the challenges faced by researchers undertaking fieldwork in so-called familiar cultural settings. Based on insights gained from a longitudinal study into the ICT consumption practices of female-headed households in Brighton, UK, it seeks to re-vitalize the ethnographic imagination by asking: how can we, in an age of mobile media cultures, consolidate on- and offline encounters and overcome anxieties around boundary crossings expressed through the prevailing heteronormative frameworks that underpin much of contemporary research project design and fieldwork practices? Furthermore, it is argued that in order to achieve ethnographic accomplishment, the factor of time in and for research needs to be re-discovered and re-thought.

Introduction

<1> Ethnographic approaches towards the study of media audiences and the consumption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) vary greatly in their use of interviewing and observational techniques in ‘familiar' or ‘foreign' cultural environments. One of the strengths of ethnography is that it offers various and multiple method choices, calling for a particular kind of inventiveness on the part of the researcher. This article critically reflects on the challenges faced by qualitative, and more specifically, ethnographic modes of enquiry into the uses and consumption of (new) ICTs in everyday life in an era of rapid technological change and mobility.

<2> Based on a longitudinal ethnographic study (1998-2005) into the ICT consumption of female-headed households in Brighton, UK, this article highlights and engages with methodological questions and fieldwork experiences that emerge from a holistic enquiry into the relationship between gender and sexual identities and the processes of gendering of ICT consumption. It hereby establishes a dialogue between media studies, gender and technology studies, queer theory/sexual geography and feminist sociology/anthropology.

<3> On the basis of the insights gained, it re-visits and re-articulates questions regarding ethnography and reflexivity from a feminist perspective by highlighting the importance of gender and sexual identities-–as analytical categories as well as practices performed by researchers and research participants alike. Furthermore, it argues that in order to examine and illustrate the cultural complexities of ICT consumption, boundaries between the ‘familiar' and ‘foreign', public and private have to be conceptually and methodologically bridged. Finally, this article stresses the importance of resisting some of the current trends to single out specific new ICTs and sites of interaction as the sole focus of fieldwork or to conduct research at the speed the technologies themselves seem to command. As technologies and everyday cultures become increasingly mobile and communities are simultaneously (re)constructed in on- and offline environments, it is particularly important to ask how such developments transform the experience of fieldwork itself in order to make this experience transparent and integral to the stories we tell.

A Story Towards Ethnographic Encounters

<4> Eyebrows flicker, followed by a nuanced pause: "You actually want to live with people... in their homes?" Pause. "Is it possible?" This kind of reaction from (non) academics and (potential) research participants alike on occasion of outlining my research project on women and their everyday techno-practices indicates not only the extent to which privacy is variously circumscribed and guarded in contemporary Western society; it also hints at the potential limitations of and risks taken in ethnographically informed encounters. What could possibly justify and necessitate such a ‘move'? At this point, the stories of my emergent research design, insights gained during fieldwork, and the production and dissemination of findings already converge. The outcomes are very much based on the momentary as much as the retrospective, to allow us to seek and understand possible futures.

<5> In the late 1940s, Jules Henry identified in his paper The Common Problems of Research in Anthropology and Psychiatry (1948) the lack of scientific knowledge of family life regarding an understanding of emotional illness. He believed that direct observation of families in their ‘native' habitat while going about their usual business would furnish new insights and suggest new ideas for prevention and treatment. Some 20 years later, Henry presented his findings based on subsequent home visits in Pathways to Madness (1971). Whilst working with the Rosenberg family, he even occupied a room within the house, staying for the duration of one week. The force of his conviction about situated research, although itself an expression of its time, still resonates today:

I am repelled by the artificiality of experimental studies of human behavior because they strip the context from life. They take away from it the environment, without which is has no meaning, without which it has no envelope. I require the actuality of what is nowadays called the ‘existing human being' as he lives his [sic] real life. I have to see that person before me; and what I cannot see as that actuality, what I cannot hear as the sound of that voice, has little interest for me. Human life fills me with a wild, intoxicated curiosity (Henry 1971: XV).

<6> Reading Henry during the early stages of my research preparations and already acutely aware that my interest in ICT consumption and mediation would challenge his conception of ‘actuality' and ‘immediacy' straight away in some cases, I nevertheless found his premise to go to and stay in the places where ‘things' happen utterly compelling. In short, I wanted to (re)discover the importance of context, environments and persons at a time when cultural studies and, more specifically, media ethnography seemed to hit an impasse with regards to its efforts to generate sufficiently empirical and ethnographic work (Willis cf. Morley, 2007: 21).

<7> I will return to the discussion of criticisms and limitations of media ethnography more fully later on. For now, I want to evoke Henry once more: to raise the question of ‘fieldwork at home' (that is ‘in a home' as much as, more broadly speaking, a ‘familiar' cultural environment) and his refusal to offer a preconceived ‘typology',

because human phenomena do not arrange themselves obligingly in types but, rather, afford us the spectacle of endless overlapping. Hence I have no family ‘types' and no statistics, only intensive analysis of a variety of family experience. The less we know about family life the easier it is to set up categories, just as the less data we have the easier it is to write history (Henry 1971: xv-xi).

