The Social Life of Things in Interviews: Activating Non-Human Informants in Empirical Research

Abstract

This article develops a methodological framework for leveraging the entanglement of practices and things in interviews. Our praxeological approach offers a processual heuristic for activating things as research participants. Adapting Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things, we analyze this activation through the triad of candidates, context, and phase. Drawing on posthumanist inquiry, we demonstrate how objects and interviewees momentarily fuse into a hybrid, collective informant. This approach operationalizes the methodological imperative to “follow the updates,” treating technological change as a primary guide to past social and cultural practices. The framework allows researchers to critically engage with the material agency of technical disruptions while foregrounding the researcher’s ethical responsibility and the necessity of ethnographic “aftercare.” Our findings illustrate how things in interviews function not merely as mnemonic devices, but as active directors of the research encounter.

Introduction

Any attempt to reconstruct a past social practice must also account for the material things with which it was entangled. These things—from old technologies and photographs to snippets of software—are not merely backdrops to social life but dormant archives of the practices they once enabled. When activated within an interview, they become powerful conversational media, capable of prompting re-enactments and accessing forms of knowledge that elude purely narrative recall. The global proliferation of things (Trentmann, 2016) thus represents a vast, yet methodologically underdeveloped, potential for the social and cultural sciences.

This methodological potential takes on a new dimension and urgency in the digital realm. The proliferation of things that Trentmann describes for the modern era, which largely concludes before the widespread adoption of the internet, has not only accelerated but also fundamentally changed in character. The objects of our study as media scholars and historians of the web—websites, platforms, comment sections—are not static entities but fluid assemblages in a constant state of flux.

This inherent instability is often perceived as a methodological challenge (Brügger, 2018). However, when introduced into research situations such as interviews, these fluid things can also function as rich analytical resources: The perpetual updates, redesigns, and reconfigurations of these technologies are not mere technical noise; they are material traces of ongoing social negotiations over authorship, control, and community. Crucially, this technical fluidity constantly disrupts the practices entangled with it, creating moments of friction where tacit, embodied knowledge becomes manifest. This dynamic transforms technological change from a problem into a core empirical field, leading directly to the methodological imperative that has elsewhere been termed “follow the updates” (Paßmann & Gerzen, 2024).

This imperative, however, implies more than simply identifying disruptive things to present in interviews. To fully harness their potential, this paper argues that we must move beyond treating things as mere mnemonic devices—as magical objects that simply trigger latent memories or disrupt routinized biographizations. While things can indeed act as powerful “game changers” in an interview, their activation is not automatic but a practical, methodical accomplishment. It requires deliberate work before, during, and after the research situation—a cooperative effort between multiple human and non-human actors.

To understand the complexity of this methodical work, we argue that activated things in interviews should be understood not as passive objects, but as media in a praxeological sense: as “cooperatively created conditions of cooperation” (Schüttpelz, 2017, p. 24). The research situation thus becomes a site where a dormant thing is turned into a functioning medium. This transformation is neither an intrinsic property of the object nor a matter of “pure social construction.” Rather, drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s (1988) concept of The Social Life of Things, we contend that this activation is a biographical intervention: Researchers actively alter a thing’s biography to make it a medium for the interview.

Things in Interviews

While the use of objects in interviews is often treated as a niche technique, a significant tradition has developed, particularly within visual sociology and anthropology. Under the term “photo-elicitation,” this approach traces its origins to a controlled experiment by Collier (1957). He found that interviews supported by photographs yielded not only more precise and concrete information but also stimulated “latent memory” and released “emotional statements,” especially concerning routinized aspects of life (Collier, 1957, p. 858). Building on this, Harper argued that images evoke “a different kind of information” altogether, accessing deeper layers of consciousness than words alone and triggering an “onrush of memory” (Harper, 2002, p. 13). From its inception, photo-elicitation thus recognized that things do more than just aid recall; they tap into affective dimensions and challenge the praxeological problem of routine, where practical knowledge becomes immemorable.

Crucially, Harper emphasizes that this principle is not limited to photographs but extends to “virtually any visual image” whose meaning is connected to the culture under study (Harper, 2002, p. 13). This insight is central, as it opens the door to a wide range of artifacts—from the paintings Harper mentions to the digital assemblages at the heart of our own research. The functions these objects can perform are varied: they can act as “carriers for collectively relevant memories” or as “markers of individual memory” (Dimbath, 2013, pp. 139–40), and in some contexts, even seemingly unrelated images can serve as powerful symbolic reminders (Frith & Harcourt, 2007, p. 1342). By introducing such objects, the research process itself is fundamentally altered, becoming a collaborative act where researcher and participant “figure out something together” (Harper, 2002, p. 23).

Similar approaches are established in oral history, where artifacts are used to address a central challenge of interview research: the problem of biographization. The core of this problem, as outlined in the interpretive social research of Rosenthal, is that interviewees do not simply recall the past; they actively construct biographical narratives that serve to explain and legitimize their present situation (Rosenthal, 2018, p. 166). This aligns with posthumanist critiques that warn against treating the interview as a transparent window into a unified, authentic humanist subject (Mazzei, 2013). Without such interventions, interviews often risk merely reproducing these routinized accounts. As a practical counter-strategy, the historian of science Hoddeson suggests “probing” with documents (Hoddeson, 2006, p. 191). This intervention can transform the interview from a monologue into a “dialogue” (Hoddeson, 2006, p. 197), prompting less-rehearsed, alternative accounts of the past.

