Bodies, Technologies and Methods

Phil Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429515316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book examines how different technologies can be used to enhance research methods in the social sciences and humanities.

The boundary between the body and the digital has become increasingly blurred in recent years due to the rise of technologies that capture and reshape our embodied selves. New technologies all too often reflect the attitudes of the privileged white men who dominate the tech sector. This book thus, in part, considers how critical researchers can employ new technologies while challenging some of the problematic assumptions that underpin their design. It also includes a series of case studies that examine the dynamic use of different techniques to explore key questions around the intersection of embodiment and the digital.

With a playful, experimental approach to conducting research today, this book offers new, cutting-edge methods that respond to the potential of different technologies. It will be invaluable reading for undergraduate and post-graduate students of social sciences and humanities to explore ways in which this approach can bring new insights to a range of interdisciplinary research questions.

1 Introduction

Playing with methods

My father is a tremendously generous man. When it came to buying his children the UK’s must-have toy in the early 1980s, he did not flinch at getting my brother Chris and I a brand new ZX Spectrum computer. My mother definitely appreciated the peace as her two rambunctious sons took a break from running around and playfighting to be quietly distracted by this new device. The computer was nominally educational, in that you could learn to program it, but the real joy was in the games that today are guaranteed to make a certain kind of middle-aged British person misty eyed with nostalgia. Chuckie Egg, Hungry Horace, Skool Daze, Jet Pac and, king of them all, Jet Set Willy were the touchstones of my youth. As we became teenagers, Chris moved on to interests in science, flying and girls, while I retained the fascination with computing and technology even as I went on to study in the humanities and later the social sciences.

Today, Chris laughs at me whenever I justify the purchase of a new device by saying that it is ‘for work’ knowing that this is only ever half true. For all that this book could easily be written as a love letter to technology, however, as a critical social scientist one cannot help but by horrified by some of the ways that technologies have been developed and employed, particularly in the last two decades. There is a lot to be concerned about, from social media companies generating advertising revenue by fostering addictive behaviours, security systems that normalise racial profiling, through to the dungheap of radicalised white nationalism and misogyny that festers within gaming cultures. Many of these issues have been subject to intense academic scrutiny by scholars far more qualified than I and this book is not simply another critical account in this vein. My intention here is instead to concentrate specifically on the methodological implications for critical scholars of this changing technological landscape.

This is a book about methods, but it is not a how-to guide. Again, there are a great many books that can take people through the specifics of approaches to data collection in the social sciences and humanities. These stretch from the relatively generic such as how to undertake an interview or archive work to more specialised techniques such as using R for spatial analysis (Brunsdon and Comber 2015), or the application of Q-method (Watts and Stenner 2012). My intention here is, however, to zoom out from the step-by-step specifics and instead explore some of the new techniques that we have at our disposal, how these are changing the ways we work, and what the implications of this are for undertaking critically informed, ethical research.

This being said, some of the methods I discuss here are not necessarily all that new in themselves. One of the big changes that has been happening in recent years is a much greater transfer of approaches between disciplines, partly enabled by new technologies that have reduced the price point and complexity associated with employing what had previously been highly specialised techniques. Although my first degrees were in history, I now work as a geographer, which is notoriously a magpie discipline, grabbing approaches and topics from across the humanities, social and physical sciences. This book is not intended to cater solely to a geography audience, however, instead being aimed at critical scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, with a view to encouraging interdisciplinary thinking and approaches. Exploring methods developed in different disciplines allows us to answer research questions we may not have previously considered. This approach also allows develop new ways of thinking simply because we can gather different kinds of data.

Many of my collaborators working in the humanities squirm when I talk about data collection rather than gathering research materials. Because I have worked for many years as a social scientist within a physical science department, I have undoubtedly picked up some of the language and mindset of the hard scientist, if for no other reason than protective camouflage. Another example of this comes in the fact that I talk about running a Playful Methods Lab because this is the kind of idiom my physical science bosses understand, even if they have no real idea what I do. In practice the ‘lab’ is merely the branding for the team of PhD students and postdocs that I’ve worked with over the years plus a cupboard filled with different bits of tech that I keep in my office.

