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Mobile Culture Studies | >mcs_lab> 1 (2020) Johanna Menhard | Entanglements on and with the street 31 Fall 2018: Picking lines and telling stories I understand myself as a storyteller25 because I think that all my research starts with my own entanglements and all the knowledge I gather is situated knowledge and based on my partial perspective of the world I inhabit.26 Thus, the way I orient myself and the lines I pick are gener- ated by my body situationally. For doing ethnography, and especially the practice of participant observation, this means that I have to take my own interpersonal experience seriously and use all emotions, affects, tensions and associations as a methodological tool to grasp the entangle- ments within ethnographic encounters. My role as a researcher – as I understand it – is to trans- form my fieldwork experiences into a story that makes you think and affects you in one way or another. Starting with my own experiences does not exclude the experiences of others, does not mean that I am no longer connected with others, does not make the fieldwork self-centred, as if my own experiences could be somehow detached from the experiences of other beings.27 So looking at my fieldwork experiences, I already have made certain choices on what I did and didn’t capture, that I did and didn’t write down, and what I will now write down and transform into a story and what I will leave out in this particular story. The lines I pick are based on errors. Bruno Latour mentioned in his introduction to the Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) that there are five chances to make things more tangible and to enhance their visibility for the researcher: 1. controversial and innovational processes, 2. distance, 3. archives and already existing elaborations on the object, 4. fictional stories, and 5. defects, accidents and errors.28 In conversations and observations on my trip, the smartphone and smartphone applications often did not work as intended, were unreliable or full of errors. But still, they were a trusted and unquestioned part of moving around in an urban space. This friction was highly irritating to me: Why should I want to be so dependent on such unreliable, but omnipresent things? After my stay in Tartu, I stayed for two days in Laupa. There, I met Keto and Isa, who gave me a ride to Tallinn. On our way to Tallinn, we went for an hour in circles over field roads because of the errors in their navigation app. Isa, who drove, was a bit nervous because she already knew of the errors, but said she was still too insecure to navigate otherwise. Even though there were indisputable street signs on the main road, the field road seemed like a trust- worthy suggestion to her – like a shortcut only the app knew about.29 Nevertheless, we arrived somehow in Tallinn, where I spent the following week. I stayed for two days with Sky, who manages everything with his mobile phone: when we took the train, he had his ticket, ID, and money on his mobile phone – no need for a wallet or cash, he said. When we went to the gro- cery store, he checked-in with his phone, scanned the products, and went out by checking-out 25 As Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner describe it in: Carolyn Ellis/Arthur Bochner: Evocative Autoethnography, Writing Lives and Telling Stories. New York: Routledge 2016. 26 See Donna Haraway: Situated Knowledges. The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Per- spectives. In: Feminist Studies 14 (1988), pp. 575-599. 27 See Andrea Ploder/Johanna Stadlbauer: Autoethnographie und Volkskunde? Zur Relevanz wissenschaftlicher Selbsterzählungen für die volkskundlich-kulturanthropologische Forschungspraxis. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 116 (2013) 3-4, pp. 373-404. 28 Bruno Latour: Eine neue Soziologie für eine neue Gesellschaft. Einführung in die Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2010, pp. 136-141. 29 Based on fieldnotes on the meeting with Isa and Keto, 05.08.2018.