Walking Through, Going Along and Scrolling Back

Abstract

Spatial metaphors have long been part of the way we make sense of media. From early conceptualizations of the internet, we have come to understand digital media as spaces that support, deny or are subject to different mobilities. With the availability of GPS data, somatic bodily movement has enjoyed significant attention in media geography, but recently innovations in digital ethnographic methods have paid attention to other, more ephemeral ways of moving and being with social media. In this article, we consider three case studies in qualitative, “small data” social media research methods: the walkthrough, the go-along and the scroll back methods. Each is centred on observing navigational flows through app infrastructures, fingers hovering across device surfaces and scrolling-and-remembering practices in social media archives. We advocate an ethnography of ephemeral media mobilities and suggest that small data approaches should analytically integrate four dimensions of mediated mobility: bodies and affect, media objects and environments, memory and narrative, and the overall research encounter.

Full text

95
NORDICOM REVIEW
Møller, K. & Robards, B. (2019). Walking through, going along and scrolling back: Ephemeral
mobilities in digital ethnography. Nordicom Review, 40 (Special Issue 1): 95-109. doi:10.2478/
nor-2019-0016.
Walking Through, Going Along
and Scrolling Back
Ephemeral mobilities in digital ethnography
Kristian MøllerI & Brady RobardsII
I Digital Design, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, krimo@itu.dk
II School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Australia, brady.robards@monash.edu
Abstract
Spatial metaphors have long been part of the way we make sense of media. From early
conceptualizations of the internet, we have come to understand digital media as spaces
that support, deny or are subject to dierent mobilities. With the availability of GPS data,
somatic bodily movement has enjoyed signicant attention in media geography, but recently
innovations in digital ethnographic methods have paid attention to other, more ephemeral
ways of moving and being with social media. In this article, we consider three case studies
in qualitative, “small data” social media research methods: the walkthrough, the go-along
and the scroll back methods. Each is centred on observing navigational ows through app
infrastructures, ngers hovering across device surfaces and scrolling-and-remembering
practices in social media archives. We advocate an ethnography of ephemeral media mobili-
ties and suggest that small data approaches should analytically integrate four dimensions
of mediated mobility: bodies and aect, media objects and environments, memory and
narrative, and the overall research encounter.
Keywords: small data, ethnography, social media, spatial turn, mobility
Introduction
Since the development and everyday adoption of the internet in the late 1980s and
early 1990s, ethnographers have “gone digital”: from connecting to research partici-
pants by email and web conferencing to using digital media as interventionist research
tools in traditional eld sites through to studying cultures that coalesce in digital social
spaces. As with any emerging eld, several inuential delineations have been proposed
over the years. Such contributions include Kozinets’s (2009) work on “netnography”,
Hine’s (2000) “virtual ethnography”, Boellstor and colleagues (2012) “ethnography
in virtual worlds” and more recently Pink and colleagues (2016) work on “digital eth-
nography”. All of these accounts ltered understandings of media through the lenses of
space, place and mobility. While the media material background has evolved and the