As part of this first chapter, I will introduce my core approach of playing with methods, which might, less charitably, be described as messing about with different techniques to see if any of them generate useful research materials. Having the freedom to play and experiment is, in essence, is what this book is about. I turn first, however, to examine why questions of embodiment matter when considering methods shaped by new technologies.

Whose bodies?

I have always found teaching to be a crucial medium through which to pressure-test ideas that I generate through my research – if it strikes a chord in class, then I usually feel that I am on to something. As a result, I will occasionally refer to working with students throughout this volume, even though it is not an undergraduate textbook. One of the key advantages of working in the university sector is the potential to co-construct research and teaching, with a blurred boundary between the two being productive for both.

For many years I have taught modules examining questions around embodiment, usually attracting small but very devoted groups of undergraduates. My intention with these modules has always been to ground challenging theoretical concepts in our everyday lived realities, demonstrating the relevance of those theories beyond mere intellectual exercises. To give a practical example, Foucault’s concept of discipline generated through panoptic surveillance comes to life when students start making connections to their everyday experiences, not least how the university monitors their presence in class and within online learning platforms. Judith Butler’s ideas on language and labelling shaping who we are seems quite abstract in isolation. When reflecting on how female students alter their behaviour and dress in anticipation of sexist abuse being shouted at them in the street, however, Butler’s ideas suddenly become both tangible and powerful.

In recent years, questions around the technological have become a greater part of my teaching as I discuss ideas around embodiment being co-constructed through technology. Of course, this is not a particularly new insight. Donna Haraway (1985) was using the metaphor of the cyborg in the 1980s to talk about the blurred boundaries between humans, animals and machines. Don Idhe, meanwhile, has been writing on the philosophy of technology since the 1970s and his work on postphenomenology has examined the shaping of lifeworlds through the intersection of embodiment and technology (Idhe 1990).

Fascinating though these theoretical debates are, this is not a theory-led book. Nonetheless, much of the work on embodiment explicitly draws on feminist theory and these perspectives are critical to the ideas that I discuss throughout the chapters that follow. In examining these debates, however, I am acutely aware of my status as a middle-aged, middle-class, straight, white, cis-gender man and how these characteristics give me a position of power and privilege. Indeed, many people with whom I share these traits assume that the white male perspective is the default, rather than merely one view among many. This is a particular problem within the tech sector, which is dominated by people who, frankly, look a lot like me. Gendered, raced and heteronormative assumptions run rife in Silicon Valley and this creates significant issues with how embodiment is conceptualised and shaped by new technologies. Reflecting on the inventions of the tech sector, Tabitha Goldstaub (2017) has used the analogy of crash test dummies: because these were originally designed around male physiology, car designs were less protective of women. The same kind of problems cut across a large number of issues in how technology is designed, for example in the way that many user interfaces take no account of intersectional identities (Schlesinger et al. 2017). Fundamentally, many of the assumptions built into the tech sector are predicated on the bodies engaging with it being able, white, male and otherwise privileged.

Katherine Losse’s (2012) memoir about her time working for Facebook captures some of the heady atmosphere of being close to the heart of a business on its way to global domination. In The Boy Kings, Losse also highlights many of the gender inequalities within the sector, the lack of women in the higher-paid engineering jobs, the casual harassment of female employees, treating them as objects, categorised as either ‘pretty’ or ‘witty’. A raft of similar memoirs and accounts have followed, including Emily Chang’s (2018) Brotopia which explored toxic male cultures in Silicon Valley, the sex- and drug-fuelled parties and the ways that women were locked out from the personal networks that drive investment and product development. Beyond these more personal accounts, the deep sexism facing women working in the tech sector has been captured in the report Elephant in the Valley (Vassallo et al. 2016), which surveyed 200 leading women in the industry. Of these, 84% had been told they were ‘too aggressive’ in the office, two-thirds reported being excluded from key workplace events because of their gender and 60% having experienced unwanted sexual advances in the workplace, the majority of which were by a superior.