Another strand of this tradition can be found in archeology, where the notion of the “artifact as interviewer” has been developed (Webster et al., 2014). Here, exemplar artifacts for shards and fragments found at an archeological site are passed around in group interviews with elderly persons whose parents or grandparents might have used the originals. The aim is not to elicit direct personal experiences, but to tap into a social memory—a reservoir of stories and knowledge passed down through generations. As the authors observe, “exemplar artifacts take the memory to places that fragmentary pieces cannot” (Webster et al., 2014, p. 27). The physical interaction with the artifact acts as an elicitor that activates this inherited knowledge, which is then shared, negotiated, and jointly articulated by the group, thereby co-producing a collective account within the interview situation itself. Tangible artifacts thus function as methodological catalysts, not only evoking latent memories but also creating a space for their collective reconstruction.

Another strand of this tradition, which is also prominent in photo-elicitation, shifts the selection of the object (or even the act of taking the pictures) to the participants themselves. In the “enhanced interview,” for instance, participants bring a self-selected item to the conversation, which shifts attention away from them and turns the object into a shared point of curiosity (Zakher & Wassif, 2021, pp. 150–51). The key insight here is the transfer of agency: the thing becomes a delegated voice, a co-performer in the interviewee’s self-narration. This logic of participant-led elicitation finds its direct parallel in the digital domain with the “archive promenade” (Mackinnon, 2022), where participants revisit their own archived web presences with the researcher. Digital traces act much like physical artifacts—anchoring memory and stimulating dialogue—but their inherent instability and fragmentation add a layer of “synchronized discovery, interpretation and analysis” to the process (Mackinnon, 2022, p. 356).

This literature paints a clear picture: introducing things into a research situation is a powerful intervention with a wide range of documented benefits. On a pragmatic level, this approach is credited with generating richer data (Dempsey & Tucker, 1994; Zakher & Wassif, 2021) and minimizing misunderstandings (Collier, 1957). More profoundly, things are shown to alter the affective and psychological dynamics of the encounter. They can stimulate deeper emotional responses (Collier, 1957; Frith & Harcourt, 2007) while reducing participant fatigue and the pressure of being in the spotlight (E. F. Smith et al., 2012; Zakher & Wassif, 2021). The object can even reshape the social setting itself, helping to engage family or group members not initially part of the conversation (Clark-Ibañez, 2004). And, as argued earlier, things in interviews can help to reconstruct the latent, often tacit knowledge of past practices (Paßmann & Gerzen, 2024).

Interviews as Sites of “Social Life”

While, across these traditions, the potential of activating things in research situations is clearly recognized, the existing literature offers little vocabulary to describe the process through which an inert thing is methodologically activated to become influential in the situation. This gap becomes particularly pressing in light of new research challenges, such as the analysis of unstable digital objects or the reconstruction of embodied practices, which demand a more precise understanding of how things can be made to do things in research encounters. To address this, a theoretical framework is needed that allows us to analyze the very process of activation.

The observation that things can assume different functions within social interactions is central to the framework of “the social life of things” (Appadurai, 1988). The core argument is that things are not static; their meanings and values are produced and reproduced as they move through different contexts. Appadurai focuses on the process of commoditization to illustrate this dynamic. He suggests that being a commodity is not an inherent quality of a thing but a particular phase in its biography. This phase occurs within what he terms a “commodity situation,” defined as the moment in which a thing’s “exchangeability [. . .] is its socially relevant feature” (Appadurai, 1988, p. 13).

To analyze this situation, Appadurai proposes a heuristic triad: A thing must have candidacy for commoditization, meaning it must meet the material and cultural criteria that make it eligible for exchange in a specific context (Appadurai, 1988, p. 14). Moreover, this potential is realized within a social context, like a market, which provides the arena for the transaction (Appadurai, 1988, p. 15). Together, candidacy and context determine the phase of a thing’s life. This focus on an object’s biography is the central contribution of the volume, most powerfully developed in Igor Kopytoff’s foundational chapter. Kopytoff argues that to understand a thing’s meaning, we must trace its “cultural biography,” noting how it can move in and out of the commodity state as its social roles shift (Kopytoff, 1988, pp. 64–68). An object’s role, therefore, is not fixed but is the emergent product of its potential, the social setting, and its specific biographical moment.

This notion of things having biographies raises a fundamental question for their use in interviews: if they can be so powerful, where does this power come from? The work of Clark-Ibáñez on photo-elicitation interviewing offers a decisive starting point by challenging the idea that the thing itself is the source: “Yet there is nothing inherently interesting about photographs; instead, photographs act as a medium of communication between a researcher and participant” (Clark-Ibañez, 2004, p. 1512). Just like a thing is not inherently a commodity or a gift, it is not inherently a research tool. It must be made into one. The thing’s methodological function is not intrinsic but emerges from a process of becoming a medium.