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Kristian Møller & Brady Robards
analytical attention diverged, a fundamental ethnographic interest remains: how do we
as researchers navigate digital cultures and produce rich, reexive and polyphonic ac-
counts of everyday life in mediatized society? To answer this question, we intend this
article to act as 1) a conceptual working through of mobilities in contemporary digital
“small data” ethnography at the same time as 2) a how-to guide for researchers aiming
to study digital culture.
Recent digital ethnographic methodological innovations reect general ontological and
epistemological shifts within the eld of internet research. In a digital media saturated
world, the meaning of what constitutes presence and action is changing with the fast pace
of development and adoption of socially mediating technologies. This also explains the
continuous and ongoing eorts to describe an ethnography for mediatized society. In this
article, we will focus on social media and draw out their aspects of everyday mobilities
that, despite the increasing datacation, do not leave stable traces that can readily be ob-
served. We believe that digital ethnography should serve as a counterpoint to the growing
reliance on the found digital traces of big data sets, scraped and collected retrospectively.
Here, we propose a methodological framework of “ephemeral, mediated mobilities” for
representing less materialized ways of being with social media. The framework brings
together small-scale media–body interactions – such as swipes and scrolls – that are often
left unexplored due to them being between the intent of the user and a measurable action
in the interface. The economic value of these small-scale interactions is also dicult to
perceive. Our proposed framework is thus in other words concerned with somatic and
digital movements, which, in our media ecology, remain largely untracked, unarchived
or only precariously archived. Signicantly, our framework places the user’s action,
experience and meaning making as central to productive research inquiry.
To esh out what an ethnography of ephemeral mediated mobilities might attend to,
we consider three methods as case studies. Each method was developed in response
to social media that recongure sociality and intimacy in fundamental ways, namely
hook-up apps and feed-based social media platforms. Compared with the chatrooms
and virtual worlds studied in early “virtual ethnographic” work, these services have
radically changed the way in which everyday closeness is produced and thus need fresh
conceptualizations. Further, the long-term and sustained use of these technologies must
now also be understood in longitudinal terms, as people and platforms begin to reect
(and capitalize) on years and years of social media histories (Robards, 2014).
To map out a broad range of ephemeral traces and determine how they can be pursued,
we will explore three case studies: 1) the “walkthrough method” (Light et al., 2016) is
an approach to mapping methodically how smartphone applications (apps) work; 2) the
media go-along (Jørgensen, 2016) involves research participants giving a verbal and
kinetic “guided tour” of an app, with the researcher intervening in dierent ways; and
3) the scroll back method (Robards & Lincoln, 2017) entails working with research
participants as co-analysts of longitudinal digital traces. The ephemeral traces pursued
in these dierent yet related methods concern the mobilities of ngers moving across
media device surfaces, of navigational ows through nested app infrastructures and of
the dierent kinds of habitating, narrating and reecting that digital social media allow.
While these media mobilities might seem inconsequential, such easily forgotten ways of
being with media should be accounted for, and we intend this article to support research
endeavours and methodological interventions in this area of mediatized everyday life.

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Walking Through, Going Along and Scrolling Back
Accordingly, rst we explore the role of digital traces in media studies and argue
that ethnography should put digital traces to work while remaining sensitive to what
is not traced and made immediately visible. Then we will provide an overview of how
spatial and mobile metaphors have been used in media studies, paying particular atten-
tion to the concepts of “mediated mobility” (Keightley & Reading, 2014; Sheller, 2018)
and “wayfaring” (Moores, 2014). Inspired by these, we suggest four dimensions along
which ethnographers can construct the ephemeral aspects of mediated mobilities. We
then apply this framework to the three case studies to show how they attend dierently
to ephemeral mediated mobilities. We conclude by suggesting future applications of
the concept in digital media research as well as its limitations. In the following section,
we explore the characteristics of a digital trace ethnography that takes advantage of the
data left behind in current social communication infrastructures.
Digital traces in ethnography
The notion of persistent and archived-by-default digital traces has evolved over the last
few years, with the introduction of more ephemeral digital traces. Snapchat was the rst
mainstream platform to allow users to send text, picture and video messages that would
last only for a few seconds (or a 24-hour period in a “story”), vanishing shortly after-
wards. Handyside and Ringrose (2017: 347) studied the role of Snapchat in mediating
memory and intimacy among 18-year-olds and found that it oered a “temporal fast-
ness and ephemerality” to their exchanges. At the same time, however, they also found
examples of “xity through the screenshotting of ‘disappearing’ snaps” (Handyside &
Ringrose, 2017: 347), as users are able to bypass the intended temporary nature of a
“snap” and record whatever was on their screen with their phone’s screenshot function.
This turn to the ephemeral was adopted later by Instagram and Facebook, through which
users can create daily “stories” that tend to chronicle more mundane, everyday experi-
ences that ostensibly disappear 24 hours later. It is now also possible to delete messages
on Facebook, and to send images or videos on Instagram that are only accessible once.
Tracing or following is at the heart of ethnography, not least since the emergence of
the multi-sited ethnographic paradigm (Marcus, 1995). Such ethnography constructs
worlds through “movement and tracing within dierent settings of a complex cultural
phenomenon” (ibid.: 106). In a mediatized society, digital traces of networked behaviour
are plentiful, with social media presenting us with readily available material. In fact, so-
cial media platforms are in the business of trace making, or rather, trace selling. Features
like the Facebook Timeline and Instagram’s “your activity” dashboard oer up only a
fraction of the insights produced in behind-the-scenes data analyses. Nevertheless, they
oer media users a resource to think about their digital lives, which in turn creates a rich
source for participant observation. Besides social media platforms, such ethnography
may draw on the abundance of digital materials available in chat services, online forums
or smartphone log data (Ørmen & Thorhauge, 2015). The traces produced by most uses
of social media are persistent and accrue over time through the archive-by-default mo-
dality of many of our digitally mediated interactions. They can be assembled or accessed
and framed as rich texts for analysis by digital ethnographers. The characteristics that
most social media share are a richness in digital traces that in Bowker’s words has led
to a “new regime of memory practices” (Bowker, 2007: 34).