Like many anthropologists and sociologists before and after, the question of the presence of the researcher distorting everyday (family) life engaged Henry. Nevertheless, he maintained the claim for the validity of his findings in arguing that the family as a culture has a relatively stable structure of behavioural patterns, which are not that easily changed.

When an observer is in the home, playing the role of the benign relative who, while making no demands and getting involved in no family disputes, at the same time makes himself [sic] useful, the family becomes accustomed to him [sic]. The factor of custom cannot, however, be considered apart from the problem of strain. Though a family may wish to protect itself from the eyes of the observer, its members cannot remain on guard constantly and everywhere, for the strain is too great (Henry 1971: 485).

<8> Having undertaken research into the gendered ICT practices in lesbian and gay households and families prior to the project in question (Karl 1995), I was already aware of the relative limitations of in situ semi-structured interviewing by itself. The findings of this study would necessarily be limited to representing momentary (timed constrained), one-off glimpses of household and family structures within which everyday ICT practices are embedded. Also, the spatial geography of everyday life may be centred around a house, a home, a household or family, even in conversational narratives the boundaries between public and private, leisure and (home)work are constantly breached and reworked, necessitating perhaps a longer-term ethnographic encounter that is at once located and centred as well as mobile in order to create a more multi-layered composite.

<9> In an interview by Claudio Flores, Media Studies scholar David Morley reflects on academic accounts of methodological choices and the ways in which they can appear "inevitable." He refers to the strong "post-hoc" dimension of research and the fact that "they often feel forced into positions in which, in retrospect, they have to be able to give you a very confident account of what they were doing, whereas, if you'd been there at the time, they were probably rather less sure of themselves and were making quite a lot of incidental choices" (Morley 2007: 71). As such, the example of my encounter with Jules Henry serves as just one instance of how fieldwork becomes already envisaged and shaped through a mere grappling with assertions and ideas. It also reflects insecurities and uncertainties with regards to what may be possible under constantly evolving circumstances. Given my interest in the role of ICT consumption in people's lives, especially with reference to the ways in which gender and sexual identities intersect and are produced through techno-encounters, one of the main concerns was to develop a strategy to release and make visible the performative qualities of identity production, in space and over time within everyday life. Would living with people give me more insight into their everyday practices and routines than mere visits and ‘long conversations' (Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley 1991)? How was I to justify and negotiate my presence? (Henry's brief and credentials were clearly very different to that of any media researcher.) Although Henry evaded to seek out and to produce ‘family types', he nevertheless worked with what could be described as heterosexual nuclear families, trusting in the relative stability of behavioural patterns as not being easily interrupted or changed by a stranger. Questioning the notion of cultural stability itself in such households and families, would ‘alternative' households and families as well as forms of living pose even greater challenges in terms of doing research ‘at home' and ‘in the home'? How was I to identify research sites and fields without predetermining categories of living? What more could be said about practices of ICT consumption in ‘the home' and beyond as there had already been at that point?

Problems and Opportunities – Expanding the Field of Media Ethnography

<10> Patrick D. Murphy and Marwan M. Kraidy point us towards some of the problems which beset the early history of media reception and audience ethnography in media and communication studies. In their view, influenced by cultural studies, "theoretical growth [nevertheless] occurred at the expense of methodological development," resulting in "increasingly textual and rhetorical usage of ethnography" rather than "participant observation and description" (Murphy and Kraidy 2003: 3). They highlight three reasons for this emergence of "quasi-ethnographic" studies: the cost factor of long-term extended fieldwork; the theoretical concerns regarding ethnography's connection with colonialism and Western discourse in the light of poststructuralist, postmodern and postcolonial critiques; and, fundamentally, the difficulties found within the field experience itself:

How does one ‘participate' in the somewhat ‘closed' contexts (bedroom, automobile, living room, headphones, etc.) of much media consumption? Unlike the less closed-in and more performative-ritualized spaces that have been the customary sites for ethnographic inquiry throughout anthropology's history, media technologies are creating increasingly intimate, microcosmic and virtual reception environments and practices. This makes the notion of participant observation of media audiences extremely arduous in many cases, and suggests a rethinking of what constitutes doing fieldwork (Murphy and Kraidy 2003: 4).