This aligns with the perspective of cultural techniques research, developed specifically in the “praxeological turn” of German media theory over the last two decades (Dünne et al., 2020; Schabacher, 2020; Seifert, 2019; Siegert, 2015), which underlines “the priority of the chaîne opératoire [operational chain] over the resulting artefacts and concepts” (Schüttpelz, 2006, pp. 91 ff.). Differentiating from the classical position in media theory that understands media as historical forces shaping societies (e.g., Innis, 1984), this strand of thought focuses on media as practical, culturally produced achievements that can be observed in the making. Media, in this sense, seem paradoxical as they are “cooperatively created conditions of cooperation” (Schüttpelz, 2017, p. 24).

We therefore conceptualize the interview as a micrological situation where this “making of media” can be observed directly. Here, the interviewer, interviewee, and other actors cooperatively turn a dormant thing into a functioning medium. Synthesizing the approaches, we argue that this process aligns perfectly with Appadurai’s triad: The creation of a medium is a biographical phase shift that is preconditioned by a thing’s candidacy within the specific context of the interview.

By conceptualizing objects as non-human informants, we align our work with the posthumanist shift in qualitative inquiry that decouples “voice” from a singular, intentional subject. As Mazzei (2013) theorizes through the concept of a “Voice without Organs” (VwO), voice is not an internal property of the interviewee but is produced in an enactment among “researcher-data-participants-theory-analysis.” In this view, the introduction of a thing into the interview does not merely aid a human mind in recall; it becomes an agential force in an assemblage where “material and human agencies are mutually and emergently productive of one another.” Our heuristic triad—candidacy, context, and phase—thus provides a practical framework to analyze how this distributed agency is methodologically facilitated.

Making a Method’s Media: The Case of a History of Online Commenting

Appadurai’s triad of candidacy, context, and phase offers a productive vocabulary to describe the process of making a method’s media and to detail the specific methodological work required to activate a thing. This chapter demonstrates how this triad can be turned into a practical heuristic, using the example of our own research on the history of online commenting: Our core methodical idea was to use snapshots from the Internet Archive, that is, artifacts or, with Appadurai, things not just to analyze how the commenting sections of blogs and news websites changed over time, but to use these changed things to conduct richer interviews with former moderators, editors and other web actors. The following details each part of the process as a distinct form of methodological labor, drawing not only on our procedural decisions but also on the affective and emotional dimensions of the research encounter. This is not a clean, linear recipe, but a reflexive account of the messy, practical work.

Candidacy

Applying this triad, the first step in this course would be the work of selecting candidates—things that might be turned into functioning media during an interview. In our case, when working with digital, archived web data, this work is defined by a central paradox that is typical for the world of things “after Trentmann”: the coexistence of scarcity and excessive abundance. While any specific archived webpage might be a rare and “deficient” record (Brügger, 2018), the sheer volume of available data in sources like the Internet Archive (IA) is overwhelming. The archive is a vast, noisy, and unstructured territory that is nearly impossible to navigate without technical assistance. Finding relevant candidates within this simultaneous abundance and scarcity requires a specific strategy, and often specific software, for reducing complexity.

Our primary strategy in the project on the history of online commenting was to search for updated commenting sections. We considered them prime candidates in Appadurai’s sense, because our main hypothesis was that moments of significant technical change—the implementation of anti-spam devices, the introduction or closure of a commenting section on a news website or blog, or a new requirement to register with a real name—might represent disruptions to existing practices.

Such updated artifacts, we hoped, would enable a different kind of remembering when used in interviews. We thus formulated the empirical imperative to “follow the updates” (Paßmann, 2021; Paßmann & Gerzen, 2024). This principle is indebted to the actor-network theory maxim to “follow the actors” (Latour, 2005), sharing its foundational premise that technological artifacts are active participants rather than mere background noise. However, whereas ANT traditionally maps the associations of a given network, “follow the updates” adapts this heuristic specifically for the fluid, historical realm of digital media. It directs researchers to follow the diachronic changes of these non-human actors to locate precise moments of friction in past practices to reconstruct them ex-post. The core idea of this imperative is thus that updates frequently act—or have acted—either as a disruption, or as a response to an ongoing disruption in the past.

In the case of such disruptions, the practical, often tacit, knowledge of users and operators must have emerged from latency to consciously deal with the change—either by attempting to change existing practices (such as making spamming harder) or by seeing one’s own practices disrupted (e.g., by experiencing that one cannot as easily as before comment anonymously). Presenting these artifacts in an interview, we reasoned, could lead interviewees back to these moments of friction and the manifest knowledge they produced.

To find such candidates, we developed software within our project to parse a large dataset of snapshots of news websites and blogs from the Internet Archive (Schories et al., 2023). It helped us identify moments of significant technological change in these sites. At that stage, the software did not provide definitive answers or structures for a history of online commenting, but pointed us to promising candidates in a “media-theoretical sampling” (Paßmann, 2021). ¹ This technologically-assisted search is—just as theoretical sampling—not a unidirectional process but a dynamic of mutual co-production, that extends to the relationship between artifacts and humans. Since a material thing only becomes a meaningful candidate in relation to the human practices entangled with it, our search for candidates always involved a search for potential interviewees. This process unfolded along two intertwined paths: sometimes, it began with a known interviewee, prompting a targeted query for artifacts. Just as often, it began with an artifact flagged by our software, which then initiated a search for the person connected to it. These two entry points are not separate logics but two poles of a constant interplay in which artifact and interviewee co-construct one another.