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Kristian Møller & Brady Robards
The concept of a “digital trace” has mostly been used to call attention to inscriptions
in media that reect human activity: the digital trace is digital traces are “records of ac-
tivity [...] undertaken through an online information system” (Howison et al. 2011: 769).
Hine noted that internet ethnography may engage with at least two types of traces: those
readily available on social media platforms, for example, and those that the ethnographer
forges through interventionist strategies to represent activity and make it available for
collaborative interpretation (Hine, 2015). As digital traces are signicant elements of
the media spaces that people navigate daily, engaging with them in digital ethnography
is the key to understanding what such media environments mean to their users. Further,
in terms of media as social spaces, digital traces are the building blocks of what can be
thought of as online presence and, thus, constitutive of a sense of online sociality. How-
ever, digital traces should not become the only thing that digital ethnographers follow.
Digital ethnographers should, depending on the social object that they choose to follow,
be able to integrate analyses of media objects and media environments reexively, with
traces of use, observation of participant media practice and media narration.
As sociological and critical internet studies are increasingly adopting the non-hu-
man-centric modes of analysis found in new materialism (Barad, 1996; Bennett, 2009;
Van der Tuin & Dolphijn, 2012), the reexive foregrounding of mobile human bodies
across static media backgrounds is being questioned. This perspective privileges encoun-
ters between dierent bodies that create marks in space that can then be interpreted to
tell us stories of the encounter itself. In Ahmed’s (2004) aective vocabulary, it is the
“impression” left on one surface by another body that tells us about the mobilities with
which the bodies came into contact, the marks that they left and the direction that they
took after the “impact”. Traces thus not only open up to the reading of past interactions
and emotions but also imply their future directions or tendencies.
Further, non-human and new materialist approaches move past the typical ethno-
graphic modus of reexively interrogating the always already situated participant–re-
searcher relationship, with media and other materials serving as the “eld” backdrop,
and instead grasp the research encounter as an assemblage acting on semiotic, material
and social ows (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988: 23). They emerge together in the research
encounter, with both their individual characteristics and the “output” or momentum of
the event/encounter becoming available to study. With many disparate sources of digital
traces available, the work of “lling in the blanks” is not lessened but intensied:
Our capacity to join into others’ attentional spaces, read intentions from minimal
traces, attribute meaning and co-ordinate around presumed shared mental states,
means that we are able to collaborate on the reduced fragments of data because
we can fill in the gaps. (Broadbent & Lobet-Maris, 2015: 117)
In other words, the place of digital traces in everyday lives cannot be extrapolated from
a set of data points and, in ethnographic terms, the subject, thing or story (Marcus,
1995) cannot be followed through machine learning and algorithmic aggregation and
visualization alone. Rather, it requires often-disparate elements across dierent temporal
and spatial planes to be combined in ways that achieve internal structural cohesion by
virtue of their internal relations and not by externally given logics.
To sum up, the ethnographic method in mediatized society should be able to follow
ephemeral and xed digital traces as well as creating its own traces, all of which should

