Tales from the field: Giving voice to my digital self

Abstract

This tale from the field began as a commission for a menswear magazine. Unpublished due to complications that arose during Covid, this account of getting dressed and walking to work sat untouched on a shelf for a number of years until it was disturbed once again by its author. Re-reading the work they were shocked to find that it was not in their ‘voice’. Reproduced here in full, the original article was instead written in the voice of their online self, a digital character that had been created as part of a piece of digital ethnographic fieldwork spanning two years. By returning to this creative piece of ethnography the author reexamines the purpose of creative praxis and the insight that can be gained from giving voice to one’s digital self.

Prelude

Whilst in the field I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with bespoke tailors in London, and from 2014 onwards followed those tailors into the digital world, charting their early flirtations with the social media platform Instagram, and the network of sartorialists that grew around them in the digital aether (see Bluteau 2022a; 2022b). As part of this work I developed a digital self whose images I posted to Instagram on a daily basis in outfits that fit with the aesthetic ideals of the network I was working with. This digital character looked like me yet was dressed to appeal to a particular idealised visual form and over time became distinct from its offline creator. Throughout this period of fieldwork I began to make connections with others in the menswear industry and was commissioned to write for a menswear magazine.

The tale from the field included below is that piece of creative writing cum experimental ethnography – an unpublished journalistic commission that never materialised into print, and way tucked away as Covid put the world on hold and the print industry struggled to respond. More recently, pulling a book off a rarely touched shelf, the draft pages were disturbed and gracefully fell in slow elliptical flutters to the floor, where they sat surmounted with dust. Looking up at me, the working title ‘A Wet Walk to Work’ was written in bold at the top of the dogeared page, fitting for its original inclusion in the magazine issue themed around ‘rain’, and from a point where I had been experimenting with creative reflection to explore the phenomenology of wearing garments (following Franklin, 2014). Picking up the pages I settled into a chair and re-read the words that will follow. I was struck that this piece of creative work offered a perspective on the value of creative writing in ethnographic practice as part of one’s fieldnotes. But it was more than that - I realised that the words originally penned for the menswear magazine were written in the voice of my online self – adopting a self-similar, yet distinct tone – perhaps unsurprising as the commission had come as a result of the online content I had produced.

So what can we learn from this? Well, as a form of experimental ethnographic practice the act of giving voice to one’s online self has been an uncomfortable one. @anthrodandy has spoken and I am not yet convinced whether I am fond of their voice. There is a disquiet about this, but as anthropological experimentation such a friction is an intellectually welcome one. More specifically, the value of this piece of (‘auto’)ethnographic writing is to position a lens on the act and activity of wearing as a research practice. Beyond this, I began to wonder about the use of creative writing and storytelling both as a means for sharing anthropological vignettes from fieldwork, but also as a means for interrogating the value of wearing and living with garments as a valuable form of social research.

Fundamentally, however this work confronted the author with a difficult question – how is the ‘self’ of the researcher conceived of in the first place, and how can the digital self be theorised. In previous work, I have categorised the non-digital self of the researcher as a terrestrial self, an intentionally chosen moniker that implies an Ingoldian understanding of the self as relational and embodied (following Ingold, 2020). This terrestrial self is in a continual process of becoming and following Luvaas’s (2019, 252) reflection on Ingold’s (2015) work, this can be conceived as an unfolding that ‘overlap[s] with innumerable other unfoldings’. Yet here my conceptualisation of the digital self deviates from this narrative. In the beginning of my fieldwork the terrestrial self and the digital version that was beginning to be created with those early Instagram posts were close reflections of one another – as though gazing like narcissus into a digital millpond. Yet as I began to post more frequently and the online version of myself became more tailored to appeal to the interlocutors I worked with the paths the digital and terrestrial versions of myself were progressing along began to diverge. There is a sense of Ingold’s (2011, 149) wayfaring here, with paths being forged in the on and offline landscapes of the world that cannot be rendered in a simplistic two-dimensional cartography. They will always be linked emotionally, spatially, aesthetically and temporally – resulting in an innumerably folded map where two lines may diverge, yet can still meet, intersect and overlap.

This is not a unique conversation, and for as long as anthropologists have been investigating online spaces questions have been asked about the nature of the digital self from Boellstorff’s (2008) investigation of second life to Abidin’s (2016, 2017) work with influencers. It is difficult to engage with the notional idea of a digital self without considering these digital creations as a form of performance, driven in some part by the necessary self-curation that is part of choosing a set of content to post online (following Pitcan et al., 2018). Whilst the extent and the purpose of this curation will vary this performativity has led those such as Turkle (1984) to suggest that such digital creations can be framed as a second self.

For those conducting digital ethnographic research this is pertinent. As more of us use digital versions of ourselves as part of our research process and as increasingly few fields are devoid from all digital connection we must consider the impact of these second digital selves on the wellbeing of the researcher and the way in which we collect and analysis our own ethnographic data. For Luvaas’s (2019, 258), the difficulties of leaving a digital field (see also Bluteau, 2022a, 129) have been clearly stated, and there are echoes here of the ‘context collapse’ Davis and Jurgenson (2014) describe. This concept is used by Boyd (2008, 2010; see also Marwick and Boyd, 2011) to explore how performing multiple identities across different platforms and devices can lead to users increasingly unable to distinguish between registers of identity across spaces, landscapes and platforms, both on and offline. For researchers and their interlocutors this is increasingly pertinent, but perhaps by giving voice to out digital selves we can retain the essence of reflexive ethnographic practice, and mitigate some of the dangers of context collapse.

