![]() ![]() Moreover, affective ripples emerging from such irritations also expose underlying assumptions about how ethnographic encounters should ideally proceed and what constitutes rapport and “good” ethnographic relationships, seemingly a prerequisite for successful ethnographies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with visitors of two youth centers in Vienna, Austria, in 2019, I argue that the moment when the smartphone becomes part of the affective triad, alongside the researcher and the interlocutor, also presents a window on the entanglement of digital technologies with everyday life. ![]() But what happens when the smartphone, seemingly a distraction from the relationship in the making, creates a wall between the anthropologist and the interlocutor? While smartphones have been widely explored as a media technology used by the interlocutors, or as research tools, their affective grip on the researchers themselves has received less attention to date. “Hanging out” and establishing “rapport” is an essential part of the ethnographic encounter in anthropology. CASUAL GAMES ONLINE OFFLINEHence, I primarily focused on the moments in which online and offline intersect, as the thumb scrolls through the Instagram feed while passing the time, and not necessarily because the person is interested in its content-i.e., mundane practices reminiscent of what Ehn and Löfgren (2010) have called "non-events," barely perceptible, yet imbued with complex meanings and social choreographies. ![]() While the content of online practices or the intricacies of specific online platforms or communities have been studied frequently in scholarship over the last two decades, embodied, seemingly trivial, and "in-between" (Hjorth & Richardson, 2014 Juul, 2010 Kinder-Kurlanda & Willson, 2016 Kuittinen et al., 2007) "small scale practices" (Møller & Robards, 2019), such as scrolling and swiping, are still ethnographically under-researched. Ethical reasons aside, my interest was primarily in the embodied in-between moments when their fingers touched the screen, somewhere between intention and content. ![]()
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