<11> In order to develop responses towards these problems and questions and to point towards possible ‘future' avenues, it is worth outlining the trends and developmental stages of media and audience reception research over 40 years or so. As Pertti Alasuutari (1999) asserts, the emergence of the ‘first generation' reception research is often tied to Stuart Hall's encoding/ decoding essay (1974), signalling a linguistic or semiotic turn and making media ‘effects' more a question of people's interpretations than previously thought in behaviouralist theory. However, as Alasuutari points out, "from the perspective of the encoding/decoding model it appears that the ideological effects of programming are dependent on the particular strategic moment when the encoded media message enters the brain of the individual viewer", leading to "an obsession with ‘determinate moments', especially the moment of ‘decoding' in reception research" (Alasuutari 1999: 4). Putting the theory to the test so to speak, the ‘second generation' of audience and reception research took an empirical turn, by moving towards ‘audience ethnography'. From analysing programmes and studying their reception by particular audiences by means of in-depth interviewing, a growing interest in identity politics and everyday life experiences re-articulated and somewhat de-centred the focus on media audiences towards an understanding of "the role of the media in everyday life, not the impact (or meaning) of everyday life on the reception of a programme" (Alasuutari 1999: 5). Importantly (and I will come back to this shift) audience ethnography was also enriched by concerns about the consumption of television and other information and communication technologies as technological objects as well as ‘texts' under the ‘domestication' paradigm (Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley 1991, 1992 and Silverstone 1994). According to Alasuutari, the ‘third generation's' quest is to further broaden the frame:

One does not necessarily abandon ethnographic case studies of audiences or analysis of individual programmes, but the main focus is not restricted to finding out about the reception of ‘reading' of a programme by a particular audience. Rather, the objective is to get a grasp of our contemporary ‘media culture', particularly as it can be seen in the role of the media in everyday life, both as a topic and as an activity structured by and structuring the discourses within which it is discussed (Alasuutari 1999: 6).

Media ethnography in this context is re-envisaged as a ‘project' that can benefit from the ‘cultural familiarity' of the researcher (the assumption being that media ethnography is mostly undertaken ‘at home'). In this context, "we have the advantage of a very long personal field experience … In light of our abundant field experience, it is ridiculous to think of media ethnography in terms of so-and-so many months of participant observation: ‘fieldwork' has actually started years before we knew anything about a particular site we are going to study" (Alasuutari1999: 8).

<12> Arguably, this ‘new' project has been under way for some years now but not necessarily yielded very different methodological approaches towards creating an ethnographic imagination of media and ICT consumption. Ethnographically inflected studies of ‘media, home, and family' for example (see Hoover, Schofield Clark and Alters 2004; Mackay and Ivey 2004; Livingstone 2002; Lally 2002) produced a host of, at times, intimate accounts of the politics of family living and ICT consumption in the US, UK and Australia. Home visits and (repeat) interviewing of family and household members formed the basis for subsequent ‘accounts'. More and more, the emphasis has shifted away from television in order to engage with and explain the integration of ‘new' media into people's everyday life. In this context, the emergence of Internet ethnography shifted fieldwork into the virtual realm and, as such, seemingly provided a new focus and dimension in research and perhaps as much as a ‘specialism' in the research community (Hine 2000, 2005). As the importance of the relationship between on- and off-line is being increasingly acknowledged and exercised in order to avoid techno-centric perspectives (Mackay 2005; Karl 2007) to interpret ‘text' in the light of ‘context', the question of the possibility of ‘immersion' in multiple field(s) as well as fieldwork practice itself needs to be re-evaluated.

<13> There clearly is a sense that, over time, distinctions have been drawn between the virtual and the real space/fieldwork, and domestic and ‘mobile' consumption of ICTs. ‘Boundary crossings' and ‘fluidity' are arguably accentuated by but not necessarily unique to our experiences through new media (Mackay 2005). In the same instance, the idea in social anthropology "that one could study holistically a physically and socially bounded community or society" is itself, as I would argue, a (historical and cultural) construct, as "the boundary of any study will, to a degree, be defined arbitrarily" (Mackay 2005: 134). As Hine points out, re-considering past approaches, it is hard not to feel anxious or threatened in our sense of security of membership of a community of research practice (Hine 2005). There is also an anxiety around new forms of ‘mobile privatisation' (Williams 1992), a move towards privatised micro-rituals so to speak, which seemingly pose threats to our ways of looking: participation observation appears to succumb to more and more sophisticated exercises in ‘tagging', ‘bookmarking' and virtual ‘walk-throughs' to capture the life worlds of the user/consumer of new ICTs (Livingstone 2004). As the possibilities and need to capture increasingly complex techno-practices grows, the researchers own techno-ability and literacy may itself be challenged, binding the observational field yet again. The relationship between text, technology and context, can, for example, be established through interviewing and discourse analysis, but, arguably, the weight of this relationship (and the inter-play between macro- and micro-structures) in space and over time may be better felt through forms of participant observation and long-term immersion in the field(s), let alone allow for the researcher to become accustomed to the particularities and composition of any given research field, no matter how familiar or unfamiliar it may seem to begin with.