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Walking Through, Going Along and Scrolling Back
be integrated into the analysis of how everyday life with media looks and feels. While
working actively with the agencies or directions of both people and media materials,
and how they come together in the research encounter, we hold that ethnography should
retain the human interest in critically approaching the ways in which everyday lives
are touched by media. In the following, we draw from work on media space and mobil-
ity to approach the ways in which media “touch” everyday life through the concept of
mediated mobility.
From spatiality to mobility
In media studies, spatial metaphors have long been employed to understand many aspects
of mediatization (Harvey, 1989; Jenkins, 2010; Madianou & Miller, 2013; McLuhan
et al., 1968; Meyrowitz, 1998; Sandvik et al., 2016; Silverstone, 1994). In Life online:
Researching real experience in virtual space (1998), Annette Markham explored how
spatial metaphors allow for a reading of the internet and code as providing boundaries
for presence and action, designs that designate certain entry and exit points. Here, while
still focusing on media as stable frameworks, we see attention to the ways in which these
frameworks shape the metaphorical movements that can be performed online. Similarly,
others have pointed out that, when the eld site spans multiple spaces to follow sub-
jects and objects of interest around, social presence and participation must also become
distributed and networked (Licoppe, 2015; Stempfhuber & Liegl, 2016). Digital media
have changed the repertoire of ethnographic practices in that recording and visualization
technologies can be used to create new interventionist strategies that do not just follow
but actively recongure participant–researcher knowledge production by introducing
media objects into the research (Pink, 2007).
With the spatial turn in media studies, geography’s inuence on media studies was
formalized. In anthologies on geographies of communication (Jansson & Falkheimer,
2006) and media space (Couldry & McCarthy, 2004), human and cultural geography
have been used to describe the production of mediated space at dierent scales. With
this turn, media studies became decidedly non-media-centric (Morley, 2008) by draw-
ing together “imaginations, representations and (inter)subjective interpretations […]
implied or embedded in spatial practice and material structures” (Jansson, 2012: 143).
Through this perspective on digital ethnography, we are able to shift our attention from
the social interactions occurring in relation to a set of material structures towards the
ways in which dierent digital materials are at once woven together in mobile practice
and frame the kinds of mobility that are thinkable and doable. By centring on tensions
of mobility and stillness, potentials and actualizations and the place-making eorts of
both human and non-human actors, the paradigm is well suited to approaching the way
in which digital trace ethnography can be performed. Specically, the concept of medi-
ated mobilities, the “interaction between an accumulation of spatially and temporally
specic mediated political, economic, social and individual experiences [and] processes”
(Keightley & Reading, 2014: 297), is useful here. Ethnography of mediated mobilities
should thus attend to the particular ways in which media and people are accumulated
in certain encounters. Digital traces that are readily available as well as researcher- and
participant-generated digital traces are central to the ways in which these accumulations
are studied.

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Kristian Møller & Brady Robards
To gain a more concrete understanding of what ephemeral mediated mobility looks
like, Moores’s reading of Ingold’s “wayfaring” concept is useful (Ingold, 2011). Wayfar-
ing describes practical engagement with lived-in environments as “alongly integrated
inhabitant knowledge” (Moores, 2014: 201). From Moores’s perspective, mediated
mobility is “doubly digital” in that it involves both physical manipulations of media
artefacts (such as nger to touchscreen) and imagined but just as real orientation and
habitation in digital media environments, interfaces and aordances (ibid.: 204-205).
Further, with the perspective of wayfaring in ethnographies of mediated mobility, nar-
ration and discourse are not conceived of as research “add-ons” that give dierent kinds
of access but as types of “movement from place to place” (ibid.: 201). Knowledge of
media environments is thus integrated into the ethnographic account at many levels.
In this way, dierent ethnographic methods not only congure dierent paths with
and through media environments but also dierent narrative paths to knowledge about
mediatized life.
Ethnographies of ephemeral mediated mobilities
The question of mobility has also been approached from the perspective of emotions and
aect. Sara Ahmed (2004) explored the power of emotions to move minds and bodies,
making apparent the ways in which emotions attach to objects and how that serves to
mobilize or pacify publics around dierent issues, sentiments and bodies. Conversely,
Brian Massumi (2002) conceptualized the work of aect as a prediscursive force and
bodies as multiple, both somatic and imagined. While the roles of aect and emotion
are conceptualized dierently, they both consider how contemporary culture operates
in ways that require sense making that extends beyond practice, representation and
discourse.
As mentioned in the previous section, another focus point in the literature has been
the ways in which media frame sociality, experience and action. Generally, the spatial
turn in media studies seeks to register the ways in which the layering and penetration
of media things and services fundamentally shift what a social situation looks and feels
like. Similarly, the intensied mediation of practice and the production of more stable,
material traces have led to methodological innovations in the study of memory. Here,
Kuhn’s concept of “memory work” (2010) has been instrumental in the introduction
of personal media materials into the study of everyday mediatized life. Memory work
is performed by participants prompted by media into which lived life is somehow
inscribed. Thus, it reects the ephemeral and unstable nature of remembering in that
it is inseparable from the surrounding material objects, which might change or even
disappear over time.
Finally, with the vast amount of digital traces that are more or less readily available,
what constitutes ethical research activity must be renegotiated. Such work is particu-
larly pertinent to the eld of internet studies, which has consequently responded with
a number of collaboratively produced guidelines. The most recent iteration, from the
Association of Internet Researchers (Markham et al., 2012) suggests that processual,
situational, embodied and feminist ethics take the place of the application of a uni-
form ethical ideology and rule-based systems like those of ethical review boards. This
response from the researcher community reects the fact that, in complex mediatized

