619958

research-article2015
MMC0010.1177/2050157915619958Mobile Media & CommunicationPink et al.

Article

Mobile Media & Communication

2016, Vol. 4(2) 237­–251
Tactile digital ethnography: © The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
Researching mobile media sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2050157915619958
through the hand mmc.sagepub.com

Sarah Pink
RMIT University, Australia

Jolynna Sinanan
RMIT University, Australia

Larissa Hjorth
RMIT University, Australia

Heather Horst
RMIT University, Australia

Abstract
In this article we focus on the relationship between vision and the hand to develop
an understanding of the experience of mobile media use which in turn informs a
methodology for researching it; a tactile digital ethnography. Theories of knowing
through the hand, and uses of the hand in documentary practice already highlight its
significance. We bring these together with our video ethnographies of mobile media
use, to show how a focus on the hand offers both new insights into other people’s
digital worlds, and an approach to learning about these.

Keywords
Ethnographic knowing, mobile media, tactile experience, the hand, video ethnography

Introduction
On a warm afternoon in Melbourne, Stephen, a man in his late 50s discussed his four
mobile devices with Sarah. He described how he used his iPad mini for browsing and

Corresponding author:
Sarah Pink, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476, Melbourne,
VIC 3001, Australia.
Email: sarah.pink@rmit.edu.au
238 Mobile Media & Communication 4(2)

watching YouTube videos, often in bed when he couldn’t sleep. Stephen also had three
mobile phones: a Windows smartphone, which he took everywhere with him, for phone
calls, SMS and emailed documents; a Samsung, inherited from relatives in Singapore,
which he kept active on a A$3.00 per month contract with an Australian network but
saved the call credit to use during his visits to Malaysia, and just used the phone with his
home WiFi, for Facebook and taking photos; and an old HTC that he had bought as a
contract package with a phone for his daughter, which he had kept going even though he
now had a new phone. However when speaking to his family in Malaysia, Stephen used
the landline as they had free calls with their current plan.
Towards the end of our interview, Stephen picked up his Samsung and switched it on.
Immediately, our rather matter-of-fact discussion of how mobile media devices and plat-
forms fitted into the complexities of his transnational life was transformed. Scrolling
down his Facebook page he showed Sarah and Jolynna some messages that had followed
an “incident” on one of his Facebook groups, breaking into laughter as he described how
a group member had posted a comment which was perceived as inappropriate by others,
leading to the message being removed and the perpetrator having to apologise. We joked
over how these groups need to be regulated and Stephen recounted how as the moderator
of a different Facebook group, he needed to be similarly vigilant.
This slippage of the private Facebook group into the research encounter was through
Stephen’s familiar embodied and sensory relationship to his smartphone. Once he
picked up the phone he began habitually scrolling down, into a world that he usually
accesses alone. We encountered only a snapshot of this world, in comparison to its
actual temporality, meaning, and size, and the people Stephen mentioned remained
anonymous to us. Through this encounter we began to understand how the hand is
implicated in both guarding people’s privacy, and in accessing the partially hidden digi-
tal worlds in which they live part of their lives. This applies both to how the hand is
integral to our everyday living with mobile digital technologies, and to how we might
learn by researching through hands.
In this article we examine how theories of the hand can inform both how we under-
stand the experience of mobile media use and how we research its use. The importance
of the hand in mobile communication has been emphasised in earlier studies such as
Richardson’s (e.g., 2010) investigation of the role of haptic (touch) screens on feelings
of embodiment. Here we advance this by proposing how attention to the hand can further
our understandings of how everyday intimacy and privacy are experienced with mobile
media. However, the principles this discussion reveals are more widely relevant when
interrogating the methods we might use for researching (through) hand-held mobile
media. Locative and mobile media device and app use is difficult to follow and observe
as it plays out in everyday life, and interviewing reveals little of the detail of how tech-
nologies are actually used and experienced. Indeed, it is not uncommon for participants
to show mobile media ethnographers their devices and how they use them. This calls for
further reflection on what might be learned through such performative and embodied
engagements through the hand, and the methodological implications of this for mobile
media research.
Here we develop this discussion by first interrogating how the hand might be concep-
tualised as a theoretical and practical dimension of mobile media use. We then bring
Pink et al. 239