<14> Anxieties around access (and the limits of access) to observational fields, around boundaries on the one hand, and (increasingly) too much fluidity and mobility on the other, beset media ethnographies in the Anglo-American tradition perhaps from the beginning. This is also visible in what I would deem an anxiety around boundary crossings in terms of acknowledging and venturing into fields where the use of concepts such as ‘cultural familiarity', ‘home', ‘family', gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity would have to be more fundamentally and explicitly questioned than Alasuutari's above assessment of the task of fieldwork ‘at home' allows for. As the canon of media audience and ICT consumption research has, over the years, exhibited a strong bias towards certain versions of the (nuclear) family unit from a heteronormative perspective (Karl 2007), with some feminist and queer media researchers ‘filling in' on questions of gender, class and sexuality from the sidelines (Seiter et al 1989; Gray 1992; Hermes 1997; Wakeford 2004; O'Riordan and Phillips 2007; Karl 2007b), the relevant questions may well be: just how scared and uncertain are we as media ethnographers in the light of the ‘messiness' of everyday life as lived by others; how much can be learnt through the observation of the prevention or inability of access to certain realms and texts; and how much are we prepared to observe and recognise diversity as one of the shaping factors of our social world on micro- and macro-levels.

Queering Feminist Media Ethnography

<15> In her reflections on the contribution of feminist politics and scholarship to the study of audiences, Ann Gray points out that such endeavours are often ironically seen as "examples of the de-politicization of media studies" in accounts of the history of reception studies and that "very little close attention has been given to the specificity of these studies and their aims" (Gray 1999: 22). She points towards a rift, a "gendered division of the field", where, in some accounts, a distinction is being made between those audience studies contributing towards "'the public knowledge project'" (focusing on factual media, broadcasting and the press) and those contributing to "'the popular culture project'" (focusing on fictional and entertainment texts): "the result is that feminist-inspired work (often situated within and ‘labelled' as the latter) is constantly kept on the margins of media studies" (Gray 1999: 25).

<16> I agree with Gray that feminist-inspired studies are causing ‘trouble' to some of the established ways of approaching audiences, and arguably, to the gender and sexual politics of academia and academic institutions themselves. Importantly, feminist-inspired work has examined power relationships in the domestic sphere, with reference to class, gender and, in some instances, race and ethnicity (Gray 1999: 30-1). In the light of critics who point towards the ‘limitations' of micro-level attention, Gray argues:

What underpins the questions and problematics of the studies are those of agency and structure. Studies show how public and private are absorbed into the everyday, the mundane, the ordinary. Such studies recognize the false distinctions between micro and macro, and demonstrate how discourses flow in and out of constructions of identity, self, private and public, national, local and global. Boundaries, thus[,] are permeable, unstable and uneasy, demanding a new way of thinking and looking at the ‘audience', the user, the text, and the complexity of relations and discourses which surround and are part of it (1999: 31).

According to Gray, it is important not to pre-determine what may or may not be relevant in our investigations of media consumption: "what reflexive ethnographic studies have suggested is the very boundlessness of media text and audience, of the need to take account of and pay attention to the messiness of everyday life" (1999: 33). In this sense, she suggests that, rather than feminists necessarily moving from consumption analysis to take on ‘political economy' and a perceived ‘public knowledge project', we should ask political economists of media and communication studies "why … their agendas remain closed to the insights of feminist scholarship? These insights would insist that they question their views of the relationship between macro-structures of media and micro-processes of viewing" (1999: 33-4).

<17> As feminist scholars such as Gray have greatly contributed towards pushing forward the agenda of gender and sexual politics, feminist audience and technology studies have, nevertheless, remained within what could be deemed a ‘heteronormative' framework in terms of the chosen ‘sites', ‘audiences' and modes of analysis themselves. Sexual politics in this field remained for most part of the 1990s ‘heterosexual' politics, despite (or perhaps exactly because of) the inroads made by feminist queer theorists in destabilizing gender and sexual identities (Butler 1997,1999; Fuss 1991). What became more and more visible was the marginalization within the margin: studies interrogating the connections between gender and sexuality started to occupy the virtual or cyberqueer edges of feminist media studies (Karl 2007: 48-9). As the ethnographic imagination of queer is still struggling to find its way out of the virtual realm to embrace more fully on/offline consumption of Media and ICTs, and to be taken into account by mainstream media scholarship in its demand to question heteronomativity in any analysis of the media and media consumption, it is also worth re-considering already existing (ethnographic) accounts in feminist audience and technology studies. For example, Catharina Landstrom illustrates in her re-examination of ethnographic work in feminist technology studies how heteronormativity influences even feminist research, resulting into "the divide between a theoretical discourse that fully accepts ‘the end of the binary of femininity and masculinity', and empirical research that ‘relapses into the old [gender] pattern'" (2007: 7). She therefore concludes that:

Heteronormativity is not something that feminist constructivist technology studies bring to their subject matter. However, they have, as of yet, not problematized it, neither in the communities they study, nor in their own analyses; this is in spite of the knowing that it is present in their empirical material and in the wider socio-cultural environment (2007: 11).