This reciprocal process reveals that finding candidates is a complex methodological labor in itself. Things are not passive objects waiting to be “casted” as a candidate; they are actors that actively shape the research direction. This activity requires another layer of reflection on the nature of the candidates themselves. It is crucial to consider how they might act in the interview: Do they point to productive disruptions, or do they have the potential to create ethically problematic situations? In that sense, Mackinnon (2022) points out that her “archive promenades” might lead their interviewees to memories that for them are problematic or even traumatic. The search for candidates, in other words, is not a neutral collection of useful things. It can easily become problematic in research-ethical dimensions.

Furthermore, we must reflect on the historical contingency of “disruption” through “updates.” In the 2000s, for example, every update to a platform like Twitter might have been a widely discussed event. Today, users are far more accustomed to constant updates, which may no longer have the same disruptive effect on everyday practices. Acknowledging this changing entanglement of things and practices is a vital part of the work of selecting a potent candidate.

Context

The second step in our process is to create or recognize the right context in which a candidate can be activated. This is a delicate and multi-layered form of methodological labor. ² For this interpretive analysis, it is crucial to distinguish between the macrological dimension of the overall setting, which we call, leaning toward Appadurai, the methodological situation, and the micrological dimension of the specific moment of intervention, which we call the context. This might seem counter-intuitive, as this renders situation larger than the rather short moment of the context. Indeed, this is a by-product of the fact that we adopt this triad to the micrological scale of the research situation, whereas Appadurai conceptualized it on a rather general level.

However, it helps us to understand that the situation is powerfully shaped by the participants long before the first question is asked, as an interview conducted by Lisa Gerzen with a recently retired chief editor of a major daily newspaper illustrates. The interviewee himself suggested the location: a café located in the main building of one of Germany’s largest public-broadcasting institutions in the city center of Cologne. In the terms of Clarke’s (2005) Situational Analysis, this setting is a complex assemblage of human and non-human elements that constitute the conditions of the encounter. By choosing this location, the interviewee actively established the dominant frame (Goffman, 1986) for the interaction: that of the seasoned media professional performing his role on familiar, status-appropriate territory. This became apparent even before the interview started, as Gerzen’s fieldnote shows:

After a few minutes, I notice an older gentleman wearing a light blue flat cap and a matching light blue scarf, who has been sitting in the café’s outdoor area since before I arrived. He moves to another table, one that technically belongs to the indoor section but is placed right in front of the fully opened window fronts. He coordinates this change of seat with one of the staff members—confident and assertive, yet not arrogant or disagreeable. He gives the impression of someone who knows exactly that this is where he belongs. The staff member, who is about my age, also seems aware of this; she appears almost deferential. He seems to embody the kind of clientele that feels at home in this café—for a good reason. (Ethnographic field note, Gerzen, 09/2022)

Right in that moment, even before greeting the interviewee, Lisa Gerzen decides to not use the archived snapshots of the news website that are already opened on the iPad in her backpack and sorted in chronological order, but instead to use the printouts. This might have been a result from the telephone call she had with the interviewee, in which he had stated that online comments had not been his area of responsibility—together with the impression he gave in that café. It seems like the interviewee, together with the interviewer and her colleague, involuntarily shaped the thing’s (i.e., the candidate’s) materiality—also in expectation of the methodological situation.

Within this situation, the micrological work of the thing-shifting context unfolds. Initially, the former chief editor skillfully integrated the printouts of ca. 10- to 15-year-old versions from the newspaper’s website into his biographical narrative. The disruption came later, when the interviewer pointed to a printout of an archived web page showing remains of a “local Facebook”—a discarded innovation omitted from his rather linear success story. This forced him to restart his explanations and to account for this “exception.” Gerzen mentions in her field notes written after the interview, and this impression consolidated by listening to the interview’s audio record, that this intervention into his biographization did not seem to feel very disruptive to him. We interpret this as a result of several factors, among others, his experience of speaking and specifically biographizing publicly, but also as a result of the interactions with the earlier printouts that he could integrate into his narrations easily. This impression is supported by the way how the interviewee actively rearranged the material situation of the interview by switching tables. The overall situation seemed so settled that the moment of the context for the candidate came in easily.

However, this is not always the case. For an interview we conducted together with an editor of one of the largest German daily newspapers in 2022, we were invited to the newspaper’s central office, a high-rise building. Looking at our fieldnotes 3 years later, we found that we were not only very much concerned with our roles as young, male professor and female PhD candidate, trying to not let aspects of gender and power imbalances define the interview situation. We were also, in a quite “Goffmanian moment,” grappling with what kind of situation it was that we were in.

When we arrived, after a long train journey through Germany, the editor welcomed us in the foyer of the building. After quite a long elevator ride during which he explained to us that his department, which is responsible for (specifically digital) audience dialogue—and thus also online commenting—had once been in the cellar, “where technical support is located,” and has now moved up in floors, he started something that felt to us like a guided tour for visitors. He showed us the impressive view of the city from the top of the building where the news desk is located, that now, as he explained continuing the topic of the elevator ride, also has a seat for one member of his team. Taking the notion of things in interviews broader, he used all those things, the elevator, the top-level, the news desk and much more as “things” that demonstrated to us how important online comments had become over the last two decades.