together this understanding of the hand, with an understanding of mobile and locative
media to examine the implications for how we treat the hand in research about mobile
media. We then chart out an agenda for researching mobile media through hands and
video recording. In doing so we draw on ethnographic research into privacy and mobile
media amongst intergenerational and intercultural families in Melbourne, Australia,
undertaken in 2015. Building on video ethnography literatures (Pink, 2013) as well as on
our own and others’ extensive work on mobile media and communication (Hjorth &
Pink, 2014; Hjorth & Richardson, 2014; Horst & Taylor, 2014), we argue that a theoreti-
cal interrogation of how we know through the hand offers a deeper understanding of
what and how we might learn through a tactile approach to digital ethnography. Finally
we discuss the wider implications of this approach for mobile media and screen research.

Theorising the hand

Existing approaches to mobile technologies as material culture (e.g., Horst, 2016) as
ambient, and as productive of forms of copresence and intimacy (e.g., Hjorth &
Richardson, 2014) acknowledge the embodied nature of our relationships with these
technologies. Recent research has emphasised the haptic nature of these relationships:
Richardson has proposed that the shift from the visual to haptic (touch) changes our
embodied relationship to the screen and its content, arguing that mobile devices present
“a significant shift in the relational ontology of body and technology” which is “perhaps
more intimate, ever-present and affective than any we have thus far experienced”
(Richardson, 2010); and Verhoeff has developed the notion of “haptic engagement”
(Verhoeff, 2012, p. 163) to understand “interacting with screens” as a “performative act”
(Verhoeff, 2012, p. 166) involving agency and experience (Verhoeff, 2012, p. 163).
The hand has been a focus of interest across disciplines such as philosophy (e.g.,
Heidegger, 1962; Merleau-Ponty, 1962/2002), art history (Jordanova, 1992), and semi-
otic approaches to sociology and anthropology (e.g., Bezemer & Kress, 2014).
However of most relevance to our interests here is the work of the phenomenological
anthropologist, Ingold who building on Merleau-Ponty’s approach, and critiquing the
focus on the symbolic and cultural of linguistic research paradigms, has conceptual-
ised the hand as an extension of the brain (Ingold, 2013, p. 112). Ingold “invites us to
consider the hand in relation to multiple ways of knowing and telling, involving sens-
ing, memory and imagination” (Pink, Morgan, & Dainty, 2015), emphasising the
humanity and intelligence of the hand (Ingold, 2013, pp. 111–115), and proposing that
the hand has capacities to both know and tell (2013, p. 113) and to “recognize subtle
clues in one’s environment and to respond to them with judgment and precision”
(2013, pp. 109–110). Thus he sums up that:

[T]he hand’s tactility is by no means confined to the fingertips but extends over their entire
surfaces, front and back. Gnarled and weathered by the exactions of their respective tasks as are
the limbs of tree by the elements, the hands of skilled practitioners bear witness to years of
repetitive effort. Not only, then, in touch and gesture, can hands tell. In their bumps and creases
they can also be told, both as histories of past practice and, in the telling of fortunes as prophecies
for the future. (Ingold, 2013, p. 117)
240 Mobile Media & Communication 4(2)