When women are not taken seriously as colleagues this has a series of knock-on effects. Certain behaviours and priorities may not be called out for being sexist simply because there are no women in the room who can do so. Even a company like Apple, which likes to market itself on being forward thinking, did not undertake a diversity report about itself until as late as 2014. This review revealed that 70% of its employees were male and more than half of its workers in leadership positions were white (Lowensohn 2014). In that same year the company released its first Apple HealthKit, which was sold as allowing people to ‘monitor all of your metrics that you’re most interested in’ and yet did not include a menstrual cycle tracker (Duhaime-Ross 2014). The company faced major criticism for this and added period tracking in the iOS9 update a year later (Perez 2015) but the fact that it simply did not occur to anyone that this might be a useful thing to include from the start is symbolic of the kind of thinking that arises when there are no female voices present in strategy meetings. We see something similar in the fact that the major digital assistants (Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana) are gendered female by default, the underlying assumption being that an assistant’s job is women’s work. A UNESCO report picked up on this issue noting that until changes made in early 2019, Siri responded to the comment ‘Hey Siri you’re a bitch’ by saying ‘I’d blush if I could’, with digital assistants being a model of submissiveness in the face of sexist abuse (UNESCO 2019).

Since around 2015 there have been some moves to clean house within the tech sector, although not a great deal has changed in terms of hiring practices. Nonetheless, there have been some high profile actions, such as Travis Kalanick being fired as CEO of taxi company Uber once it became clear that he had presided over an office culture of rampant harassment and frat-house misbehaviour (Isaac 2017). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the attempt to reform led to a pushback from some men within the sector who saw themselves as now being the victim of discrimination. In the summer of 2017, for example, James Damore, an engineer at Google, published a memo filled with pseudo-scientific language stating that men were biologically inclined to be better at writing code than women. He argued this meant Google’s diversity policies were fundamentally flawed because women were simply not as capable as men (claims which have been carefully debunked by, among others, Campbell 2017). Unsurprisingly, once his memo became public, Google fired him. He instantly became a heroic martyr to those supporting the alt-right, who claimed that he was sacrificed for daring to speak the truth about female inferiority. Indeed, Google continues to be criticised in the right-wing press for supposedly discriminating against those with conservative political views (Ghaffary 2019).

The tech sector undoubtedly has an uncomfortable relationship with embodiment and particularly with female embodiment. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg began his journey toward world domination in 2003 with tool called FaceMash which used stolen images of female students and asked people to rate their attractiveness. At about the same time Angela McRobbie (2004) was talking about the rise of post-feminism within media discourses, where the language of empowerment was being used as a cover for moves that undermined the gains to female equality that had been made in the 1970s and 1980s. The post-feminist con trick has thus run in parallel to the rise of social media since the early noughties. Unsurprisingly, there has been a mountain of commentary and academic work exploring how gender discrimination is being played out in new types of media, with particular concerns around mental health. Being acutely aware of the tech sector’s structural sexism, therefore, sends up red flags when examining the ways that we are encouraged to present ourselves online and particularly questions around photography and body image (among many others, see for example Tiggemann and Slater 2013, Fardouly et al. 2017).

It would be a little too easy, however, to simply position technology as a bogeyman producing all of our social ills. Throughout this book I will examine positive changes enabled by new technologies, as well as some of the genuinely unpleasant social phenomena that have been driven by how the tech sector has evolved. We also need to be aware of powerful actors attempting to shift the blame for wider structural problems onto new technologies. We see this, for example, in discourses of moral outrage about the corrupting influences of violent video games on young people. Following mass shootings that took place in Dayton and El Paso in summer 2019, President Donald Trump and a host of right-wing commentators blamed, among other things, violent video games rather than the widespread availability of firearms (Hernandez 2019). Those of us on the political left can all too easily fall into the same kind of intellectual trap by suggesting that the tech sector’s diversity problem makes all of its products irredeemably problematic.

