Researching Mobile Phones in the Everyday Life of the “Less Connected”: The Development of a New Diary Method

ABSTRACT

This article introduces our mobile diary method, a qualitative method for the study of mobile phone practices. Adapted from the diary methods of psychology and media studies audience research, it is designed to foreground tacit and mundane data about everyday mobile phone practices. The diary interview reconstructs details of the social practices of everyday life that make up each participant’s “yesterday” and situates mobile practices within this account. To illustrate the method, we provide examples from our study, Izolo, that spanned three distinct South African neighbourhoods in different parts of the country and focused on less-connected people. Participants owned mobile phones and were officially classified as poor or very poor. Grounded in a media practice approach, the method generated rich narratives that foregrounded the experiences of marginalised people. It explicitly addressed technological infrastructures and digital materialities, including devices, platforms, tariff structures, different types of connectivity and computational power. Such holistic narratives are essential to understanding the full spectrum of digital inequality, and allow a movement beyond binary conceptions of digital divides. The method provides the kind of detailed empirical overview of existing media practices that enables careful policy making and innovation in developing countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Diary method
• mobile communications
• everyday life

Acknowledgements

The research was funded by Making All Voices Count (MAVC), a global fund that has supported more than 170 research and practice initiatives in 13 countries in Africa and Asia. Our work forms part of a programme of research into the ways in which new technologies may contribute to processes of increasing “citizen voice” and improving government accountability and responsiveness.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names used here are pseudonyms in order to preserve anonymity.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Making All Voices Count.