Ingold’s work is increasingly recognised for its relevance in media scholarship (Moores,
2012; Pink & Leder Mackley, 2013; Verhoeff & Cooley, 2014), and here, implies three
ways in which we might see hands as implicated with mobile media: as repositories of
memory; as articulate in the present; and as having an orientation towards what will
happen next.
In his review of recent theoretical interest in the hand the media scholar Moores
notes similar strands. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s example of the organ-playing hand,
Moores reflects on: the relationship between stabilisation and improvisation in the work
of the player (Moores, 2014, p. 199, commenting on Merleau-Ponty, 1962/2002); the
philosopher Tallis’s (2003: 29–30) work on “the knowing hand,” which has “exquisite
knowledge of the size, shape, surface, texture, density… etc. of the object it manipu-
lates”; the Finnish architect Pallasmaa’s (2009) “thinking hand”; the sociologist
Sennett’s (2009) “intelligent hand”; and Sudnow’s “ways of the hand” (2001) in jazz
piano (Moores, 2014, p. 199). Building on this and on Ingold’s work, Moores has argued
for a phenomenological approach to how people move online. He critiques the notion of
“navigating” the Internet, and instead calls for attention to how we feel our ways through
online environments, which “is intimately caught up with the habitual movement of
human hands, involving deft movements of the fingers or digits on keyboards and vari-
ous touch-sensitive devices” (Moores, 2014, p. 205).
We extend these existing understandings of the hand by developing the idea of the
knowing hand in relation to two theoretical stances relating to mobile and locative media:
(a) understandings of how mobile media use generates emotional and sensory feelings
through forms of copresence (Horst, 2011; Licoppe, 2004; Richardson & Wilken, 2012)
and social media socialities (Bennett, 2012; Gruzd & Haythornthwaite, 2013; Markham,
2014); and (b) notions of mobile play and playfulness (Hjorth & Richardson, 2014).
Such approaches, we argue, invite a consideration of how the hand knows and tells and
how it generates feeling, beyond its relationship to the materiality of the world and its
capacity to write and draw.
To account for how our experiences of the world are felt through the hand, we return
to Ingold’s (2013) point that the hand can be thought of as an extension of the brain. It is
through being active in the world that the hand achieves this—through its engagement
with the environment, as a knowing, telling, sensing, remembering, and imagining part
of the body–mind. Thus when we cast mobile devices, their materiality, content, and
sociality as technologies of the hand, we ask how they become part of this particular
configuration where there is a certain intensity between the hand–mind–device relation-
ship as people and phones move through everyday digital–material environments
together. The ways we sense our worlds are complex and, as discussed elsewhere, are not
fully understood by either phenomenologists or neuroscientists (see Pink, 2015). It is not
our concern here to address that complex problem. However it is commonly understood
that the modern western five-sense sensorium does not represent five different sensory
channels that correspond with how sensory information is processed between body sur-
faces (eyes, ears, noses, mouths, and skin) and brains. Instead these sensory modalities
are intertwined, as cross-cultural sensory studies (e.g., Geurts, 2002; Howes, 2003) dem-
onstrate. With this in mind, we cautiously refer to the categories of tactility, vision, and
sound but note that, for instance, the argument that touch and vision are inseparable,
Pink et al. 241

creates productive challenges for thinking beyond ideas of eye–hand coordination and
towards asking how the eye and hand know, learn, and sense together.
As Richardson has suggested, “both body and screen are imbricated in a number of
complex ontological and embodiment metaphors” (2010). Visualisations on the touch
screen are not just seen but they are part of both what the hand incrementally learns and
knows, part of how the hand knows and are inextricable from our sensory perception of
the wider environments we are in. Therefore as technologies of the hand mobile media are
sensed in multiple but entangled ways, they are not simply tactile screens, but are felt and
engaged with through a wider field of sensory perception. In addition to this, the visual
and audio content of tactile screens participate in how our everyday lives are mediated—
both as information and as content that people produce and disseminate through social
media and other platforms. However, we stress that through the tactile screen content is
necessarily experienced and engaged with corporeally. This requires it to be analysed as a
sensory medium, beyond a focus on its representational or symbolic status.
The art historian Stafford, writing of the way we experience images, has sug-
gested that “representations do not hang about in our heads” but rather “the process
is not one of representation but manifestation at the interface where the neural and
sensory registers dovetail or become superimposed into a whole” (2006, p. 215).
Stafford suggests that

[T]his delicate joining of self to world and of world to self [i.e., when we view images], as J. J.
Gibson argued in his theory of affordances, is predicated on an organism’s response to the
visual features of the environment that matter to it. (2006, p. 215)

Applying this approach to the way we understand mobile media content allows us to
move away from the analysis of content and the visuality of the tactile screen as repre-
sentation, to consider more deeply how people feel their ways through the world with it,
and what they might imagine with it. Indeed Ingold’s suggestions as regards how we
might comprehend drawings or paintings can be equally applied to the visuality of the
tactile screens of mobile media:

Should the drawing or painting be understood as a final image to be inspected and interpreted,
as is conventional in studies of visual culture, or should we rather think of it as a node in a
matrix of trails to be followed by observant eyes? Are drawings or paintings of things in the
world, or are they like things in the world, in the sense that we have to find our ways through
and among them, inhabiting them as we do the world itself? (Ingold, 2010, p. 16)

