Thoughts from the Field, Instagram Mosaic

I did fieldwork in Hong Kong from December 2010 until July 2012, and goodness knows how I underestimated the centrality of the smartphone in the research data collection process. There has been anthropological research on the role of mobile technologies in shaping/reshaping cultural practices; especially in regards to social communication and intimate relations, phone materiality translating into social capital, etc. There are the articles linking Facebook and Twitter with the Middle-East mass protests in recent years, and on the flip-side, articles critically questioning the true extent of influence social media has in the real world. But there is surprisingly little being written about how mobile technologies can affect the practices of researchers, to facilitate their work...


There are pragmatic reasons for getting a smartphone. During the first few months, I carried a digital voice recorder, a notebook, an army of pens, and a camera; it became incredibly difficult to handle all of these devices. Imagine having to jot notes in the middle of a jostling demonstration crowd, then having to dig around your bag for the camera to create a visual account of what is happening. After you've juggled these objects around, suddenly your phone rings... more shuffling ensues. In contrast, a smartphone enables you to do all those things on one device. My second motivation for getting a smartphone is because my digital voice recorder decided to boycott fieldwork-- it just died in the middle of an interview. So I figured that I needed a replacement, and one that would allow me to email the sound files to my computer immediately after an interview. (When I tried to salvage the sound files from my broken digital recorder, the dratted thing refused to upload anything onto my computer, and the speakers refused to work, so that is data lost...good thing I have the interview notes to rely on.) Then there is the peer pressure to be connected. A lot of informants-- or rather, a lot of Hong Kong people-- have smartphones, and they constantly relay information through Facebook and Whatsapp.  And without map apps, I might have spent half my time wandering around looking for meeting spots, especially in the chaos of urban Kowloon...

One of the unexpectedly useful tools on the smartphone would be Instagram (or any other photo-sharing app). I'm not their spokesperson, and I don't like their recent bout of shifty privacy, copyright/ownership, and user-rights policies. But it proved to be a mode of documentation that compliments fieldnotes. Although photos on Instagram can be terribly mundane (hello, cups of tea and noodle shops), it is a reflection of your everyday life. The first advice our class received before setting off to our respective research sites is that everyday life is mundane. Things simply don't happen all the time. Ethnographic accounts have pages of fascinating rituals and events from various societies; but this is often the work of anthropologists who have been out in the field for years on end. Secondly, recording the everyday is important, because it all adds up towards framing your entire field experience. Fieldwork involves studying and understanding the lives of others, but it also involves you living your own life. You might be in a location for a temporary period of time, but it isn't an experience that can be compartmentalised after returning to your institution. With or without knowing it, the fieldsite will change ways of thinking and ways of acting, and will follow you for a quite a while. So in this blog post, I'm including a smattering of images from my own fieldwork; ranging from protest scenes, to bookshops visited, the change in seasons, and local restaurants...

When you scroll through the Instagram photos at a later date, there will be things of importance in them that you did not notice when these images were first taken. The images change in significance as your research idea evolves. For example, I didn't even realise that I was taking so many shots of local architecture, until my topic shifted towards that direction. Somehow I unconsciously took images of things that really interested me, and it took a while for my conscious brain to follow suit. Indeed, using filters from Instagram can be seen as corrupting the integrity of the original image itself; it makes the image look processed, distant, remove, and artificial. There is a degree of insincerity coming from imposing a range of 'special effects' onto the images... then again, any form of photography (even with basic point-and-shoot cameras) involves depicting a form of reality in your own ideals. Just by framing a shot and deciding on the composition, choosing to use a specific type of film, adjusting the exposure and aperture, is a form of visual manipulation by the person behind the lens...but I digress. Personally, I found that my choice of filters often reflected my mood and feelings at the time the photo was taken (using filters to convey sentiments of melancholy, emptiness, vibrancy, nostalgia, solemnity, for starters). 

But, technology doesn't supplant the importance of having meticulous fieldnote-taking practices. Smartphones are a great help, but it is ultimately a tool that, as the cliché saying goes, is 'only as good as the person using it'. The researcher must still make sure that the collected information is well-organised, detailed, and that the information is approached from a diverse array of angles (visual/audio/textual, and comprising of different viewpoints). It shouldn't only include the facts of an issue, but cover the emotive responses this evokes from yourself and your informants. How the data is interpreted and presented to be of relevance to theory and ethnography remains the responsibility of the researcher.