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Walking Through, Going Along and Scrolling Back
social phenomena, “ethically important moments” (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004) arise
unexpectedly and that dealing with them is a messy process of unpacking the specic
ways in which bodies and media come together in that moment.
Inspired by these works’ attention to ephemeral and unstable relations, we suggest
that ethnographies of mediated mobilities should observe and analytically integrate
dierent dimensions of mobility, including:
1. Bodies and aect. How do media and their users somatically and semantically impress
upon each other? What do these impressions tell us about the mediated circulation
of identity and community ideals? How are their aective and agentic capacities
actualized?
2. Media objects and environments. What mobile capacities of media are actualized in
the ethnography? How are object attributes, interface aordances and media envi-
ronmental genres mobilized?
3. Memory and narrative. What temporal distributions of mediated experience are
traced? What memories and stories of media are mobilized and to what eect? What
kinds of narrative on media structural change arise in ethnographic research encoun-
ters with media?
4. The research encounter. What elements are drawn together and how is agency dis-
tributed among them? With what directions and momentums do they enter into the
encounter, what interactions and frictions occur during the encounter and what future
directions can be speculatively constructed?
Now we consider three case studies that exemplify how ethnographic methods can
attend to mediatized everyday life across these four dimensions of mediated mobility.
The ndings are summarized in Figure 1. We draw on two of our own independent
research projects, and one other adjacent one, to develop three case studies of medi-
ated mobilities in digital ethnography. First, we consider Light and colleagues (2016)
study, which developed an approach to methodically mapping out how smartphone ap-
plications (apps) work – they called this the “walkthrough method”. Second, we draw
on Kristian Møller’s (2017) study of gay men’s mobile media use in Denmark, which
involved research participants “walking through” app use with the researcher – he called
this the “go-along method”. Third and nally, we draw on the work of Brady Robards
and Siân Lincoln (2017), which involved working with research participants as co-
analysts of longitudinal digital traces on Facebook – they called this the “scroll back
method”. Taken together, these three case studies draw attention to the ways in which
mobilities other than traversals of physical space can be observed and accounted for:
walking, going and scrolling in digital spaces. The following case studies show how
observing ephemeral mediated movements can produce rich, “small data”, embedded
and detailed ethnographic enquiries into digital cultures that extend beyond or rather
“below” larger-scale methods.

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Kristian Møller & Brady Robards
Figure 1. Four dimensions of mediated mobilities in the walkthrough, media go-along
and scroll back methods
Dimensions of medi-
ated mobilities Methods of digital ethnography
Walkthrough Media go-along Scroll back
Bodies and affect Navigational flow Navigational style Archived semantic
bodies and iden-
tities
Media objects and
environments
Expected use Structuring invita-
tions for go-alongs
Algorithmic resurfa-
cing of history
Memory and
narrative
Researcher media litera-
cies guide the narration
Haptic and seman-
tic wayfaring
Personal and inter-
face biography
Ethics of the research
encounter
Researcher carefully
evaluating assumptions
of privacy
Distributed ethical
agency in medi-
ated access and
narration
Distributed ethical
agency in mediated
access and nar-
ration
The walkthrough method: Preferred mobilities of the interface
Social activity increasingly occurs within apps, which in an ethnographic sense operate
as cultural scenes in which certain actions are valorized while others are made impos-
sible. The walkthrough method developed by Light and colleagues (2016) works to map
out these app surfaces, methodically moving through an app’s design and functionality
to identify discrete aordances. In using the walkthrough method, the researcher moves
across the media landscape, noting both the physical manipulations of the smartphone,
tablet or computer and the preferred uses and mobilities indicated in the media envi-
ronmental interface. By “participating” in the implied ows of practice while analysing
how these surfaces are culturally coded and meaningful, the walkthrough method allows
the researcher to observe how dierent apps structure presence and action. This method
aims to understand what seemingly mundane apps do and feel like. The apps are “made
strange” by moving slowly through them, applying analytical categorization to every
design element, allowing a detailed analysis of how entry and exit point architecture
shapes the ow of arrival and departure.
The walkthrough method captures how the researcher navigates through the interface.
The method aords the researcher high mobility in that he or she can access every corner
of the media interface, taking time to reect on how it feels to inhabit each of these areas.
As a sense of habitation arises from pre-established knowledge and impressions as well
as in direct engagement with the material space at hand, the eld notes detail narratives
of the sequences of interface aordances with the social coding that the researcher reads
into each button, layout, prole picture and so on. The reading of the interface is thus
narratively entangled with the embodied knowledge that the researcher enters with and
the sequential ow through which his or her body walks through and explores the app.
The app as a material environment is subjected to readings of what is considered to
be “expected use”, that is, ways of using the interface that are materially coded into the
app. The researcher approaches the app with existing knowledge of app design. The
researcher may also be familiar with the “genre” of apps into which the app of interest