The tactile screen implicates the knowing hand as well as the eyes in how we make nar-
ratives with and through the (audio)visual content of smartphones.
Finally the ways of knowing through the hand with mobile devices, that we have writ-
ten about above, also bring together sensory perception and embodied knowing with
affective and emotional ways of feeling and being. These might be generated through the
stories we narrate with visual and audio content or through social relationships to others
and forms of empathy, intimacy, and presence that we “feel” through the tactile screen.
We discuss some of these issues further in relation to the use of video to research our
relationships to and ways of knowing and feeling through the tactile screen.
242 Mobile Media & Communication 4(2)

The approach outlined above informs our understanding of how the hand is impli-
cated in uses of mobile media. However our reason for elaborating it in this article has a
double motive since it also informs our understanding of what a digital-visual-sensory
ethnography focus on hands can tell us as researchers. It is one thing to understand theo-
retically how the hand is implicated in how people use mobile media. However, if our
objective, beyond this, is to understand what and how people know and how they experi-
ence everyday forms of intimacy and privacy through mobile media, we also need to
consider how a research focus on the hand can enable this.

Filming the hand: A digital-visual-sensory ethnography

research agenda
Researching how participants use smartphone and tablet apps when they are (often)
alone, or with small family groups (often around the TV) is not easily achieved
through conventional research methods. It is difficult to observe such activity
directly, and observation is likely to reveal the context of use but not its experience.
Interviews provide participants’ narratives about what they think they do with their
devices, yet do not necessarily bring insights into how these play out experientially.
To go beyond these methods we combined ethnographic interviewing, as a conversa-
tional entry point into understanding how mobile media are part of family life, with
video-recorded demonstrations or reenactments of participants’ uses of their devices
and apps, tours of their homes to explore where and how they used them, and col-
laborative mapping exercises to understand their perceptions of the spatiality of their
use outside the home. The reenactments involved participants demonstrating their
embodied ways of knowing by showing researchers what they “usually” do, while
verbally reflecting on these activities. They were not intended to be repeats of actual
events, but ways of collaborating with participants to produce understandings of
normally unspoken ways of knowing performed in nonstatic environments (Pink &
Leder Mackley, 2014b). Here we discuss the video recording of demonstrations and
reenactments of use, focused on the hands, and the insights gained from these meth-
ods, some of which were unanticipated. Film scholars tend to agree that the face and
the hand are, as Cartwright puts it “the two places we tend to look when we turn to
the body to read its surface for expression and feeling” (2012, p. 152). We first out-
line how hands have figured in existing video research and documentary practice to
provide a background to the relevance of hands in communicative and representa-
tional genres and forms of empathetic knowing. When understood in relation to the
theoretical proposition outlined above, this presents a framework for thinking about
researching through hands.
Hands have long since been an important element of the toolbox of ethnographic
documentary makers. While a cliché, the cutaway shot of hands during interviews is a
standard technique that when performed well offers more than just a smoother edit, by
employing the hands as an expressive medium for implying emotional or physical states
and inviting empathetic engagements from viewers. However the hand can take on fur-
ther significance in documentary. For instance the film scholar Nichols has described
how imagery of the hand has been used in reenactment filmmaking, describing a scene
Pink et al. 243

from Chile, Obstinate Memory (Jeanneau, Michel, & Guzman, 1997) when four of the
personal bodyguards for President Allende reenact their role in a presidential motorcade
prior to the military coup d’état that toppled his government on September 11, 1973
(Nichols, 2008, p. 76). Nichols convincingly argued that:

Nothing captures this temporal knotting of past and present better than a close-up image of the
hand of one of the guards slowly fluttering up and down on one of the half-open car windows;
the rhythm follows from the cadence of his gait beside the car, but the camera’s close-up view
of his delicate grip, the rise and fall of his fingers, and the overt absence of an engulfing crowd
attest to the psychically real but fantasmatic linkage of now and then. (Nichols, 2008, p. 77)

