Short abstract:

We propose a dialogue session between four researchers from two Medialabs: Médialab-SciencesPo (Paris) and Medialab UNIGE (Geneva). Based on ongoing surveys, we will discuss research methods aimed at investigating the imbrication between online and face-to-face social life.

Long abstract:

The notion of situation has a long history intertwined with ethnomethodology, feminist epistemologies and pragmatist philosophy. Methodological reflections about the study of social relations afforded by digital technologies and platforms has been influenced by the concern of context collapse (Davis and Jurgenson, 2014; Marwick and boyd, 2011; Meyrowitz, 1985) – the disappearance of the spatio-temporal determinants of communication that jeopardizes the ability of actors to make meaning, and of researchers to interpret social phenomena in digital environments. Where the context refers to elements that the researcher must add to the description to explain empirical phenomena, the notion of situation refers to elements that must be taken into account in order to provide a thicker empirical description of the phenomena, emerging from the core of involved actors’ experience and concerns rather than being defined from the outside. It calls for research practices that pay attention to the liveness and indetermination of social media practices , and reflect upon the artificiality of qualitative methods as sociomaterial settings. We are sharing three research projects that designed their own methods to address this challenge, which have in common to elicit participation in the inquiry and to equip their methods with socio-technical devices (telephone, card games, videos etc.). This presentation addresses the challenges of (re)situating the study of social media practices and their role in social life. It does so by investigating offline/online connections and by tinkering with methods and tools for describing the corporeal, spatial and more-than-digital inscription of social media.