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Walking Through, Going Along and Scrolling Back
falls: dating/hook-up apps, image sharing, instant messaging, games and so on. Each
genre has its own pre-existing norms and conventions that users might expect to nd
in similar apps. This knowledge shapes the researcher’s approach and determines a set
of expectations. Light and colleagues (2016) explained that apps also operate within an
environment of “expected use”: “how [the] app provider anticipates it will be received,
generate prot or other forms of benet and regulate user activity” (Light et al., 2016:
3). The method thus acknowledges both the multiplicity of reading strategies to which
apps are subject and the fact that users will typically read the interface similarly and
follow similar pathways.
By foregrounding the assemblage performed by the researcher, the researcher litera-
cies relating to the media genre and the communities organized within them become
central factors in understanding how the app cultures are narratively constructed in
academic writing. As such, the method somewhat backgrounds the possibility of a
multiplicity of voices in the narration of user-and-interface cultures that other more
person- and identity-focused methods might produce.
Ethically, applying the walkthrough method to the study of apps requires the re-
searcher to pay particular attention to the ways in which he or she becomes visible
to other users, how such a presence might be perceived, how such a presence might
negatively aect the users’ sense of pleasure and safety and what kinds of risks the
researcher might face. Because the method foregrounds the media and cultural litera-
cies of the researcher, they can be put to work in the careful description of navigating
the app. Knowledge about and in relation to the mediatized cultures of the app is thus
foregrounded and choices regarding avoiding and disseminating risks are ltered through
this lens. Thus, the researcher is well positioned to choose carefully a representation
strategy that takes into consideration the relationship between the cultural make-up
of the scene and the researcher’s personal and academic positions. At the same time,
by being the only participant, the reective potential in engaging with other ways of
wayfaring and inhabiting the media is foregone. While textual bodies (in prole texts
and chat messages) could be engaged with in such reective matter, they are mostly
backgrounded too, treated as ethical liabilities in the sense that they to a certain degree
are taking part in research unknowingly.
The media go-along method: Collaborative orientation and mobility
Whereas the walkthrough method centres on the researcher’s experience of an app, the
media go-along method (Jørgensen, 2016) combines interview and participant observa-
tion to understand how participants use personal mobile media. Concretely, the research-
er interviews and observes the participant while he or she uses his or her own device
and social media service accounts. The method identies three media environmental
aspects for which observation and narration can operate: aordances, representations
and communications. The method is highly collaborative, as the intervention oers both
the researcher a resource for asking relevant questions and the participants the ability
to take control of their memory work (Kuhn, 2010). While it allows for the description
of expected mobilities embedded in interfaces, something on which the walkthrough
method focuses, it is more attuned to the uptake of these and what that tells us about
the media user and his or her place in the mediated community.

