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28 Mobile Culture Studies | >mcs_lab> 1 (2020)Johanna Menhard | Entanglements on and with the street for a methodological introductory volume on cultural anthropology – after all, digitalization is not an optional model.15 It’s definitely part of everyday life, so why was it so invisible in urban anthropology to me? Technologies like the internet are an essential component of cities: Smart- phones are inseparable from the bodies moving on the streets, and the perception of the street itself is greatly shaped by digital maps and navigation. According to Katerina Diamantaki and others, the city could thus be described as a “technospace”.16 Carolyn Guertin adds, because of the increasing availability of GPS-based tools and after the Internet of data and the Internet of things, we are now confronted with the Internet of actions and the Internet of bodies-in-mo- tion.17 The starting point of my research, and the questions in my exposé, were therefore all about cartographies and representations of urban space within certain tools and smartphone applications, and how they would affect people’s ideas of the city and practices of orientation and navigation, of moving around in the streets, of being bodies in motion.18 The lines I trace below will give a glimpse of typical ethnographic pathways, which are sometimes truly wind- ing paths with dead ends and hidden branches: You never know in advance, what effects your research field might have on the choices you make and what you will find out on your journey. Summer 2018: Ethnography as a method for accessing entanglements on the street During the summer break, we were supposed to focus on our individual ethnographic fieldwork until we met again in autumn. Therefore, I planned to do research on a three-week journey to three Baltic/Scandinavian cities (Tallinn, Helsinki, Stockholm) to find out how location-based smartphone applications would affect my travel and interaction with people and places, and my body in motion on the streets. Based on conversations with other smartphone users and research on location-based applications, I installed a broad mix of blue-friending/dating19, social, hostel and private accommodation, navigation, orientation, and self-tracking apps – all of which display and/or filter people and places from the immediate environment according to my alleged interests, according to what I might be looking for, according to what I might want to find. I often travel alone, and so far, preliminary research, road maps, travel guides, travel con- tacts, advance bookings, or taking notes of addresses have sufficed to find my way around in new cities. But with a smartphone, I should in theory be able to access even more local knowledge that would have otherwise remained inaccessible to an unequipped tourist: I wanted to switch from an outside to an inside perspective on the city, as Regine Buschauer and 15 See Gertraud Koch: Ethnografieren im Internet. In: Christine Bischoff/Karoline Oehme/Walter Leimgruber (eds.): Methoden der Kulturanthropologie. Bern: Haupt 2014. pp. 367-382, here pp. 367-368. 16 See Katerina Diamantaki/Charalampos Rizopoulos/Dimitris Charitos/Nikos Kaimakamis: Conceptualizing, Designing, and Investigating Locative Media Use in Urban Space. In: Katharine S. Willis/George Roussos/Kon- stantinos Chorianopoulos/Mirjam Struppek (eds.): Shared encounters. [Result of a workshop held as a part of the CHI 2007 conference that took place on April 29, 2007] (Computer supported cooperative work). London: Springer 2010. pp. 61-80, here p. 64. 17 See Carolyn Guertin: Mobile Bodies, Zones of Attention, and Tactical Media Interventions. In: Wolfgang Sützl/ Theo Hug (eds.): Activist Media and Biopolitics: Critical Media Interventions in the Age of Biopower. Inns- bruck: Innsbruck university press 2012. pp. 17-28, here p. 17. 18 In reference to my research exposé, 16.05.2018. 19 More about the term “blue-friending” and blue-friending-technology in: Geert Lovink: Im Bann der Plattfor- men. Die nächste Runde der Netzkritik. Bielefeld: transcript 2017, pp. 200-201.