The research team has been busy the last few weeks conducting ethnographic interviews in participants’ homes. We’ve gotten semi-lost, wiped our feet, taken off our shoes, played with pets, said hello to spouses, and even gotten a “spa treatment” from a six-year-old daughter of a participant.
Field work is full of surprises. Sometimes participants just stop calling you back. Sometimes they forget you’re coming. Sometimes they just don’t open the door. I personally have experienced all of these instances in past field work. I’m delighted to say that our participants are almost uniformly engaged, animated, and curious about our work.
So far, we’ve learned:
- Smartphones have “homes” within homes: participants usually assign a spatial location (or sometimes several locations) to their smartphones. These “homes” are symbolically thick. A smartphone that “lives” in the office is not the same device as one that “lives” in the bedroom. So far, we’ve found that the bedroom still appears to be place relatively free of technology, including smartphones. Interestingly, the iPad has started to creep into the bedroom as a tool for reading.
- Smartphones aren’t breaking existing temporal norms, just bending them: participants are telling us they pay more attention to unspoken social norms of their work place first, and the smartphone second. For example, one participant told us that emails tend to come until 11 or 12 at night, and start again at around 6 a.m. Another participant, with the same functionality on his phone, says he gets a “morning block” and then another “afternoon block” of emails. It’s not the technology determining these times, but existing social norms.
- Some phones are more “plugged in” than others: All participants have other technology in their homes, but some participants are integrating their smart phones more closely to this “ecosystem” than others. The BlackBerry for work is not getting much integration, but the iPhone that controls the stereo sure is. The Android phone has replaced the family camera, but the BlackBerry still remains a “work device.”
- Smartphones bind families closer: some participants told us that their texting increased when they upgraded to a smartphone. A discrete text to one’s spouse is easily tolerated in the workplace, making it much easier to stay in touch than through voice only. Partners tend to be sending quick texts to each other throughout the day, thereby binding their lives closer together and facilitating their domestic management.
We will be fleshing out these initial themes as we go forward with our project. We invite conversation with members of the public, and of course, from our participants! Join us on this quest to understand what these devices are doing for — and to — us!