Female-headed Households and Alternative Families: Challenging Concepts and Fieldwork Experiences

<18> Ethnographic approaches towards media audiences and ICT consumption are partly in crisis because of the (self-)imposed restrictions on methods, timeframes and ‘access', and the relationship between micro- and macro-politics of everyday life. Additionally, as I have argued above, anxieties around various forms of ‘boundary crossings' have so far prevented even some of the feminist-inspired writers to seek out and address issues of gender and (hetero)sexuality in media and ICT consumption in a concerted effort. In this light, I would like to raise a number of issues and possibilities for the future of media ethnography, by reflecting further on my own research and fieldwork experiences whilst conducting an ethnographic study of five female-headed households in Brighton, located in the south-east of England.

<19> Previously conducted interviews in lesbian and gay households had left me with a strong sense of having only very partially explored connections: between audiences and ICT consumption, media texts and technologies; between household and home; between private and public; and between work, housework and leisure. People's gender and sexual identities resonated and emerged through their narratives about TV programmes, computer use, favourite video games, the ways in which they use (or not use) their mobile phones etc. Nevertheless, what became clear was just how caught up these specific ‘techno-practices' are with everyday household, family and work politics; their sense of living in Brighton, offering a relatively large and, to some extent diverse, LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) community, signalling opportunities as well as causing frustration. At times, I could recognise myself as a lesbian woman in their accounts; at other times, we did not seem to live in the same city, sharing few common cultural references. I also experienced a diverse range of forms of (family) living, which rarely get acknowledged in media and cultural discourse. The possibility to share people's everyday lives in more ways than through in-situ interviewing and observation over extended periods of time seemed potentially fruitful as a means of literally and virtually tracing and probing the connections, which criss-cross people's life worlds.

<20> For my next study, I re-thought the kinds of households I wanted to engage with and decided to focus on women--partly a political and emancipatory move, as we are often still under-researched. Rather than concentrating on lesbian or queer identified women only, sexuality became a ‘variable', as I aimed to probe hetero- and homonormativities, the fluidity of sexual identities and the ways in which they may intersect with gender identities through ICT consumption (rather than pre-determining the domain of sexuality yet again as posing questions for queer, lesbian or gay participants only). Once more, Brighton (my ‘home town' for some years by then) was the chosen location: to travel far and often (or to immerse myself in for a long period of time in another place and communities) was financially not viable; at the same time, the links I had already fostered in this city seemed advantageous. I ended up working with five ‘women-headed' households and families, including a student household where the women identified as straight, queer or bi-sexual, a lesbian single mother, as well as a nominally ‘straight'-identified single mother and a woman living on her own. They were not chosen on the premise that they were particularly technology rich households as such, as I was more interested in how they would negotiate and make use of the media and ICTs they had.

<21> To choose female-headed households as the centre-stage and starting point for empirical research allows us to re-direct the focus of study onto a diverse field of living conditions and forms of cohabitation (Karl 2007: 58). To conceptualize female-headed households is not an easy task, as they are signified by their diversity, rather than similarities. Nevertheless, it can signal a women-centred approach in terms of its focus as well as methodological underpinnings, as demonstrated particularly in feminist-inspired research practices (Reinharz 1992: 52). Secondly, it highlights the tensions and theoretical blind spots regarding the relationship between "gender, power, the family and the household" (McKie, Bowlby and Gregory 1999: 9). In this context, David Morgan suggests that "the term ‘family' is best employed as an adjective rather than as a noun" and employs the term "to refer to kinship and marriage and ‘the expectation and obligations which are associated with this practices'" (cf. McKie, Bowlby and Gregory 1999: 12). I would like to argue that there is still a distinct over-emphasis on ‘marriage' and ‘kinship' in relation to the definition of ‘family'. As a consequence, we may be tempted to sideline research into "‘families of choice': flexible but often strong and supportive networks of friends, lovers and even members of families of origin which provide the framework for the development of mutual care, responsibility and commitment for many self-identified non-heterosexuals" (Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan 1999: 111) or, more generally speaking, any kind of household and family relationship that does not involve a woman, a man and possibly children. The households and domestic cultures that I encountered did not necessarily always represent forms of family living and kinship; however, they allowed me to question and re-think these very notions.

<22> As Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley have pointed out, "all ethnographies require, in large measure, the reinvention of the methodological wheel" (Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley 1992: 206) and have to be developed to suit the ‘locale'. Their study of nuclear families and ICT consumption was mainly based on interviewing and participant observation during their visits, bolstered by time-use diaries, household maps, technology lists and network diagrams. In their experience, the researcher would often be the focus during their visits and constitute the centre of household activities. Nevertheless, underlying patterns would come to the surface during those visits. They had chosen to study nuclear families by taking "account of the fact that not only were such families still the largest single household unit in British society, but that they still occupied a fundamental ideological position in British culture" (Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley 1992: 208). Recruitment took place through the offices of a market-research recruitment agency, to start with, and later on through schools.