The important point to reflect on here is that technology is not neutral – it is a product of the imaginations and flaws of the people who make it and the wider society that shapes and is shaped by them. It is a fair assumption that, for the foreseeable future, the products of the tech sector will certainly be more orientated to positivist and masculinist perspectives with an emphasis on quantification. As critical scholars, however, we should avoid the temptation to dismiss the research techniques enabled by new technologies as being tainted, rather than positively engaging with the possibilities that they offer. We can attempt to work around or subvert the underlying assumptions on which different technologies were built, creating social aware research aimed at making positive changes in the world around us. Indeed, refusing to engage all too easily becomes a cop-out for not exploring new ways of doing research. New methods may be challenging to our existing assumptions, difficult to operationalise or simply different to what we are used to doing but those are poor reasons for not trying them. Throughout this volume, I celebrate some of the work being undertaken by critical scholars who take technology in new directions within their research.

Playing with methods

All research methods are a compromise, generating data that is situated and partial, only allowing us to see part of the picture. For most of the last decade I have been interested in developing new research methods or new applications of existing techniques. People working on advancing research methods often face the critique that we prioritise innovation for its own sake and thus dismiss robust and well-established techniques. To avoid any confusion, therefore, I will clearly state here that standard research techniques are incredibly valuable. For the vast majority of projects, the common methods used in our disciplines will be the most appropriate. My guiding philosophy as a methods researcher is to find the simplest solution that generates the data (or materials if you prefer) that are needed to answer your research questions. For me, the point of methodological research is to try different approaches in order to examine the advantages of a technique, its compromises and how it can be deployed in new contexts. This may mean doing things in an overly complicated manner in order to work out what would be the optimal approach in most circumstances. To give an example, many years ago I worked on a project that used walking interviews as a technique. Among other things that we experimented with were a variety of different microphones and ways of recording the conversations with our research subjects. Ultimately, however, we found that putting a cheap digital Dictaphone on a string around the neck of our participants gave us the optimal balance between useable audio quality and simplicity of operation in the field.

I tend to talk about this experimentation as being part of a ‘playful methods’ approach – messing about with things until you hit on a good solution. When talking about ‘play’ within methodology, there is, however, sometimes an assumption that you are talking about research with children. There is, of course, some really interesting work on cognitive theories of play and human development (Takhvar 1988). Likewise, while I would not dismiss the fantastic work happening in childhood studies, I argue that play and experimentation (in a non-scientific sense) are not simply restricted to young people. Indeed, part of the point of working in the academic sector is that despite the increasing intrusion of neoliberal management (Cannella and Koro-Ljungberg 2017) there is still a huge degree of freedom to simply try things out which may not have an immediate pay-off.

For me then, playfulness is an approach to research methods that tries new techniques in order to develop innovative insights into a problem. This comes with the risk, however, that such experimentation will not deliver methods that give a significant improvement over conventional approaches. This being said, failure is an important part of research which we do not always capture as well as we might (Harrowell et al. 2018). Indeed, this is a significant problem particularly within the medical sciences where there have traditionally been very few publication routes for negative data (Hayes and Hunter 2012). As researchers, if we do not tell people about the things that have not worked, there is a risk that other people will waste time making the same mistakes. Indeed, I have previously published an account of how my own failings in project management had a significant impact on the ability of a research team to deliver meaningful findings, but also took the research in unexpectedly productive directions (Jones and Evans 2011). As a general rule, however, the things that go wrong do not always make their way into publications. Throughout this book I have given examples of things I have done that have not worked, ideas that were never pursued and projects where I have been unhappy with the outcome. The broader point is that failure can be very productive in making discoveries; more playful or experimental approaches are built on the idea that the first thing we try might not work.

There is, however, a very important issue here relating to power and privilege. I was four years post-PhD and in a permanent post before I really started to try out riskier projects. The lower rungs of the university sector are increasingly characterised by a high degree of precarity (Ivancheva 2015). Not everyone has the luxury to try out projects that may not deliver ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms
• 1. Introduction: Playing with methods
• 2. Privacy, transparency and ethical research methods
• 3. Measuring the body
• 4. Gaming and virtual landscape
• 5. Creative practice
• 6. Maps, apps and mobilities
• 7. Conclusion
• References
• Index