This performative epitext created a specific frame for the formal interview that followed. When, in the course of the interview, we introduced our own candidates—the archived snapshots from the Internet Archive—this created a context in which two sets of things, and two narratives, competed. On one hand, there was his performance, using the impressive corporate architecture to tell a story of institutional success, and two guests who had been guided around like tourists. On the other hand, there were our digital traces, which pointed to a more fragmented and less linear history of trial and error, asking for explanation.

This tension made the micrological context of activating our candidates more fraught than in the Cologne interview, as Johannes Paßmann’s field notes show:

It’s going well; during the conversation, however, I often have the impression that the moments when Lisa ties him back to the updates of the website are not to his liking. He often says a dry “yes,” as if he had to gather himself as he now has to deal with a new problem to get his head around. Inconvenient. But that might be necessary; we don’t just want to have a pleasant time with him, we want to have precise accounts. Actually, these uncomfortable moments are what we want to create with our method. (Ethnographic field note, Paßmann, 11/2022)

Here, the disruption felt more like a direct challenge to the frame he had just so carefully constructed. Each time we tied his grand narrative back to the concrete, sometimes awkward, reality of a past technical update, the friction became palpable. At this point, it is crucial to conceptually distinguish between two temporal levels of disruption, both of which are driven by an agentic clash. First, there is the historical disruption: the original technical update in the past, where a changing interface clashed with established user practices. Second, there is the methodological disruption: introducing the material trace of that past clash into the present interview, where it now clashes with the interviewee’s rehearsed narrative. This present tension is the direct methodological payoff of following the updates: it uses the material remnants of a past agentic clash to provoke a new one in the interview setting. It forces the latent, messy realities of technical trial and error to the surface, preventing the interview from becoming a mere reproduction of a rehearsed success story. However, this did not, or at least we did not notice this, result in an unproductive situation. It did interrupt the flow of his accounts. The affectively felt inconvenience demonstrates that the use of things in interviews can easily be experienced like a micro-violent intervention. This does not render them good or bad on a general level, but researchers should be prepared for what it means to use the epistemic potential of “follow the updates” and their possible disruptions, that might make specific ethical reflections necessary. However, the way a situation unfolds can help provide a context to introduce things to interviews.

On a more general level, this demonstrates that contexts are not simply there, they have to be created and taken care of. They are cooperatively produced, by the interviewee, the interviewers, the café and its waiters, a building’s architecture, views and infrastructures (such as the elevator), and by the things themselves. However, not all of these actors have the same agency. It is the interviewer’s decision how (e.g., on paper or on the iPad) and when (e.g., more disruptive things after less disruptive ones) the context appears right to introduce which things.

However, it would be wrong to understand things in interviews mainly as possibly dangerous disruptors, able to violently disturb interviews. This became evident in an interview that we conducted together with an early blogger—in fact she is considered one of the earliest of all—in San Francisco. We had rented a rather cozy yet modern office room, with old leather couches and a view of the city center. Whereas the current editor and community manager in the interview mentioned above was a professional still performing the job we asked about, the situation with this interviewee in San Francisco was different: We “found” her as a web-historically relevant figure that we wanted to interview about two decades later. The situation shaped the meaning of archived web pages, as a fieldnote from Lisa Gerzen describes:

While looking at her archived blog, she points us to specific sections, and we sometimes click through the website together. [Her name] is enthusiastic and describes the comment section under her blog posts as her “living room”—a private space into which one might invite people, but where one always wants to decide who sits and speaks there. (Ethnographic field note, Gerzen, 10/2023)

The archived snapshots functioned more like a reconstructed lived space, where she could guide us around—rather than a disruptor tackling her biographization. Quite the contrary, it enabled her in the first place to situate her biography materially. Here, the voice of the interviewee emerges precisely as an entanglement with the non-human informant; it is produced within the “mangle of practice” (Pickering, 1995)—as contextualized within Mazzei’s (2013) posthumanist framework—rather than extracted from an isolated subject. The interviewee could show us where she did what we were interested in. The context did not require as much active creation on our part. Rather, the things themselves provided the situation in which the interviewee could unfold her accounts. That is also the case because she understood, what we call a “thing” here, as her “living room.” At the very least, this was the artifact (or an archival reconstruction thereof) that was the essential element of her past practices.

Still, this did not render the situation “just easy.” The blog was started and maintained by her and her late husband, whose illness and passing had been topic of a few of the last posts that were written on the blog. Before meeting the blogger, this was one of our main concerns:

[The blogger] talks a lot about the “old days,” which for her seem deeply intertwined with sentimental memories of her husband. At first, I feel unsure about how to navigate this sensitive subject, but I quickly notice that she seems grateful for every reading impression I share, grateful for every memory that our joint look at the blog she and her husband wrote brings back. (Ethnographic field note, Gerzen, 10/2023)

When Lisa Gerzen notices how these personal details shape the situation and that they seem to have a positive influence on how the blogger feels, she starts to show and mention extra little details, like the blog of the interviewee’s cat, “Pixel.” But not only these deliberate decisions in specific moments of the interview helped to create a situation in which we were able to speak about sensitive topics. Even before the interview, the situation that we––in parts––found ourselves in involuntarily, seemed to have brought the interview to a more personal level: The blogger arrived to the place of the interview around 50 minutes early, because there was less traffic than she expected, as she explained. The field note shows how––after an initial moment of surprise and nervousness, or even shock, resulting from her being early––this contributed to the interview feeling more intimate than some of the interviews we had done before:

[The interviewee] is already part of the interview preparation, even though that wasn’t the plan. She watches as I test the placement of the recording device and arrange my equipment so I can easily access it when I want to show something. By the time the interview actually begins, we are no longer strangers. We’ve already created this situation together, and now, it feels to me, we are simply switching the mode in which we interact. (Ethnographic field note, Gerzen, 10/2023)

In sum, what these examples illustrate is that the role of things in interviews is neither predictable nor uniform. Sometimes the introduction of a candidate unsettles and interrupts, creating friction that forces the interviewee to reposition their narrative. At other times, the very same type of object becomes an enabler, opening up biographical accounts and allowing memories to unfold in ways that words alone would not have achieved. The work of “things” is thus neither deterministic nor entirely voluntaristic. They cannot be reduced to mere tools at the interviewer’s disposal, nor can they be understood as acting independently of human intention and interpretation. Rather, their agency is relational: it emerges within, and is shaped by, the methodological situation and the concrete micrological context. While researchers cannot fully control the effects that will follow, they are still the most powerful actors in this situation. As a result, it is their task to find the right moment, to create the context, in which a thing in the interview can function as a medium. This is a matter of timing of how and when “to put the thing on the table,” but also a matter of creating the social (i.e., architectural, normative, affective, etc.) environment. The methodological task, therefore, is to attend to, and sometimes to anticipate, how the things interact with participants, settings, and narratives in the unfolding of each specific encounter.

Phase

Our three cases illustrate just how differently quite similar things in interviews can be used. Simply naming this process “cooperatively created conditions of cooperation,” that is, the shifting from the phase of a thing into a medium would not contribute to a methodological differentiation, but rather to an oversimplification. We argue that for a methodology of the social life of things in interviews it is important to differentiate between the multiplicity of phases that a thing enters, or, the multiplicity of media practices that can unfold, once the thing switches its phase. We do not argue that we can provide an exhaustive system of those media practices. Rather, what we want to do in what follows, is to start an open-ended list of possible phases.

In a first approach, we might say: For the retired chief editor in Cologne, the printout became a document that disrupted his polished success story, forcing a new, less-rehearsed account. This aligns with what Hoddeson (2006) describes as “probing” with documents to disrupt routinized biographizations and force a less-rehearsed account. The thing acts as a corrective, compelling the narrative to accommodate inconvenient evidence. In the interview with the editor and community manager in the high-rise newspaper building in southern Germany, the activation was more fraught with tension. It did function as a document at times that might put him at risk of self-contradiction.

The encounter with the blogger in San Francisco provides a stark contrast. For her, the archived pages of her blog did not disrupt but rather enabled her narrative. She repeatedly referred to the comment section to re-enact her past practices. The archived snapshots of her blog functioned less as a disruptive document and more as a map of her “living room,” guiding her through her memories. This reflects the foundational insight of photo-elicitation, where objects act as “carriers for collectively relevant memories” (Dimbath, 2013) or simply stimulate “latent memory” (Collier, 1957), allowing for a richer, more detailed account without fundamentally challenging its structure.

At the same time, the object became a co-performer in her account, allowing her to materially situate her biography rather than simply narrating it. One might say, the thing for her functioned more as an artifact than as a document. In this role, the thing does not trigger a clear memory but initiates a process of joint speculation. This resonates with the “artifact as interviewer” approach (Webster et al., 2014), where the object’s ambiguity prompts a collective effort of reconstruction. Researcher and participant become co-archeologists, “figuring something out together” (Harper, 2002, p. 23) to theorize about the lost practices the artifact implies.

At the same time, our archived web pages (and how we spoke about them) demonstrated to her that we had meticulously tried to understand her past as a blogger; in other words, the things became a token of legitimacy for us as interviewers, who had not participated in these past practices but yet had deserved to be considered legit conversational partners. Or, in the words of the interviewee:

Wow. That is so cool. I mean, it’s just, it’s so amazing that, you know, you’re, you’re taking this so seriously. [. . .] It’s very gratifying, you know, to have to have somebody actually, you know, look at it with a serious eye. (Interview, San Francisco, 2022)

A different dynamic, one based not on legitimacy but on a form of methodological reciprocity, became evident in the interview with the editor responsible for reader dialogue. Confronting the interviewee with a multitude of archived website updates elicited a different reaction. Here, multitude is not merely a quantitative descriptor, but a specific phase in which the objects operate as a collective material presence. It was not a single snapshot that shifted the narrative, but the sheer material mass and density of the assembled technical traces—the “pile” on the table. This collective weight provoked a telling moment after the formal interview concluded. The editor asked us to turn off the recording and move from the guest table over to his personal desk. He said “as you seem interested in these kinds of things. . .” and began demonstrating the various comment moderation software his team used, explaining the functions of their underlying algorithms.

He responded to our collection of front-end media with a reciprocal gesture of analogy. This gesture marks an interactional phase where the interviewee counters the researchers’ material with his own, functionally equivalent objects. It seemed as if he had identified a view on online comments that our things from the Internet Archive (i.e., front-end webpages from an end-user’s perspective) were systematically missing. In this dynamic, the presented web pages transformed into tokens of incompleteness. In this role, the objects actively signified the researchers’ blind spots, compelling the interviewee to compensate for this lack of knowledge by providing his own artifacts.

