By Daniel Miller and Sheba Mohammid

Open access image CC BY Liftarn

The ASSA project runs until October 2022. Mostly the last year of the project is dedicated to publishing our results, for example The Global Smartphone has now come out in Spanish and Italian, and the monographs from Ireland and Italy are also published. There is also a continuation of applied work such as Charlotte Hawkins’ contribution to a tele-psychiatry project in Uganda. But there is also one final ethnographic project. This is being carried out in Trinidad by Sheba Mohammid with the support of Danny. Sheba is very suited to this work having written her PhD on how Trinidadians use YouTube. As a final project this is more oriented towards completing the trajectory of our mHealth research. The story so far is that the ASSA project began with the intention of studying mHealth apps for smartphones. Over time as we realised older people make very little use of these bespoke apps, the project shifted to the study of how people turn the apps they are comfortable with into health apps, for example, WhatsApp, LINE and WeChat, but also Google and YouTube. For example, Marilia Duque’s manual on the use of WhatsApp for health in Brazil demonstrates how what we learn from the everyday practices of our research participants can then be used to inform others. In Trinidad we are hoping within a one-year project to research smartphone usage, plan and implement an mHealth intervention, and evaluate it – though that is quite ambitious in the limited time period.

The Trinidad project is progressing well and it looks like the emphasis will be on issues of diet in relation to diabetes, hypertension and also concerns over anxiety… we shall see. After three months, however, something quite different has emerged that is worth reporting on. Early on in the pandemic Danny shared a YouTube video on how to conduct ethnography with only online access. Given the stringent covid controls in Trinidad, online methods have been the only way we could conduct our ethnography. The good news was that, at least in this instance, the optimism of that YouTube video has been vindicated. Sheba’s work certainly amounts to conventional ethnography. As well as interviews, she has regularly spent periods of three or four hours online with her research participants, hanging out and chatting about all manner of things.

Sheba conducting ethnography online. Photo by Sheba Mohammid.

The online ethnography has focused upon building relationships, as is aspires to in traditional ethnography, and from this foundation trying to attain greater insight into the practices of participants and the wider ecosystem of social connections in which these are situated. Besides some in-depth formal interviews with participants, Sheba regularly spent time cultivating a better understanding and appreciation of their everyday lives. Participants have spent time with their webcam on, hanging out with her while they attended to childcare, cooking, breastfeeding, arranging appointments on the phone or dealing with the daily minutiae in between their chats. The success of the online ethnography so far has depended on Sheba being flexible and determined to follow up, send reminders and work around participants and their evolving schedules and internet problems etc. More than anything, Sheba has prioritised sensitivity and a privileging of their well-being in a time when it was not uncommon to have participants dealing with Covid19 related deaths in their households, their own infections or economic fallout from job loss and insecurity during the pandemic.

As participants grew closer to Sheba and more interested in our study, a deeper intimacy emerged where participants became eager to share more information and would send her WhatsApp screenshots of interesting feedback they received on their apps or new social media accounts on diet and fitness that they thought she might be interested in. All of this amounted to an ongoing, sustained conversation over the last few months with many participants and an engagement in their lives that buttressed the formal interviews on mobile phones and health with participant observation on their everyday lives. For example, after an interview, a participant may take her phone outside to demonstrate to Sheba how she had been setting up her kitchen garden. There were constraints that Sheba had to work around and be adaptive to in the online fieldwork. For example, she felt that it was often intrusive to ask people to show her their phone screens to look at conversations in the way that then team had done in the past in in-person fieldwork. Sheba instead adapted this method by exploring other opportunities within the online interactions. She was able to go online with participants and look at social media together to gain their perspectives. For example, she would have them walk her through which YouTube fitness accounts they preferred or which Instagram or TikTok influencers they found appealing and why or why not. She followed where this ethnography took her and ended up talking to some key Trinidadian social media influencers that participants pointed out as noteworthy. Many of Sheba’s participants were recruited through recommendations and participants asking their family and friends to talk to her. While she initially used some of her own networks in Trinidad to source participants, she then worked to extend her fieldwork to include a diverse range of participants.

The online ethnography over the past three months has enabled Sheba to gain greater access into a broad demographic of participants in both rural and urban Trinidad and from a broad cross-section of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. This was achieved largely through participants themselves helping her to recruit more and more participants. For example, one woman in her 60s living in Port of Spain who worked in a retail store introduced her and shared WhatsApp contacts with the members of her AquaAerobics group or when Sheba was trying to recruit more male participants, a female participant linked her online through WhatsApp to her nephew who helped her get more contacts to further male participants and so on in a true snowballing manner that has taken place through online ethnographic work. This recruitment has only been incentivised through participants deepening their relationship with Sheba and gaining an enthusiastic interest in the project and wanting to see us succeed in collecting meaningful data and translating that into something applied next year. So more on that to come in 2022. It will no doubt be a challenge but it is heartening so far to have been able to create such a supportive network of participants, many of whom are interested in being involved in the applied work so we can achieve our aim of creating something from the bottom up.

Happy New Year from Danny and Sheba!

Stay tuned for more…

By Georgiana Murariu and Laura Haapio-Kirk

In this blog post, we present the fourth comic in our ASSA comics series, this time set in Kyoto, one of Laura Haapio-Kirk’s fieldsites. Laura undertook fieldwork here for 16 months on the intersection of ageing and smartphone use and a significant part of her research focused on the rise of visual digital communication among older adults.

One of the findings in our project is related to the rise of social media and smartphones: we found that visual digital media such as emoji and stickers have become an integral element of conversation. Increasingly conversations do not necessarily need either voice or text. It is among older women in particular that Laura found these visual elements to be perceived mostly positively, as a quick and easy way of expressing care. Stickers also mean one is less likely to make mistakes such as typos, and they also help maintain the right atmosphere in a conversation, which is very important in Japan. On the dominant messaging app called LINE, billions of emojis and stickers are sent back and forth every day. However, it is not just stickers that help uphold social norms and etiquette – one’s ‘digital public façade’ can also be upheld through their style of digital communication.

In the comic below based on one of Laura’s participants, we meet Hiro-san, a man in his early 50s who finds the smartphone convenient, but also finds that his style of communication does not fit with what is expected of him when using the smartphone. Hiro-san prefers to write long messages, just as if he was writing an email as he is used to doing in his working life. However, increasingly this style of communication does not fit with the rapid and constant exchanges he is part of in groups on LINE. He also thinks the fact that people can see when one has read a message puts more social pressure on the individual to respond quickly. In response to this sense of pressure, he develops a ‘tortoise’ persona who replies slowly, writing long messages without the use of stickers. ‘Becoming a tortoise’ online frees him from the pressure to fit in with the popular style of messaging which he feels is far too fast-flowing for him.

When this particular participant explained his ‘tortoise’ persona to Laura, she immediately could see the potential of developing the story in a comics format. Laura sent some ideas to John Cei Douglas, the artist we are collaborating with, exploring the possibility of showing the character physically changing into a tortoise costume. John responded with panels that build suspense by showing elements of the costume sequentially, only revealing the full effect in the final panel. One challenging aspect of illustrating this story was how best to show Hiro san’s long messages. Instead of presenting these long text messages visually, John has instead shown the abundance of short and quick reactive messages that Hiro-san was concerned about. We hope that the comic conveys in a playful way how smartphones can both facilitate connection and also be sites for disconnection for those who feel that they do not fit in.