A matter of life and death

Chat to someone about their mobile phone and you catch a glimpse into their lives and relationships. That’s according to Hjorth, a digital ethnographer and artist based at RMIT University.

She’s spent the last two decades examining mobile media and play in Asia and the Pacific, and is now Director of the Design and Creative Practice Enabling Capability Platform (ECP) at RMIT.

These practices include how we deal with death and the growing challenge of managing our online legacies – digital footprints left by our wanderings across the internet.

According to Hjorth, mobile media has expanded upon traditional rituals for grief and now provides new models, such as selfie eulogies. 

“Previously, when a person died, loved ones cleaned up their material artefacts. Now, with so much of what we do online, this is creating a digital legacy we are yet to fully understand.”

Through two separate projects funded by the Australian Research Council, Hjorth and her colleagues have been looking at how our lives and even those of our furry friends have been fundamentally altered by mobile media.

One project explores the intergenerational uses of locative media in households in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne.

“I’m examining how the sharing (and non-sharing) of GPS and geo-tagging on social media can provide methods for ‘friendly surveillance' by family members,” Hjorth says.

“Parents keep an eye on their children, while grown-up children use it to monitor ageing parents, especially those grappling with dementia.

“Understanding these practices will help us in preparing for the future of media, care and rituals — especially in terms of digital legacy.”

In the other project, Hjorth and her collaborators spent three years investigating the role of mobile games in Australian households. While conducting their research, they experienced an unexpected hitch – pets kept getting in the way.

“We observed cats playing with iPads and keyboards, dogs watching television or participating in Skype calls,” Hjorth says.

“As our work progressed, it became clear that humans and their pets are entangled in various digital forms of intimacy and kinship.”

The researchers even encountered “pet wearables” that allowed owners to track their pet’s movements and emotions during the day while they were at work.

“This is why I love ethnography as a set of methods and mode of inquiry,” Hjorth says.

“From the households I visit, I learn a lot about how people adapt media in ways that are often unexpected, creative and playful.”

Hjorth is bringing this same playfulness and flexibility to her RMIT ECP. She says it’s the best way to make sure their work has value.

“The world requires creative solutions to solve complex real-world problems. This is why design thinking has become so prominent globally.

“At RMIT, we excel at creative solutions around digital culture, sustainability and social enterprise.

“The focus of the Design and Creative Practice ECP is practice-based research across architecture, art, design, games, digital media, fashion, and organisational contexts.”

In what’s likely to be a first, it seems that Hjorth and her team are creating research which not only benefits us during our lifetimes, but potentially in the hereafter too – now that’s taking impact to a new level.

Story: James Giggacher