The presence and perceptibility of personal digital data: findings from a participant map drawing method

Abstract

Personal digital data are often imagined and experienced as invisible and immaterial phenomena, albeit with increasingly powerful impacts on people’s lives. In this article we discuss findings from an ethnographic project involving 30 participants in Sydney, Australia, directed at identifying their practices and understandings concerning their home-based digital device use and the personal data generated with and through engagements with these technologies. As well as engaging in a video-recorded home tour, we asked participants to hand draw maps of the digital devices located within their homes and the flows of digital data emitting from the devices. These maps mark the presence, interconnections and mobilities of digital technologies and the digitised details generated by their sociomaterial entanglements. The maps were also used to spark further discussion with the participants about their devices and data, seeking to understand their sense-making practices. Working with our concept of ‘digital scaffolding’, we explore what these participant-generated maps can reveal and make visible about digital technologies and data in relation to the domestic environment as well as the world outside the home. We consider what the maps themselves show in terms of digital presence, and what the mapping activity made perceptible within the research encounter.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant DP190100959, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society under Grant CE200100005.

Notes on contributors

Ash Watson

Ash Watson is a sociologist of technology and fiction. In 2021 she joined the UNSW Sydney node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society as a postdoctoral research fellow, working with the Centre's Health focus area and People program. Her research draws on arts-based and qualitative methods to explore the socio-cultural impacts of emerging technologies and identify the kinds of futures that are opened or closed off by current trends. Ash is Fiction Editor of The Sociological Review and the creator of the public sociology project So Fi Zine.

Deborah Lupton

Deborah Lupton is SHARP Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, Australia. Her research is interdisciplinary, spanning sociology, communication and cultural studies. She is located in the Centre for Social Research in Health and the Social Policy Research Centre, leading both the Vitalities Lab and the UNSW Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. She is an elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and holds an Honorary Doctor of Social Science degree awarded by the University of Copenhagen.

Mike Michael

Mike Michael is a sociologist of science and technology. He joined the Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Exeter in 2017, having previously worked at Lancaster University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Sydney. His research interests have included: the relation of everyday life to technoscience; biotechnological and biomedical innovation and culture; the public understanding of/engagement with science; and process methodology.