‘There’s No Going Back’. Roxie’s IPhone®: An Object Ethnography

Abstract

In many of the countries of the developed world, young people live in a web of what Miller and Madianou (2012) have described as ‘polymedia’. That is, many young people, including those that took part in the study underpinning this paper, have an array of media from which to choose when creating and accessing text. Adding a layer of complexity, many of these media forms, along with the lives of many young people, are increasingly mobile. Taking this into account, this paper takes as a specific focus one of the artefacts that constitute this polymedia web, specifically the textual practices that follow for one young person called Roxie. To this end, the paper develops an object ethnography of Roxie’s mobile phone as a way to consider the role of this mobile, technological artefact in the construction of her everyday realities and the textual practices that emerge around this interaction.