When we initially planned to use these things in interviews, we anticipated they might function as a script for re-enactment—expecting interviewees to literally mimic past mouse movements or point to the screen. While this direct physical pantomime of past interface use rarely occurred in the exact way we envisioned, the objects did successfully prompt other powerful forms of enactment. Most strikingly, they triggered a live enactment of current practices. Unlike a retrospective re-enactment—where a participant merely mimics past actions—a live enactment is a performative, present-tense demonstration where the immediate material setting forces the interviewee into practical action. When the editor and community manager demonstrated how his current software and algorithms work, the objects shifted from being passive scripts of the past to active directors of the present.

Moreover, even without physical pantomime, the objects served as scripts that prompted detailed spatial and narrative reconstructions of past practices. For instance, when we showed the retired editor-in-chief from Cologne that we found that his paper’s commenting sections were closed at night, he told us about his morning routine, how he walked through the newspaper’s building, checked screens and the “onliners’” rooms for urgent events and so on (Paßmann & Gerzen, 2024). As he said this sitting in a café, of course, and as he was not working in the company anymore, he could just speak about his past practices, rather than re-enact them.

We assume that this open list of varied roles—from document and artifact to script and token of incompleteness—demonstrates the rich and complex social life a thing can take on within the methodological situation of an interview. The phase change from a dormant object to a functioning medium is not a single event, but a fluid process in which the thing can adopt multiple, sometimes even contradictory, functions. To take this work seriously requires moving beyond the view of the interview as a neutral tool for data extraction. The introduction of an active “thing” renders the conventional notion of the respondent as a passive “vessel of answers” (Holstein & Gubrium, 1998, p. 8) untenable. It forces an analytical shift from the substantive whats of an interview to the practical and interactional hows of knowledge production (Holstein & Gubrium, 1998, p. 4).

Discussion: Non-Human Informants in Research

This shift toward the non-human informant makes it necessary to treat the interview not as a simple data collection event, but as an ethnographic field site in its own right—a processual and generative assemblage in which reality is collaboratively produced (Briggs, 2007). By “plugging in“ archived web fragments as active informants, we move beyond a representational logic that seeks to extract a pristine voice or mirror a participant’s “ authentic” experience. Instead, we embrace what Jackson and Mazzei (2012) call a “new analytic”: a practice that does not ask what a thing means, but how it works and what it produces within the threshold of the encounter. The active presence of an object helps to deconstruct what Briggs terms “communicable cartographies”—the ideological projections that create the illusion of a seamless transfer of an interviewee’s voice into a public text (Briggs, 2007, p. 556). The messy, unpredictable interactions with a thing—pointing, re-enacting, hesitating—make visible the very pragmatic gaps and meaning-making labor.

This brings us to a vital methodological consequence we term aftercare. Because the non-human informant introduces an agentic clash that frequently manifests in spatial, non-verbal, and affective dynamics, the traditional audio transcript systematically fails to capture the core of the intervention. Crucially, these dynamics are not confined to the exact moment of disruption; they encompass the entire methodological situation, unfolding before the formal recording starts and continuing well after it ends. Aftercare therefore requires the rigorous ethnographic documentation of this broader context. By writing these extensive field notes, researchers do not merely supplement the audio file; they actively generate an additional, equally crucial primary data source.

This generated data becomes indispensable in subsequent analytical steps. First and foremost, writing these field notes is a deeply reflexive practice: it forces the interviewing researchers themselves to actively process and make sense of the complex spatial and affective dynamics they just experienced. In our own project, for example, this documentation then allowed us to bring these encounters into collaborative data sessions. This comprehensive record enabled our research group to critically reflect on the situation as a whole—the entanglement of things, spaces, and human actors. To return to our earlier example, it was only through the process of writing and subsequently analyzing these field notes that we fully grasped the methodological significance of the elevator ride and the guided tour: we realized they were not merely preliminary small talk, but a spatial performance that actively framed the interview and competed with our digital artifacts.

If we accept the interview as a field site, we must also reconsider the agency of all participants within it. This perspective directly leads to the question of the things’ roles in this co-production. The varied roles a thing can assume demonstrate that the activated thing shapes the interaction, co-produces the narrative, and contributes information that might otherwise remain latent. Looking at these modes of operation together, the activated object becomes what we, in reference to Latour (2005), can call a non-human informant: an actor that is co-responsible for the interview’s outcome and the knowledge it generates.

Crucially, designating the object as a non-human informant does not mean it speaks in isolation. One might ask whether these artifacts act merely as “co-interviewers” prompting the human subject (Webster et al., 2014). However, such a view maintains a humanist divide between the inquiring researcher and the passive subject. Viewed through a posthumanist lens, the informant is no longer a bounded entity. Instead, the human interviewee and the activated things momentarily fuse into a hybrid, collective informant. The data generated—what Mazzei (2013) terms the “Voice without Organs”—is not extracted solely from the human mind, nor read directly off the artifact. Rather, the information is produced precisely in the entanglement, the friction, and the gestures between them. The non-human informant, therefore, is vital because it completes this meaning-making circuit.