<23> With a different, more fluid and ‘open-ended' field in mind, how would I locate and identify households? Given the pressures Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley experienced in their project with regards to causing tensions and interruptions in the households they visited, would a longer period of immersion in the field, ‘living in' with people prove impossible, or would it resolve some of the tension, creating more space for reflexive research participation? What exactly constituted my ‘locale' in the first place?

<24> The process of fieldwork for my entire project span the best of eight years, something that was not as such anticipated, but illustrates how relatively timed projects (originally I intended to conduct fieldwork over the period of two years) can evolve and grow into longitudinal studies. Also, I did not ‘find' all the households at once. Rather, I started with a ‘pilot' study of one household, testing the ground and developing more detailed ways of working and being in the field, whilst putting the word out through networks of friends and colleagues as well as through previous research participants. Quite a few interested parties, understandably, declined after learning about the intensity of our involvement through visits, interviews, shared activities and perhaps a period of living in their households; others showed themselves more open to the idea. Issues around sexuality (and the prospect of talking about their sexuality) also posed certain barriers from the start, and a number of initial long conversations remained exactly that. My entry into the lives of these women and their children was initially strongly dependent on the fact that I am a woman myself, whilst my sexuality seemed the more ready key in some instances. The reasons given for participation ranged from what was described as ‘curiosity' about ‘being researched', an ‘exotic' experience which some hoped would give them more insights into their own everyday lives, to more overt political motivations, welcoming the idea that more light may be shed on women and sexuality. As such, the women in my project where self-selected, predominantly white (one of the women who shared the student household was Asian) and from working or middle-class backgrounds.

<25> Diane L. Wolf identifies power as a central dilemma for feminists in fieldwork: "the unequal hierarchies or levels of control that are often maintained, perpetuated, created, and re-created during and after field research" (Wolf 1996: 2). She highlights three interrelated dimensions, spanning power differences resulting from different positionalities of the researcher and researched (for example race, class, sexuality, nationality, life chances, urban-rural backgrounds); power expressed through the research process as well as postfieldwork period (ibid). In her view, "there is now a great deal of research about women by women, but there is not much academic feminist research ‘with' and ‘for' women. … It is difficult to change power differences during and after fieldwork without radically changing the kind of research that is done and, therefore, without confronting and challenging the structure of academia" (Wolf 1996: 3). Subsequently, it is never without a certain amount of unease, and nervous tension, that I sit alone in front of the computer in an attempt to (re)produce, articulate and ‘share' experiences in ways that remain meaningful to the women involved in the project as well as academic communities. Yet it is this unease and tension that also acts as a productive and constant companion and reminder of the field and its power in/equalities, in fact, drawing me back into it, further blurring the boundaries between planning, undertaking and writing research, between researcher and ‘researched'.

<26> In terms of power relationships, it was crucial to experience (and try to work through) emerging tensions between how I envisaged the households, families, gender and sexual politics during the early planning stages and how these were challenged and subsequently developed over time during in situ encounters. I became increasingly aware that not only had I already positioned the women in many ways from the start, but also that they (re)positioned me as a stranger/researcher, lesbian woman, potential friend, in/outsider in their communities. In a number of cases, their curiosity about ‘being researched' quickly turned into a curiosity about ‘our' researcher and translated into various degrees of objectification and ‘ownership' of myself. In many instances I experienced their probing questions into my life as challenging, uncomfortable, revealing and rewarding in ways they may have experienced my enquiries into their lives. Together we explored gender politics, class and racial differences and sexual identities, solved ‘computer problems' and discussed virtual relationships, but also experienced the limitations of what can be expressed in any kind of relationship. Some of the women clearly regarded our acquaintance as ‘work in progress', while others chose to see it as the beginning of a friendship. In the end, many of the women knew much more about my personal life than I originally intended or anticipated in fear of losing research perspective and ‘distance'. At the same time, I experienced the rewards of developing multiple and increasingly self-reflexive research positions that allowed me not only to better recognize differences and power hierarchies but also to actively engage with them. With predominantly questions of gender, sexuality and technology on my mind when I entered the field, the women made me at times painfully aware of the role played by class and racial difference in their everyday lives and indeed how ‘our' relationship was classed and raced (in fact, how comparatively little I had thought of/was prepared to engage with surrounding issues thus far). Also, though some of them showed a keen interest in ‘sharing' and commenting on my (academic) writings about our experiences, others showed no interest in this particular form of distribution, expressing a sense of recognition, but also removal. For them, the experience of working and living together itself held the key for potential (self)empowerment/reflection – as much as being at times exhausting, full of frictions and ‘fun'. In this sense, ‘doing fieldwork at home' throws up similar if not the same fundamental questions about power relationships in research as it should anywhere, anytime.