The use of hands in reenactment videos has also been important in video ethnography. As
Pink and Leder Mackley (2014a) show, reenactments offer ways to release muscle mem-
ories of habitual activities never usually spoken about—such as using the hands to switch
on and off lights as one goes to bed at night. As Pink et al. (2015) have shown, video-
recorded reenactments of health care workers’ uses of disinfectant hand gel has brought
to the fore workers’ ways of knowing about safety at work that would have been difficult
to articulate without the understandings evoked through the activity of applying the gel.
Filming hands has moreover for some time been part of ethnographic film practice. An
early example is Baily’s use of film in ethnomusicology research and documentary mak-
ing, with “a mute Super 8mm camera with its three-minute rolls of film to record patterns
of hand and finger movements in playing the Herati dutar (a long-necked lute) . . . in
Afghanistan (1973–4)” (Baily, 2009, p. 56). Significant aspects of filming hands are
discussed by the anthropological filmmaker and theorist MacDougall in relation to how
when watching film we might assume “the existence of a parallel sensory experience in
others” (1998, p. 52). He proposes there are three things that take us to the “quick,”
which connects us to the consciousness of others (1998, p. 52; or at least makes us feel
as if this is happening). The face, MacDougall argues is the “primary site” for the genera-
tion of such feelings (1998, p. 51), with the eyes “being the part of the body most care-
fully watched for disjunctions between social performance and inner feeling,” followed
next by the hands, with the voice also playing a part in this (1998, p. 52). The hand and
haptic qualities of film have also been discussed by film scholars.
Marks’s work on haptic perception in film is particularly relevant since she insists
on the importance of bringing together optical and haptic perception (Marks, 2000,
p. 11). In what Marks calls “haptic visuality, the eyes themselves function like organs
of touch” (2000, p. 2) and she suggests that quite simply “Looking at hands would
seem to evoke the sense of touch through identification, either with the person whose
hands they are or with the hands themselves” (2000, p. 8). An example of how this
might play out at the intersection of ethnographic and arts practice is demonstrated
through a technique that the artist and sociologist Lammer calls empathography
(Lammer, 2012). Reflecting on Lammer’s Hand Movies (http://www.corporealities.
org/hand-movies/)about the hands of clinicians in surgery, Cartwright argues that “The
camera enacts an empathetic gaze through the hands of the videographer, Christina
Lammer, who enacts through her instrument of the hand an empathetic relationship of
looking closely and with care” (Cartwright, 2012, p. 147).
244 Mobile Media & Communication 4(2)

As these literatures indicate, the hand is implicated in culturally established ways of

telling, and implies empathetic ways of knowing in video ethnography, documentary,
and feature film. Recent empirical research in the field of eye tracking studies, regarding
the viewer’s gaze reinforces this from another perspective. Eye tracking studies show
how viewers often focus on the eyes and the gaze of film subjects, to follow their move-
ment and gaze for indications of what is significant. For instance: “when viewing a
simple magic trick where an experienced magician in a video waves a hand to make an
object disappear, the gaze direction of subjects viewing the video is heavily influenced
by the actual gaze direction of the magician in the video clip (Tatler & Kuhn, 2007). If
the magician appears to pay attention to his waving hand then subjects follow this mis-
direction of viewer attention and the magic trick, performed with the other hand, cannot
be detected and the magic trick is successful” (Dyer & Pink, 2015). Filmic images of
moving hands can also attract the viewer’s gaze. For example analysing a sequence from
Sherlock, Redmond, Sita, and Vincs report on how “viewers’ eyes were strongly drawn
to follow movement and directional cues and signs” and “where Mrs. Hudson’s fingers
scrape along the wall, followed by Sherlock’s fingers retracing her steps . . . we see all
viewers making strings of successive fixations—each following these finger move-
ments” (Redmond, Sita, & Vincs, 2015). Collectively the literatures discussed in this
section suggest that the possibilities of the hand for research practice merit further
interrogation.