The choice of the term “informant” is a deliberate one, and refers to the question of (co-)responsibility. In qualitative research, the term has been criticized, a debate that has evolved in distinct stages. While the foundational work on ethnographic reflexivity by Hammersley and Atkinson (2007) urged researchers to critically examine their own role in the production of knowledge, decolonizing methodologies criticized extractive logics. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s critique targets colonial power relations, illustrating how researchers historically became “reliable” experts on Indigenous life while their “‘informants’ were relegated to obscurity” (L. T. Smith, 2021, p. 95). Building on this critique, the most recent scholarship on participatory research charts a clear shift away from this model: while researchers previously involved community members “only as informants,” it is now “becoming more common for researchers to seek a more equal partnership” (Dick, 2021, p. 210).

Our use of “non-human informant” does not seek to ignore this debate. On the contrary, it leverages the term’s problematic history to make a specific point about the unique status of things in research: their activation acknowledges their agency and a sustained social contact over different phases. Simultaneously, and most importantly, it highlights the asymmetrical relationship and the researcher’s responsibility: Things in interviews are not equal partners. They are active participants in the research process; however, they have only limited accountability as to how their activity unfolds, in which context they participate, whether or not they are appropriate candidates and in which kinds of phases they should be shifted. This is also an ethical issue: Certain things can trigger problematic memories, just as certain questions can, and it is thus the researcher’s task to accept responsibility for the things s*he uses in interviews. This means, it is important to highlight the hierarchy between researchers and things in interviews, and rendering them “non-human informants” should make this hierarchy visible.

One might wonder, whether or not, as a result, one should better call them “actors.” Latour explained that his concept is derived not (only) from the sociological theories of action, presupposing human consciousness, but from the metaphorical world of the theater, following the work of Goffman (Latour, 2005, p. 46). Within this metaphor, we could argue that the researchers act as directors. Yet, they do not direct a human subject to reveal an inner truth. Instead, they stage the material conditions—casting suitable non-human candidates, deploying them in situ, and introducing them into the right contexts. By doing so, the director sets the stage for the human and the non-human to entangle and momentarily fuse into a hybrid informant. Directors are responsible for the production, and they have to skillfully stage unruly “actors” with their specific strengths and flaws, meaning the director can never fully control their non-human actors, but is undoubtedly responsible for having put them on stage. This might even more be the case for Latour’s concept of the “actant.”

However, applying our own praxeological framework to our theoretical vocabulary, we must recognize that the ANT metaphors of actor and actant have a conceptual biography of their own. Historically, they have been successfully deployed to establish analytical symmetry—to make the often-ignored activity of non-human participants visible. Because of this specific conceptual biography, adopting the term non-human actor today risks signaling that our primary goal is merely to demonstrate this activity. By choosing the term “non-human informant,” we actively intervene in this conceptual biography to make a distinct methodological point. This term allows us to retain the posthumanist recognition of distributed agency (Mazzei, 2013), while firmly reinstating a crucial ethical asymmetry: while agency is shared in the interview assemblage, accountability is not. The human researcher remains responsible for staging these encounters, setting the material conditions, and caring for the vulnerabilities exposed when these non-human informants are put on stage.

Conclusion

This paper began with the observation that social life is increasingly entangled with things. As Frank Trentmann (2016) has shown, this is a long historical process. It has accelerated dramatically in the recent decades, creating an abundance of things that find more and more entrance into our research. This poses a general challenge for the social sciences and humanities, raising the question of how to deal with things that gain more and more “active” qualities. Our suggestion is to think of them as non-human informants: On one hand, it helps to connect this current problem of dealing with them as social and cultural research has always dealt with informants. On the other hand, the problematization of the concept of the informant for the use for humans makes it fruitful for the use for non-humans.

More specifically, the article pointed to a potential of the proliferation of things in human life: Their use in interviews. This demands a methodological framework that goes beyond treating things as magical objects “thrown into” an interview to trigger memories. The praxeological framework we have outlined is not a recipe. As our research shows, we have not yet produced what we initially hoped for: A situation where interviewees would use the things in interviews as media to re-enact their past practices. However, this research helped build a heuristic intended to sensitize to the complex and demanding methodological work of activation. Ultimately, this framework operationalizes the imperative to “follow the updates.” By tracing the fluid biographies of digital objects and bringing them back to the human actors, we transform technological disruptions into powerful tools for reconstructing the tacit practices of the past.

It requires the preparatory work of selecting viable candidates, the in-situ work of co-producing a relevant context, and the reflexive work of navigating the risky and often unpredictable transformation of the phase. This process is not merely an ex-post reconstruction of the past; it is a joint achievement within the interview encounter itself. To take this work seriously means to understand the interview as more than just a site of transcribable speech. It must be treated as an ethnographic situation in which things happen, relationships are negotiated, and meanings are practically, not just discursively, produced. A crucial part of this methodological practice is therefore the aftercare: the documentation of these situational dynamics through ethnographic field notes, which become as important as the transcript itself. In a sense, this approach calls for researchers to consciously co-write the biographies of the things they use.

The elicitation tradition has always known about the power of things. But in a world where our practices are inextricably interwoven with a growing number of complex, often ephemeral, things, this is no longer a niche technique. It is becoming a central, ever more urgent task for the social and cultural sciences. Given the density of this entanglement, one might even have to conclude: perhaps there are no longer any interviews that do not, in some way, involve the potential for things to become media. Our task as researchers is to learn how to methodically facilitate and understand this process.