‘New’ Ethnography and Ubiquitous Computing

Abstract

In this chapter we inspect how the movement of the computer away from the desktop and the workplace has led to calls for 'new' approaches to ethnography within systems design, with the accompanying suggestion that ethnography should now be used to provide an understanding (rather than an explication) of culture and the meaning that technology has for people in their everyday lives. What we see in these calls are some old social science arguments about the 'macro' and the 'micro' being dusted off and played out anew in design. More than this, we see old social science practices of description at work, which rip familiar everyday concepts out of everyday contexts of use and distort them to provide generalised analytic accounts of culture and the social order that have arisen as a consequence of ubiq-uitous computing. Something we especially see unravel for the reader here is the way in which, for all of their claimed purchase upon the social character of comput-ing in the twenty-fi rst century, the generalised analytic accounts provided by 'new' approaches to ethnography fail to give design any kind of privileged insight into the contemporary social world. The accounts they offer are of much the same order that any competent member of society might give, in so much as they are demonstrably rendered through common -sense practices of description.