Screen Walks: Conducting “Research in Motion” in Digital Environments
By Steffen Köhn (University of Aarhus) and Nestor Siré (Independent artist, Havana)
For more on their research on SNET in Cuba, read “Fragile connections: Community computer networks, human infrastructures, and the consequences of their breakdown in Havana” in our print journal.
Introduction
We developed the screen-walk method when we faced difficulties studying SNET, a large, homegrown community computer network that connected tens of thousands of users in Havana, Cuba. While conducting research, we engaged in more “classical” participant observation with the numerous volunteers that maintained its physical infrastructure, but we quickly found that we needed a different approach to observe SNET members’ online social interactions. So we developed an elicitation method where we asked SNET users and admins to give us visual and verbal tours through the network. Our research participants took on the role of guides and explained to us the different platforms and services and demonstrated their typical patterns of use. We recorded these active, participant-led explorations on their computers with a simple screen-grabbing software.
This screen-walk method shares many characteristics with established online cultural practices for the evaluation of cultural goods, such as walkthroughs, unboxing videos, or tutorials. Like these instructional or even educative formats, our method makes explicit the concrete processes of engagement with a digital medium or environment that are difficult to convey only through words. We want to explore the inherent opportunities and affordances that digital mediation offers for rewiring the relations between anthropologists and their various research participants, publics, students, and colleagues (Collins, Durington, and Gill 2017).
The screen walks were important for our research process for two reasons: first and foremost, they served us as research data, as they documented how our research participants did things in the network, which activities and sites were most important to them, and how they interacted with other users. The many hours of recordings that we collected with them allowed us to better understand the processes, practices, and routines that made up their everyday online lives. Second, we came to see screen walks as a possibility to disseminate anthropological knowledge differently. By editing some of the screen walks that our participants had performed into a series of short videos that resemble online instructional videos, we were drawing on an audiovisual genre that SNET administrators frequently consumed, shared, and, in some cases, produced themselves. Likewise, users were enthusiastic about creating and sharing gameplay videos to show off their best creations in Minecraft or their most dramatic Dota 2 matches. As the screen walks were a familiar genre they could easily relate to, our research participants eagerly collaborated with us in crafting their narrative structure and circulated the finished videos among their friends.
This essay and the series of screen-walk videos are the outcome of a collaboration between an anthropologist, a visual artist (who developed various artistic projects about SNET), and several members of the network’s community. The text presents the conceptual and methodological ideas behind the screen walk as a novel research and representation practice, and the videos constitute audiovisual explorations of the network from the perspectives of a maker of its infrastructure, a user, and two administrators. We believe that this multimodal format that combines audiovisual ethnography with textual reflection has offered us a space for engaging in an “inventive collaboration” (Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón 2019) outside of established forms of representation and the format of the single-authored academic research paper.
Exploring SNET through Screen Walks
SNET organically evolved when hundreds of neighborhood LANs that groups of friends had set up to play multiplayer video games began to connect with each other to form a city-spanning structure. The network not only hosted online games but also Facebook clones, message boards, file-sharing platforms, or copies of popular websites such as Wikipedia. Its central interface was TeamSpeak, the slightly outdated voice-conferencing software that allows online gamers to strategize their team’s cooperative play. SNET users could use it to chat, make calls, or do live radio shows or use it as a social network and a web directory.
Each of the screen-walk videos that we produced explores SNET through an individual participant’s lens of experience: that of a maker of its material infrastructure, that of a user, and that of two game administrators. Each video has a slightly different aesthetic and presents a different application of our method.
The first screen walk takes place on the laptop of K3mpactchi, one of SNET’s founding members, who takes us through his collection of photos and videos that document the network’s emergence and expansion over the last decade. He is the prototypical expert-interlocutor with para-ethnographic tendencies who had been invited to speak about SNET at some international tech events and even co-presented a research paper at the Internet Measurement Conference. As he shared our concern to document the network’s unique architecture, he was the perfect guide through SNET’s complex material infrastructure.
Screen Walk 1
The second screen walk was performed by (DJ) ☠The Big Boss☠, a user from Centro Habana who explained to us SNET’s software infrastructure and its various services. Whereas K3mpactchi’s video tour took us through images and videos saved on his hard drive, this screen walk documents a user’s real-time interaction with the network and reveals how SNET members had to navigate their online space differently than we are used to on the global internet.
Screen Walk 2
In the third screen walk, Greta and her partner Antonio, whose SNET nickname is KZKG^Gaara, unveiled how SNET looked like and functioned from an admin perspective. The couple formed part of the administration team of Republic of Gamers, SNET’s main game-hosting pillar. In their screen walk, they showed us the software backend of their pillar’s gaming servers that normally remained invisible to users and detailed their various responsibilities and interactions with other members of the network, such as moderating forums and maintaining and updating the games they administered.
Screen Walk 3
Setting these videos on our research participants’ own desktop screens enabled us to produce highly subjective portraits of the network. The screen walks allowed us to elicit their feelings about and reflections on its development and material infrastructure, its frontend users engaged with, as well as the software architecture that was sustained by its administrators. Together, they reveal how the network’s connectivity is dependent on face-to-face-interactions, how its software interface was designed to facilitate direct communication between each member of the network, and how its physical and software infrastructure was kept alive by hundreds of admins who repurposed and modified software, maintained equipment, or assisted users with technical problems.
Conclusion
The screen walk is both an elicitation method and a new representational practice for the study of network culture. While we only used the screen walk offline and in physical co-presence with our interlocutors due to the restrictions of the local Cuban context, we believe that it is a dynamic method that can be applied in many cases of online research—for example, during a Zoom interview with the help of the “share screen” function. As a form of ethnographic filmmaking for the digital age, the screen-walk method acknowledges how the screens of our computers, mobile phones, and tablets have become primary sites for worldly interaction (Köhn 2020).
References Cited
Collins, Samuel Gerald, Matthew Durington, and Harjant Gill. 2017. “Multimodality: An Invitation.” American Anthropologist 119 (1): 142–46
Dattatreyan, E. Gabriel, and Isaac Marrero-Guillamón. 2019. “Introduction: Multimodal Anthropology and the Politics of Invention.” American Anthropologist 121 (1): 220–28.
Köhn, Steffen. 2020. “Desktop Documentary: Screens as Film Locations.” In The Routledge Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video, edited by Phillip Vannini, 267–77. New York: Routledge.
Cite As
Köhn Steffen, and Nestor Siré. 2022. “Screen Walks: Conducting ‘Research in Motion’ in Digital Environments.” American Anthropologist website, April 16.