Mobile media ethnographies with hands

Because our video ethnography filmed hands, not faces, it was with their hands that par-
ticipants showed us their social media, other apps, and how they used their devices. We
also concentrated visually on hands for ethical reasons: since we were researching pri-
vacy, we preserved participants’ own privacy by not video recording or photographing
their faces.1
To return to Ingold “Not only, then, in touch and gesture, can hands tell. In their
bumps and creases they can also be told, both as histories of past practice and, in the
telling of fortunes as prophecies for the future” (Ingold, 2013, p. 117). When we see
hands and put them into the biographical context of what we also know from inter-
views, talking and other aspects of our ethnographic encounters, this helps us to situate
ways of knowing through digital media with biographical knowing and being. The
hands that access Facebook, send SMS and WhatsApp messages to their family mem-
bers are the same hands that have cared, cooked, crafted, laboured, written, and learned
and told throughout lives. Thus the attunement of a hand to a smartphone or tablet is
always relative—part of its wider attunement to a world it is part of. Contact with the
device through the hand is part of a particular configuration of feeling that emerges
through that contact, because it engages people directly with the affective and sensory
experiences that are part of the forms of sociality, copresence, and playfulness and
more that are associated with mobile media. In this section we turn to our ethnogra-
phies of technologies of the hand. We discuss two families from the 35 people who
participated in our research to highlight the detail of how and what we can learn by
researching through hands, and by bringing together the empathetic and visual research
Pink et al. 245

knowledge derived from being there at the research encounter and viewing the video
with other research materials, as is normal practice in video ethnography (Pink, 2013).
We begin with a discussion of Esther and Patrick before turning to Mike.
Esther and Patrick are a middle-class professional couple, aged 58 and 72 respec-
tively, with an adult daughter. We met at their home and Esther walked Sarah around the
home, explaining where her devices were kept. She pointed to where she would take her
phone out of her bag and leave it on the study desk in their lounge room on arriving home
from work and how she always leaves her tablet on the coffee table in case her husband
Patrick wants to use it. To show us how she used the devices Esther brought the phone
and the tablet to the dining table. Opening the flip cover to show the tablet’s keyboard,
she explained, “My daughter bought [it] for me, but I never use it [since] I’m not one to
sit and type for hours . . . He doesn’t use the keyboard either,” she said of Patrick who
followed up, telling us that “I used to type a lot at work, but since I haven’t been to work,
I don’t really do much typing.” This kind of interaction, where Esther began to comment
on Patrick’s media use and he continued to explain himself, parallels how they described
their use of Facebook where Esther would take the lead since she had a Facebook account
and was friends with several of Patrick’s relatives in India. Although Patrick was not on
Facebook himself, he saw what his family posted through his wife’s account, which was
always left open on the tablet.
A few minutes later, Esther picked up the tablet and turned it on, explaining that her
son-in-law had given it to them before he went on an overseas trip, to make using Skype
easier than from the desktop. He had taught Esther how to use it, and those past experi-
ences were also invoked through her hands, as she touched the screen to scroll past the
clock, which he had set for her, and to open up the Chrome browser, which he had also
set up. Touring the device with her fingers, we followed her hands with our eyes as
Esther also opened Skype, which she used to communicate with her daughter when her
daughter worked overseas.
Esther’s son-in-law had downloaded WhatsApp onto her phone when he put Skype on
the tablet and since then, Esther had also used WhatsApp with her daughter. Picking up
the phone, she showed Sarah a WhatsApp group chat she shared with her old high school
friends in Malaysia, touching the app she revealed the messages, links, and images she
would receive throughout the day, sometimes, up to 15, which she considered slightly
excessive.
Esther scrolled through the messages noting how she would delete messages that used
too much memory, such as videos and memes, complaining that staying in touch with her
friends tended to eat up so much of her monthly data. But as she sat back from the phone,
these feelings associated with the embodied experience of assessing and deleting mes-
sages throughout the day were dissipated as she remarked that “It’s nice to know what
they’re up to though and what they’re doing with their lives” and told us about the
upcoming reunion they were organising for later in the year.
Esther then opened her The Age newspaper’s online app on the tablet, explaining that
it was only the free version, as they didn’t get the full newspaper online, and moving her
hand in a flicking motion to show how she would look through it. Similar to the conver-
sation about typing, Esther led the discussion of the newspaper, although Patrick used the
app more. Talking about the tablet also involved their hands. Esther scrolled through
246 Mobile Media & Communication 4(2)

Figure 1.  Esther’s and Patrick’s hands move over the iPad, as if drawn to it while performing
their uses.