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Kristian Møller & Brady Robards
With the method, the researcher is able to tell stories of bodily mobilities across
interfaces, of how people are with their media and of their sense of ease, joy, disorienta-
tion or estrangement. By observing the somatic mobilities of limbs touching interfaces,
it enables the researcher to approach an understanding of the dierent purposes and
styles of wayfaring, that is, somatic clues to the participant’s position in and aective
relationship to the mediated culture at hand. Such narratives can, for example, highlight
the temporal instability of body–media relationships, because they capture sequences
of user–interface interaction and narrations that might show disparate and direction-
changing ways of inhabiting personal media technologies. In other words, the method
allows nuanced bodily relationships to media to emerge in research accounts, challenging
the stable categories of “user types”.
The media go-along method produces narratives of collaborative haptic and semantic
wayfaring across the smartphone interface and environment and foregrounds how these
narratives are negotiated between researcher and participant. By combining eld notes
on behaviour and audio recordings of discourse, it creates the basis for analytically in-
tegrating narration as it arises in tandem with somatic wayfarings across the smartphone
screen and environment, scrolling up and down and pressing buttons to move through
dierent sections of the services. Such mediated memory work might arise from engag-
ing with either the interface structural parts and what they signify or the representational
culture present in user prole pictures and texts or in communicative histories of the
chat message archive.
When privacy online is framed as a question of contextual integrity, formal proce-
dures for informed consent do not suce. Here, the media go-along research encounter
brings to the foreground the practical ethics of gaining visual and narrative access
through encounters with personal social media. As this access extends to third parties in
the sense that their private messages become visible and commented on, it is relevant to
ask what ethical implications such intimate observation has and what risk dissemination
strategies should be applied accordingly. The method suggests that practice-based ethics
could usefully be conceived of as the careful negotiation of mobilities. With the media
go-along method’s attention to the temporal instability of interface interactions, the re-
searcher should be ready to pay special attention to how the encounter has unfolded to
arrive at an ethically fraught moment and to consider who is present in the moment and
what should be undertaken next to de-escalate it. Third parties are by far the most im-
mobile in that they are not able to tell that their digital representations and interactional
traces are visible to the researcher. An ethics of care would require the researcher to be
extra cautious around such textual bodies. Conversely, as the participants control the
media device, they are able to go wherever they want in the interface and furthermore,
with a ick of the wrist, deny the researcher visible access. Somewhat complicating
this sense of unrestricted mobility, it should be noted that the researcher typically holds
a privileged and revered position in the situation and is able to turn that into powerful
“suggestions” or “invitations” regarding where the participant should go next. Thus, the
method is well positioned to inform digital practical judgement through rich contextual,
reected and negotiated research moments but also to allow the researcher to consider
and activate distributed ethical agency in his or her ethical navigation.

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The scroll back method: Mobility of memory
The scroll back method (Robards & Lincoln, 2017) was designed to study how social
media disclosure practices change over time and to work with research participants to
reect on the longitudinal nature of digital traces on social media. Whereas the walk-
through and go-along methods are focused on the here and now (for the researcher in
the former and the participant in the latter), the scroll back method attends more closely
to historical digital traces and to capturing change over time. The scroll back method
involves sitting with research participants as they scroll back through their social media
timelines or proles and asking them to narrate and explain what they see. The method
mobilizes digital traces recorded and marked as signicant by either the Facebook user
or the Facebook algorithm (through likes, comments and so on). The memory work in
the method relates to user- and machine-produced signicance markers. The research
attention paid to this relies on the degree to which the participant is able to reect on the
reworking of recorded moments. In this way, the scroll back method uses the Facebook
timeline as a memory object and, through collaborative interrogation of it, confronts the
participant with earlier versions of his or her mediatized life through memory objects.
Thus, the scroll back interview involves revisiting the archived “semantic bodies” of
research participants, often producing experiences of nostalgia, embarrassment, shame
and joy (Robards & Lincoln, 2017). It should be noted that, while the method was de-
veloped for Facebook in particular, as it was the most long-standing, still widely used
platform at the time, it can be adapted and applied to any form of social media in which
there is a persistent record of posts, images and other disclosures.
The method foregrounds the dynamic aspects of media, more specifically how
algorithms work to resurface and reassemble a personal user history into narratives.
Chronological records of posts and tags are a main component of contemporary social
media platforms, most prominently exemplified by Facebook’s “Timeline”. While
these are presented as rather static and temporally organized life narrative archives,
they should more accurately be described as a representation of user inputs, which
have been produced within a digital framework subject to both incremental changes
and major redesigns. An example of one such change is the ways in which Facebook
presents the user with “friendship stories” or “this day x years ago”. These are de- and
re-contextualization’s of user inputs, blurring the line between human and algorithmi-
cally generated memory objects.
While scrolling back through memory texts oers a chance to obtain rich narratives
of mediatized life, it also heightens the risk of unearthing information that the participant
did not anticipate, which may be uncomfortable or even problematic to share with a
researcher. Like the go-along method, the scroll back method is necessarily intimate in
many ways, as the digital traces that are produced through the use of digital media are
traces of personal and intimate lives: sleeping patterns, friendships, familial ties, tastes
and interests, sex lives and experiences of loss, sadness and elation. In a research sce-
nario, the “contextual integrity” (Nissenbaum, 2004) of certain disclosures can become
compromised. The ethical practice around this method should apply strategies to limit
the risk of such unwanted aective intensities arising and be ready for when they do. One
question that the researcher should ask of him-/herself and the participant is whether the
participant is aware of such a risk, how precarious and marginal their lives are and to
what degree they are able to deal with what might be remembered. Thus, ethical conduct