Doing fieldwork at home

<27> To do fieldwork at home has a number of theoretical and practical implications. Shirley Ardener, addressing the problems of fieldwork in familiar settings, points towards the tensions between the need for both empathy and detachment which faces all anthropologists, yet it appears often forgotten by those who argue against the ‘insider' working in her or his own society, as opposed to the ‘outsider', transplanted to an exotic setting. Many anthropologists who do study their own society have tended to seek out people whose values and live-styles are different in order to provide the requisite ‘culture shock', but without the foreign travel (Ardener 1998: 129-30). In her critique of those conventions within anthropology, which would insist that the selection of fieldwork sites has to be based on cultural, social and spatial distance as a gauge of ethnographic authenticity, Vered Amit poignantly observes that

The boundary between anthropological field and home which has so often been demarcated by the metaphor of travel has incorporated a presumption that ‘home' is stationary while the field is a journey away. It is a presumption which is undone as much by the cognitive and emotional journeys which fieldworkers make in looking at familiar practices and sites with new ethnographic lenses as by the transnational organization of many academics' lives (Amit 2000: 8).

<28> Doing fieldwork at home, Karin Norman writes, can be rewarding as well as difficult in a number of aspects: the closeness allows for fieldwork to be undertaken over long periods of time, and can be combined with other work and family-related commitments. The end of fieldwork means not visiting anymore rather than leaving. Furthermore, "working at home can make the anthropologist appear (and feel) like ‘one of us' who is expected to share certain cultural values and social experiences, to ‘know'; or, alternatively the anthropologist can be seen as different, a representative of the ‘majority' and the powerful who might then be seen as to have political or economic influence" (Norman 2000: 122). There is also the possibility that ‘the field' may lose the otherwise more specific boundaries and spill over in the researcher's private live, "something that can be both emotionally and intellectually rewarding or quite difficult to manage, emotionally, and also practically" (Norman 2000: 122). Finally, as Amit-Talai, reflecting on her research with youth in inner-city Montreal, points out: "ethnographic research in one's home city is not easier than research far from home. It can be much harder, demanding a degree of self-consciousness that anthropologists may aspire to everywhere but find especially acute in the conflicts generated by this kind of ethnographic fieldwork" (cf. Caputo 2000: 26).

<29> At this stage, I would like to briefly return to Alasuutari's claim with regards to our ‘abundant field experiences' already in place when undertaking media ethnographies from the ‘home' perspective of ‘cultural familiarity'. The following is an edited extract from my field diary, written on the day where I would, after a three-month period of (preparatory) interviews, long conversations and observation, move into the student household for the period of one week:

More packing. Why do I always end up with so much stuff. It felt funny to tell Peter [my flatmate] that I will be, again, away for some time, and then add, ‘but I am still in Brighton, almost literally down the road'. Thinking about doing research at home, it nevertheless feels like I am on a journey. It surprises me every time how strange everything becomes.

Having grown up in Germany but lived and worked in England for some years at this stage, immersed in the culture and language, in fact considering it my home, I nevertheless had to continually ‘re-address' my position and cultural familiarity in this context. As the boundaries between being at home and doing research at home constantly revolved and shifted, my position in the field as a white continental European resonated alongside and was inflected in other aspects of my ‘multiple selves' (Darling-Wolf 2003) such as gender, sexuality and class. This is not to contend with arguments regarding the possibility of cultural familiarity and doing fieldwork at home as such. Nevertheless, this is to argue for the necessity to recognise the variations, nuances and limitations within any such claim, and the need for reflexive positionalities of the researcher and her/his research. It is also to say that, as a lesbian woman with no children, it was not necessarily easier to comprehend the life world of the lesbian household, than it was, for example, in the case of the straight woman with two children, although different sets of challenges emerged. As already pointed out above, in some instances, issues around class (difference), religion and race exercised us more than issues around gender and sexuality. Some of the women themselves had been internationalized over the years through extensive travel, work and living abroad, or came from a different or hybrid cultural background, collapsing the boundaries between familiar and foreign in themselves. Over an eight-year period, I was in many ways privileged in being allowed to observe, engage with and learn from the live experiences of a diverse range of women. As household compositions reconfigured, family relationships and friendship-networks expanded and contracted, existing love relationships collapsed and new ones were formed, new houses and flats were bought or rented, my own life became in parts intertwined with theirs. Over this time period, I became aware of the multitude of forms of living, which, if only glanced at, are easily over-looked or sidelined. Although fieldwork at home may start years before we enter any given field, we ought not to underestimate the necessity of spending time in and across particular cultural environments and continually question the very notion of cultural familiarity itself.