showing Sarah Patrick’s use, and Patrick added to the spoken conversation while his
hands also moved towards and over the screen when he spoke of his newspaper reading
(Figure 1). Once she had put her hands on these devices, Esther’s stories also seemed to
scroll one after the other, from her son-in-law, to her high school friends in Malaysia,
through to her husband’s media use.
Esther’s hands therefore showed us some of the affective and sensory dimensions of
online socialities, copresence, and use of information content through mobile media.
Like Stephen, whose example opened this article, her feelings about her participation in
social groups through mobile media came to life and became apparent to us in specific
Pink et al. 247

ways through her hands. Mike, 47, another participant, similarly brought to the fore the
feelings associated with using his device when touring it with his hands. Mike used his
iPad mostly for entertainment, commenting on how “After work, I don’t really want to
think, I want to sit down and unwind.” Mike spoke quite seriously about his own posts
as he opened the 9Gag app, pointing out that he found many things that other people post
on Facebook, about family or personal feelings to be inappropriate and was concerned
about future consequences of these. Instead he shared things from apps such as 9Gag,
which were intended to be light-hearted and humourous.
As Mike scrolled down 9Gag, he began to laugh at some of the videos, he opened up
Twitch, a gaming app that allows players to follow and watch other gamers playing on
screen in real time, which he spends a lot of time on. When he touched the apps Mike
also began to immerse himself in something he enjoyed. In Twitch he opened the profile
of a player he followed and he and Jolynna watched his screen for a few seconds, as he
compared watching another player to watching television. Mike flicked through more
profiles with his fingers, and as he explored the apps the conversation shifted from his
verbal explanation of what entertained him, to an embodied way of simultaneously
showing and experiencing his playful uses of mobile media, in the environment he usu-
ally experienced them. Thus through his handling of the device, we went beyond his
initial response that “I like to relax.” Similar to how Stephen broke out into laughter and
showed us a playful aspect of his mobile media use, not evident in his interview, once
scrolling through Facebook and exploring apps through his hands, Mike showed us the
feelings that spontaneously emerge as relaxing becomes something beyond words.

Digital knowing with hands: Activating apps/activating

feelings
We have shown how, across a selection of our encounters with research participants, we
learned about the feelings, socialities, and playfulness that they “felt” as they accessed
apps through a focus on their hands. Putting one’s finger on the screen does not only
open apps, but invokes feelings of connection with people, experiences, and activities.
Moreover the ways apps are touched, opened, and habitually operated through the hand,
is not only evocative of individual emotions or sensations but can create empathetic
ways of knowing. Hands are drawn to apps, and when one is showing an app, beyond
words, through the hand, other hands might also participate. On video these recordings
offer us as researchers, routes through which to likewise engage with how words and
hand movements come together to create an intensity of expression around the feelings
that using apps can constitute. By letting us follow their hands as they accessed their
private, usually family-based digital worlds, our participants opened up routes through
which we could study the embodied associations that are experienced through and con-
stituted by touching apps, and how these private worlds are “felt.”
As we have shown, private family digital worlds are not only concerned with closed
social media groups online, but also involve sharing devices. For example the way that
Esther showed the action of “flicking” through the newspaper is informative. Her hand
was just above the screen, to express those experiences and activities as possibilities and
also to tell us about her husband’s use of the screen and app, which his hand also moved
248 Mobile Media & Communication 4(2)

towards in acknowledgement. Here, we argue that the use of video recording hand reen-
actments with mobile media apps goes beyond the video being useful simply for captur-
ing data. Instead, the video recordings offered us ways to attend to the encounter
differently, that is, to use the videos to tell ourselves a range of different levels of “story”
or narrative around participants’ ways of showing us their experiences of using mobile
media. They have brought to our attention, for instance, how such movements—flicking,
scrolling, tapping, viewing—become implicated in the generation and expression of sen-
timents which are (contextually) part of how private forms of mobile media use are felt
and shared. The key implication of this is to develop the points we have discussed theo-
retically above towards offering a way to understanding such ethnographic contexts,
experiences, and ways of knowing. This means that we need to understand the hand, as
it is used to experience and show mobile media use, as a knowing and telling hand. In our
encounters we saw how the knowing hands of not only the owners of devices, but also of
their secondary users, were drawn into our meetings, and indeed told us more about the
ways the devices are used.
To reinforce the significance of a focus on the hand for mobile media studies, we now
briefly return to the two strands of mobile media theory highlighted above—copresence
and play—and their intersections. We argue that a focus on knowing through the hand
offers us new insights into how the affective and sensory elements of these aspects of
mobile media might be understood. We have seen how the sociality of online mobile
copresence was felt by participants as they began to show us, scrolling through, reading
out, and being engaged through their fingertips with the private and often family-based
worlds of WhatsApp or Facebook. During our research encounters and when viewing the
videos, we could empathise with the playfulness of these engagements, but so too did we
feel the sense of irritation that participants sometimes had when there were too many
messages or attachments. Likewise, with the rise in mobile gaming we were not sur-
prised that participants often showed us games that they play or observe, either alone or
socially, online—ranging from Solitaire to CandyCrush. It is the hands, we argue, that
take people into the experiential worlds of such human relationships and playful and
emotional forms of experience, which are so ubiquitous in everyday life.

