Cyborg Methodologies: Rewriting the Role of Digital, Social and Mobile Media Technologies in the Production of Knowledge

The ubiquitous entanglement of digital, social and mobile media – and increasingly generative artificial intelligence – in everyday life is reconstituting us (and our methodologies) as cyborg. This paper sets out to explore how cyborg methodologies can positively impact research practice and outcomes. In doing so, we reveal the mediating effects of digital technologies, the promissory and performative knowledge they co-produce and the new temporal-spatial ways of seeing this process affords: the generation of new, long chains of data that engender new ways of seeing and knowing in situ (in Rocinha) and at large (from Northwest England). Using examples from our own cyborg methodologies we illustrate how WhatsApp and Facebook acted as a constitutive and transformative digital technology, helping to (re)frame the site of inquiry, (re)assemble the methodological tools at hand and (re)form the knowledge produced in a dynamic process of unfolding understanding in a favela-based market study, in Brazil. Consequently, we argue the need to (re)write accounts of research practice, to provide additional transparency of the co-production of knowledge between human researchers and digital technologies and suggest that doing so will empower scholars to perform new realities and promissories, future-oriented imaginaries with the power to enact real-world impact.