Deep Ethnographic Research with Digital Detoxers

The next speaker at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is Theodora Sutton, who has studied a digital detox event in the San Francisco Bay area, Camp Grounded. This takes place in nature and bans digital technology, real names, work talk, watches, and drugs and alcohol.

Theodora used this event as a starting-point for an ethnographic exploration both of the Camp Grounded experience itself and of the participants’ technology usage practices back in the everyday world. After the Camp Grounded experience, there was a flurry of Facebook friending between participants even in spite of the ‘no real names’ policy, which involved some online detective work in order to find and verify identities. There is also a secret Facebook group for Camp Grounded alumni that is accessible to ne members only upon invitation from an existing member, and such post-Camp activities are meant to extend the community experience beyond the event itself, through thoughtful use of this technology. The group also organises its own alumni events.

Studying this community through participant observation proved difficult. The community managers did not allow Theodora to publish a paragraph about her research, and she engaged only in liking posts on the group; but she also friended participants directly and through this was included more fully in their community. Levels of community membership were measured in part also through the number of mutual friends between two participants.

Such friending also enables the research participants to research the researcher in turn; participants were able to review Theodora’s personal Facebook profile. In the end, Theodora set up a separate profile purely for research purposes to avoid potential issues and misunderstandings arising from this.

Attending Camp Grounded was the key point of access to this community, then; follow-up connections built further trust and enabled more informed consent. But none of this is straightforward.