From theory to analysis

The first issue this chapter discusses is how the analytical approach employed in this thesis is informed by the postphenomenological theory of mediation developed in the previous chapter. To repeat a crucial point, whereas the mediation of global humanitarianism has predominantly been studied as a dialectical relationship between particular media texts and the social contexts in which they are read and interpreted, this thesis begins by studying the digital media technologies themselves as well as the experiences, interpretations, and beliefs that are invested into them. In doing so, the thesis seeks to generate knowledge about the power relations at play in processes of digital mediation by studying the material configuration of particular digital media technologies, as well as the experiences and imaginaries invested into them, as conducive of specific ways of using them for humanitarian purposes.

We are reminded here that a postphenomenological approach to digital media does not denote a shift in the subject matter of classical phenomenological inquiries—namely how technologies shape human experiences of the world around them—but rather a shift in its methods and philosophical orientations. As noted earlier, such a shift is necessary to account for the many ways in which digital media intersect and interfere with the sensory capacities and perceptual fields of humans. Indeed, whereas the phenomenologists of the 20^th based their analysis of technologically-mediated forms of ‘being’ on abstract ‘arm-chair’ theorizing about technology as a social

and cultural condition, postphenomenologists instead draw methodological inspiration from empirically-grounded disciplines including, but not limited to, ethnography, media studies, and STS (Aagaard et al., 2018). As will be developed in this chapter, this may involve qualitative methods aimed at examining the configuration of the digital media technologies themselves as well as interviews, questionnaires, and auto-ethnography aimed at studying the forms of use and experience related thereto; methods which, together, allow researchers to study how specific technologies interfere with, and shape, the relations between human subjects and the world around them in particular ways in specific contexts.

It should also be noted at the outset that—albeit closely related theoretically—the methodological approach employed in this thesis differs markedly from the methodological approach to the study of digital media that has been adopted by many STS scholars in recent years. Illustrative of this is the work of Richard Rogers, wherein he claims that we cannot begin to understand the socio-political implications of digital mediation without paying attention to the often hidden data infrastructures and flows that underlie them. Therefore, Rogers introduces a distinction between ‘digitized’

and ‘natively digital’ media, where ‘digitized’ refers to the kind of media which have been translated or adopted for the digital sphere and ‘natively digital’

refers to the kinds of media that are unique to the digital age (Rogers 2013).

According to Rogers, whereas the study of ‘digitized’ media might involve traditional methods such as interviews, surveys or similar, studying ‘natively digital’ media technologies additionally requires computational methods such as ‘web crawling,’ ‘data visualisation’ and ‘crowdsourcing’ that allow researchers to follow the often hidden and networked dynamics of digital data infrastructures as they intersect and interfere with social and political life (see also Marres and Gerlitz, 2016).²²

A crucial reason for my choice not to embrace digital-computational methods as enthusiastically as many STS scholars have is the

22 To name one illustrative example, the extraction of meta-data about the spread of particular forms of digital content on Twitter enables scholars to map how political publics are formed by visualizing the patterns and connections forged by the online circulation of images, and hashtags on this online platform (Marres, 2015).

acknowledgement that the hype surrounding the new analytical possibilities afforded by these methods also implicitly enforces the belief that digital data contains information that can be translated into knowledge about the social domain of human interactions. What is implied by this belief is that if social scientists can simply gain access to large amounts of digital data (often referred to as ‘Big Data’) and learn to use the computational tools needed to visualize, analyse, and interpret these vast data sets, we will also be able to generate new insights into the social and political dynamics of digitalized societies. The problem with this belief, however, is that digital data are not untarnished resources of knowledge. As Lupton (2015: 101) writes, rather ‘than pre-existing items of information, digital data are co-produced or co-authored by those who make the software and devices that elicit and archive them, the coders who generate the algorithms in the software and those who use these technologies.’ Because of this, the ‘data that researchers have at hand are always configured via beliefs, values, and choices’ (Lindgren 2019: 2) and, for this reason, knowledge cannot just be derived directly from the analysis of digital data. Moreover, even if a lot of work has been done to combine computational tools and qualitative analysis through mixed-methods frameworks in STS and related fields, these tools are nevertheless not particularly suitable for analysing digital mediation from the postphenomenological perspective applied in this thesis, where the focus is the embodied experiences and hermeneutic frames of interpretation of human users of digital media. For example, it is doubtful if, and unclear how, data analytics can help generate insights into how human subjects involved in processes of digital mediation make sense of and interpret the digital data infrastructures that underpin them.

Rather than drawing on the digital-computational methods that have become prominent across the social sciences in recent years, the postphenomenological approach presented in this chapter instead draws on qualitative research methods from a number of disciplines that have instead adopted a digital-ethnographic approach to the study of digital media. In general terms, a digital-ethnographic approach is characterized by the adaptation of ethnographic, qualitative research methods to the study of societies, cultures, and practices that are generated and maintained through digitally-mediated forms of interaction (Hjorth et al., 2019). Whereas other,

closely related ways of studying the social and cultural dimensions of digital media such as ‘virtual ethnography’ (Hine, 2008) perceives ‘the digital’ as immaterial cyberspaces where disembodied selves form virtual communities, digital ethnographers instead start from the observation that, today, digital media is entirely interwoven with everyday life, at least for most of those living in the Global North. Paraphrasing Hine (2015), digital ethnographers can thus be said to study the ‘embedded, embodied and everyday’ dimensions of digital media and thus, at least implicitly, agree with postphenomenologists that the digital and the non-digital (or the online and the offline, for that matter) cannot be meaningfully separated but must be analysed as intimately interconnected dimensions of human existence.

In theoretical terms, digital ethnographers and postphenomenologists can thus both be said to perceive digital mediation as multi-sited processes that unfold across many socio-technological contexts. To this end, digital ethnography offers a varied selection of methodological tools that can help researchers study and trace these processes across multiple sites of embodied experience and across multiple digital-technological mediums (ibid: 61). To provide an illustrative example, when you see an image of human suffering on Facebook, that image has most likely travelled across multiple online and offline sites, from the geographical site in which it was captured to the device that recorded it; from the platforms on which it circulates and to the offline and online sites in which people talk about and attribute it with meaning. At each site, as digital ethnographers have demonstrated, different methods must be utilized to account for everything from the algorithms that manage the online circulation of the image, the socio-technological contexts in which it is consumed, or the thoughts, ideas, and ambitions of those that published it in the first place. In this sense, the multimodal methodology advocated by digital ethnographers thus allows qualitative researchers to take stock of both the technological materialities of digital media and the social imaginaries that circumscribe their use from multiple analytical vantage points.

Taken together, in adopting a digital-ethnographically inspired approach, this thesis thus performs a multimodal analysis of multi-sited processes of digital mediation. Rather than examining the often invisible data infrastructures and protocols that govern digital media platforms—as STS scholars such as Marres (2015) and Rogers (2013) do—it analyses these

processes in terms of what particular media technologies can do and in terms of what users think about and do with them in practice. To this end, the thesis employs qualitative-ethnographic methods that highlight both the technological affordances of digital media devices and the role of thinking, feeling, and experiential human subjects that use them.²³ In doing so, it produces what digital ethnographers refer to as ‘theoretically enriched descriptions’ (Hine 2015: 56) of digital mediation in practice.