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CONCLUSION
We have described and presented LAN, a means of combining more traditional approaches to ethnographic work (e.g. observation) with new technologies (e.g. mobile video). We believe that the move from everyday, personalized consumption to everyday co-production through new Web 2.0 technologies means additional opportunities for investigating social life, especially as this ‘social life’ is lead through the digital. This marks a distinct progression from the tools proposed by Crabtree et al (2006) to tools that support unsolicited, naturalistic production of data about social life. We have examined some of such ‘co-produced’ material here to explore what work it can do for the ethnographic enterprise, suggesting it can produce unique, individual views on a setting, a multi-sensory experience of being in a place, insights on extended sequences of actions and interactions and unfolding narratives. As Urry (2002:151) suggests one of the problems ethnography poses is its longevity and the potential intrusion it poses. Yet LAN ushers in another set of concerns with regard to surveillance and acknowledging the rights of those gazed upon, concerns that seem not to be shared by everyone. As services like LAN develop, we suggest there will not only be a series of ‘ready-made’ views on places but also new sets of readily available real-time data on hybrid lives lived through the digital and the physical.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was funded by the National University of Singapore project “The Use Of Geoweb Applications and the Mobile Internet For Environmental and Heritage Sites”. Very special thanks to the LAN team comprising the students Inosha Wickrama, Muhammad Farkhan B Salleh, Muhammad Shafi B Rafie, Tan Xiu Fang Vu Giang Thanh and the academic staff member, Foong Pin Sym for their work on this project. We thank Muhammad Farkhan B Salleh for permitting use of images captured during the field study in this paper. We especially thank reviewers for their comments that have contributed greatly to this next iteration of the paper.
Denisa Kera is an Assistant Professor in the Communications and New Media Programme, National University Of Singapore. Her research interests include New Media Theory, Science and Technology Studies and topics in Digital Culture and Art. Her recent work is exploring the integration of mobile, Internet and map technologies for cultural heritage sites.
Connor Graham is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Science, Technology, and Society Cluster at the Asia Research Institute and Honorary Fellow in the Department of Information Systems, The University of Melbourne. His interests lie in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and the use of ethnography for design. Recently he has focused on the use of everyday, ‘social’ technologies in people’s lives.
Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings 2010, pp. 149–169. © American Anthropological Association, some rights reserved.
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