Conclusion
Hands have always had a key role to play in research, in film, and generally in human
communication. Ethnographic practice that pays attention to the sensory perception of
digital media brings to the fore the ways in which knowing through the hand is both part
of everyday life with digital devices and may be part of the research process. If we are to
account further for how digital media are part of both the experiential worlds that we live
in, and how they mediate our experiences of the world, we need to attend to the unspoken
knowledge and experience that is integral to this. To a certain extent, this knowledge,
ways of knowing, and sensory perception they reside in, are generated through and com-
municated by the hand. In this article, we have developed a theoretical argument and a
series of examples from our fieldwork that demonstrate how such ways of knowing
might be accessed and understood through a video-based research process that attends to
the hand. Our point however has not been to simply show how our own research was
Pink et al. 249

undertaken. Instead our aim is to advance the more significant point that researching
through hands has theoretically supported implications for mobile media research meth-
odology. That is, it offers us novel ways through which to access new knowledge about
the use and experience of mobile media. Thus we would urge mobile media researchers
to be mindful of what hands can, as Ingold (2013, p. 117) puts it, “tell.”

Acknowledgements
We thank the research participants for their generosity in participating in our project.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: The research discussed in this article focused on the Australia-based
part of the Locating the Mobile project, funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant
with Intel (LP130100848), 2013–2016 with international partner investigators Genevieve Bell,
Baohua Zhao, and Fumitoshi Kato.

Note
1. While human subjects research ethics focuses on the face as a key identifying feature, hands,
gestures, and adornments such as rings or bracelets may be equally “revealing” or personal.
The theorisation of the contextualised hand will become an increasingly pressing topic for
human research ethics in a context where fingerprints are used as unique identifiers for police
checks, bio data for immigration, access to public benefits (e.g., food stamps), voting, bank-
ing, retail and shopping, and other forms of monitoring, surveillance, and by fingerprint scan-
ner enabled mobile phones as a form of security.

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Author biographies
Sarah Pink is Professor of Design and Media Ethnography and Director of the Digital Ethnography
Research Centre at RMIT. Her recent collaborative works include the books Digital Ethnography:
Principles and Practice (2016), Digital Materialities (2016), Screen Ecologies (2016), Media
Anthropology and Public Engagement (2015), The Un/Certainty (2015, iBook), and Energy and
Digital Living (2014, www.energyanddigitalliving.com).
Jolynna Sinanan is a Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Media and
Communication and the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT. She is a coauthor of How
the World Changed Social Media (2016) and Webcam (2014).
Larissa Hjorth is an Artist and Digital Ethnographer interested in mobile media and play. She is a
Professor and Deputy Dean of Research & Innovation in the School of Media & Communication,
RMIT University. Hjorth’s books include Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific (2009), Games &
Gaming (2010), Online@AsiaPacific (2013), Understanding Social Media (2013), Gaming in
Social, Locative and Mobile Media (2014), Digital Ethnography (2016), and Screen Ecologies
(2016).
Heather Horst is Associate Professor and Director of Research Partnerships in the College of
Design and Social Context at RMIT University, Australia. Her research focuses upon understand-
ing how digital technologies, mobile phones and other forms of material culture mediate relation-
ships, learning, and mobility. These themes are reflected in her publications, which include Digital
Ethnography: Principles and Practices (2016) and Digital Anthropology (2012), recently trans-
lated into Chinese and Arabic.