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Kristian Møller & Brady Robards
becomes a question of the degree to which the ethical agency can be distributed or, in
other words, whether it is sustainable to rely on the participant’s judgement.
Conclusion
In this article, we have considered three case studies along four dimensions of mediated
mobilities. The walkthrough reexively observes navigational ows through nested
app infrastructures, the media go-along interprets how ngers hover over and make
traces across media device surfaces and the scroll back method explores collaborative
scrolling-and-remembering practices in social media archives.
These research methods overlap and complement each other in dierent ways. While
the walkthrough method and the go-along method are centred on the user’s experience of
an app in the here and now, the scroll back method is more concerned with the historical
digital traces, collected over years of social media use. Whereas the walkthrough method
is focused on the experience of the researcher, navigating the app and its interface, the
go-along and scroll back methods attend to the experiences of research participants as
users of apps and social media. These everyday experiences are often intimate and deeply
personal, requiring careful and sensitive negotiations. In some scenarios, a combination
of the methods across the stages of a research project could be useful: walking through
digital space as a researcher initially, going along with research participants to learn
how they use the app or media and scrolling back with research participants to uncover
their historical uses.
Together they contribute to the geographical strain in media studies by carving out an
ethnography of ephemeral mediated mobilities that makes visible aspects of everyday
media that might otherwise pass unnoticed in research focusing on larger-scale media
mobility. More specically, they oer a framework for integrating spatial and temporal
analyses of human-and-media interactions: spatially, how orientations and actions arise
or are redirected or even unmade in relation to encounters with media infrastructures
and, temporally, how histories of media and people shape the direction, speed and force
with which they enter the observed research encounter. Further, by carefully construct-
ing a situational analysis of media–user encounters, they eectively operationalize the
calls for practice-based and aectively oriented ethics in internet research (Ess & the
AoIR Ethics Working Committee, 2002; Markham et al., 2012). Concretely attending
to mobilities that leave ephemeral traces is hard or impossible within many existing
ethnographic frameworks. Because the physical mobilities that operate on such a small
scale cannot be captured and represented with GPS positioning technology, log data ap-
proaches cannot fully attend to this. Other methods must then be used to make visible
the orientations and mobilities of bodies and limbs towards media interfaces, revealing
more aspects of users’ everyday life than their onscreen traces imply. Thus, following
these ephemeral traces allows us to learn about the phenomenological aspects of being
with media that might otherwise remain out of sight. Further, by attending to the four
dimensions of mobility, the intimate relationship between infrastructural aordances
and human thought and memory is centred. This is achieved not by privileging human
cognition and narration as the only sites on which biography and meaning are produced
but by having this arise in complex intra-actions with ever-changing landscapes of coded
technologies and social media surfaces.

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Walking Through, Going Along and Scrolling Back
We suggest that, in practice, following ephemeral traces typically means substitut-
ing or merging methods like those examined in this article into typical tools for media
ethnography alongside researcher fieldnotes, participant diaries and ethnographic
interviews. Introducing such interventions will in practice mean that the interview pro-
cess slows down, making a wider array of experiences strange and thus more readily
representable. In written discourse, it similarly requires the researcher and participant
to reect on more dimensions of their practices, motivations and emotions. In contrast,
media ethnography based on Kozinets’s (2009) netnography or similar online-only
observational methods is less attuned to the study of ephemeral traces, simply because
the participants’ somatic engagements are not considered.
This article has drawn on methods developed to gain a better understanding of eve-
ryday life with dating/hook-up apps and feed-based social media. However, we believe
that the study of any interactive media technology that is part of everyday life could
benet from attending to those mobilities of use, of action and of thinking that are not
readily available. Fields in which this approach could be useful include not only media
and internet studies but also human–computer interaction, design, social geography and
cultural studies.
Finally, there is the question of the assumed subject of study. Digital ethnographic
interventions that pay attention to the four dimensions’ mediated mobilities will require
them to be comfortable with very intense encounters. What, then, might such an intense
encounter obscure? Which subjects are able to navigate sustainably such an intense
intimacy with the researcher, with the media objects and with their memories? It seems
that the pure versions of these methods are geared to highly reexive subjectivities
without trauma or social anxiety who are comfortable with sharing deeply personal nar-
ratives from their media use. In other words, the methods might require acts in which
non-normative and precarious subjects might not feasibly engage. As such, we suggest
that further attention should be given to the intersectional aspects of studying ephemeral
mediated mobilities.
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