<30> This eight year journey allowed me to experience, explore and probe the limits of cultural familiarity, professionally as well as personally. The project enabled me to grow, to a certain extent, ‘familiar' with a diverse range of (sub)cultural practices through the eyes of the participants, but also to continuously question my own identity as a researcher and professional, lesbian women and ‘southerner' by choice. Looking back, it fostered a rather more self-conscious sense of myself and the ways in which I (re)produce familiarity and distance in and beyond the field as well as the recognition that these processes can never be complete.

Conclusion: Towards Mobile (but not necessarily) Speedy Ethnographic Futures

<31> Jules Henry's notion of living in households with families became, over the years, a research practice and, perhaps even more importantly, a metaphor, a reminder of a particular kind of research commitment. In practice, it constituted (at its most successful) a week of living with the women and their children, usually after a few months of regular visits and various forms of interviewing and before an extended period of re-visits, sharing home, leisure and work experiences. These periods constituted a marker in terms of developing and deepening trust and opening up the field of vision to experience activities beyond the domestic sphere; meet some of their friends, extended families, and colleagues; develop a sense of their (virtual) social networks; and map the (virtual) geographies and locales of their everyday lives. These periods became, later on, also markers of change in terms of the women's techno-practices and gendered and sexual selves over time. It highlighted how un/stable, fractured and temporary forms of living are and the ways in which public and private worlds, micro and macro levels intersect.

<32> Living in and a longer-term investment in ethnographic encounters do not necessarily solve all of the problems we seem to struggle with in media ethnography at the moment; neither is it always possible or desirable. No matter how established and trusting the relationship between researcher and participants, there are always barriers and limits to what we can observe and capture in space and over time. Participating in people's lives very quickly teaches us that ICTs are not consumed in isolation, that on-and offline encounters are not separate experiences in someone's everyday life. The quality of participation we seek in our efforts may change in the sense that we as researchers have to push our own understanding of participation. This also means that we have to re-consider the notions of private and public in the research context itself. Anxieties around access to certain observational fields can in part be an expression of a desire to dominate (in) the field, rather than to weigh and evaluate cultural aspects and their relationships. As ethnographers need to interpret the silences in conversations, we also need to learn how to interpret (and work around) silences in the visual and temporal field. A technology focused or media-centric perspective of everyday life may in fact not be helpful in this context (Morley 2006) as it can distract us from taking into account and taking accounts of everyday life itself.

<33> How can ethnographic imagination and practice keep up in an arguably increasingly fast-paced, de-centred and mobile (global) media environment that puts the very notions of the ‘domestic' and ‘home' under strain? Maren Hartmann reviews the shortcomings and potential of media ethnography in the particular context of mobile media usage. She suggests that in studies thus far, "only specific aspects of ethnography have ... been applied and what is missing is the mobility of the researcher him- or herself" (Hartmann 2006: 273). With reference to George Marcus' essay on ‘multi-sited ethnography' (1998), she highlights the importance of "taking mobile positions": "mobile ethnography ... needs to be mobile in the widest sense of the word and examines the circulation of meanings, identities, objects, etc. in diverse time-space constellations. Hence the cultural formation, not a set of subjects is the object of study". The recognition of movement is important, "both for the researcher as well as recognising it as an object or research. Long-standing assumptions about the connection between space, place and culture are thereby challenged and questioned" (Hartmann 2006: 280-1). Hence, the consideration of ‘mobility' ought to weave itself through any form of ethnographic endeavour and is as such not exclusive to an examination of mobile media culture. In this context, questions of ‘immobility' become particularly pertinent: mobile (media) cultures and lifestyles come at a cost that needs to be carefully assessed, be it through the journeys I have undertaken over the years with groups of women or otherwise. Furthermore, we ought to make more time in/for media ethnography to, for example, "locate technological developments within the cultural processes and associated timescale of domestic diffusion and appropriation" (Livingstone 1999: 60). As Perrti J. Pelto puts it: "the demand for quick results from ethnographic work is one of the major influences current in the applied social sciences" (cf. Wolcott 1999: 197). This is not to argue that time alone can guarantee ethnographic accomplishment. However, in a climate of technological, social and cultural change that produces corporate concepts such as ‘rapid ethnography' and research strategies for ‘hurried ethnographers', it is of re-newed interest to work against such time pressures to produce timely "thick descriptions" (Geertz1973).

<34> This paper explored ways in which ethnographic practices and more specifically media ethnography may be re-vitalized and reconfigured in an age of mobile media cultures. In this context, I highlighted some of the challenges and problems faced in relation to questions of participant observation in and access to/across closed and virtual settings. Furthermore, I suggested that notions such as ‘cultural familiarity' and what constitutes the boundaries of the ethnographic field and in field work can be fruitfully re-thought if we, for example, more fundamentally and explicitly question the prevailing bias towards heteronormative perspectives in our research assumptions and chosen research settings, even within feminist inspired ethnographic work. In this sense, new media ethnography must aspire to (re)discover the importance of macro and micro contexts and time investment as much as overcome, and work through, certain anxieties around boundary crossings.

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