A tale from the field: @anthrodandy speaks!

I would like to be one of those men who wakes up, makes his bed, and puts on the artful assemblage of clothes laid out for him (as if a supernatural valet had popped in during the night), before sallying forth into the bright morning world with a sense of accomplishment. However, this is not me; being able to assemble an outfit at all is an achievement, but after all, as my logical internal voice reassures me, who knows what the weather will be doing in the morning.

Whenever I open the curtains and see rain falling, my morning mood darkens. It’s bad enough to leave the warm and down-cosseted confines of my duvet-strewn bed (that safest of places), but what really fills my brain with dread is the need to go outside when the rain is thickening the air and aquatic stair rods bounce off the pavement with no concern to the need to maintain elegant shoes or well-pressed turn-ups.

In need of coffee, I stumble to the kitchen, still not quite among the living. Only after the strong black medicine has begun to placate my soul, steeling me against the rain battering the windows, can my attention turn to what to wear as I walk to work. Thoughts percolate gently though my brain, neurons lubricated by the contents of my cup.

Now, the weather is one of those intriguingly banal aspects of life; there is nothing you can do about it, short of moving to Tahiti, and bar a heroically theatrical thunderstorm, we in the UK tend to find almost any form of weather an opportunity to complain. Or at least, that is what I think when I first wake up, but when the coffee has begun to take hold, the anthropologist in me counters such bland and generic assertions. Weather is far from banal! As an invasive, all-encompassing, and tactile part of everyday life, weather has been woven metaphorically into the songs, art, spirituality, and the lived experiences and literally into the clothing of human beings for millennia. The long-noted comedic trope of Brits complaining about the weather is a far more subtle linguistic device employed to gauge whether strangers want to strike up a conversation. Contrary to Oscar Wilde’s assertion that such conversations are the ‘last refuge of the unimaginative’, they may in fact be the first port of call for the socially curious.

I recently moved to the heart of Manchester, and as I had been warned, I have not failed to notice the inclement weather, which dominates the personality of this metropolis. I previously lived in St Andrews, Scotland for 8 years, and despite the myriad of jokes and faux-shock expressions that greet such news, the weather there was far kinder. I even took to habitually wearing suede shoes—well, that’s the east coast of Scotland for you. Anyway, suffice it to say that since relocating to Manchester, all fair-weather items have been consigned to the darkest reaches of under-bed storage until the long winter has passed. But it’s not all doom and gloom; the change in environment has given me an excuse to go shopping (as if I needed one). Men today live in a world in which we are bombarded by a panoply of images, both digitally and terrestrially. Billboards, magazines, and seemingly impossibly sculpted men on Instagram tell us how we should look and what we should wear, from the perfume that will transform us into a better kind of man to the latest pyjamas (doubtless with an elasticated waist) that will miraculously realign our sleep patterns. I feel that the only appropriate response to such visual detritus is to give it short shrift; although I live in a world where it is easy to seek out advice, garner the collective Internet opinion, or order items to be delivered directly to your door, it can be challenging to assemble an elegant yet foolproof wet-weather outfit.

As I gaze through the window at the leaden sky, shot through with the first glimmers of cool morning light, I reflect that the persistence of those grey-hued shafts that pierce the clouds and touch the occasional raindrop—forcing it, despite all the gloom, to sparkle—is rather apt. For all the iconography and instinctual revulsion, our perception of rain is culturally constructed. Actually, it goes farther than that—it is culturally relative. This is an important notion for anthropologists; we try to look through the fog of the obvious and the assumed to look for such glimmers that help us to understand what is really going on—essentially, making the familiar strange, to paraphrase the 18^th-century poet Novalis. Our experience of rain is, like so much else that we experience regularly in our lives but think little of, a cultural construction, which means that we cannot judge it universally, but rather only understand it in its context. To Brits, morning rain may mean a grim start to the day, the prohibition of certain activities, the need to hail a taxi, or the fear that we have picked out the wrong outfit, but spare a thought for the rest of the world.

The rainmaking ritual, better known as the ‘rain dance’, is a common traditional practice among indigenous peoples in North America like the Hopi, Navajo, and Potawatomi, the Harar people of Ethiopia, Wu shamans in ancient China, and even in parts of Europe, such as the Paparuda ritual in Romania. The desire to control the weather, or at least to spiritually intervene to bring about a favourable forecast, is very understandable in times when and places where drought is a real possibility and brings horrific consequences, and in this context, rain means joy. Even in a city such as Manchester, blessed as it is with a surplus of the wet stuff, rain still has its uses, and without plundering the metaphors of the Old Testament too deeply, a heavy fall of rain overnight does, as even the surliest of morning risers must admit, wash the streets clean of the vomit and sputum deposited by last night’s revellers.

While in the UK, our culture is saturated with weather-based conversations, the foreign discourse associated with our petite windblown isles is even more hyperbolic. Visitors from abroad often declare their pleasant surprise that is has not rained as much as they expected; one sometimes feels that for reality to have matched their expectations, a second Atlantis would have had to greet these intrepid visitors upon landing at Heathrow. In other parts of the contemporary world and throughout history, humans have conducted and extolled a varied set of practices and beliefs connected to rain. It can act as a meteorological calendar; the go-to example here is the monsoon season that is a fixture of certain global regions, imposing a fluid temporal structure onto the passage of the year. For many cultures, rain is indelibly entwined with fertility; the coming of the rains brings hope, life, and sustenance to both land and people after a long summer. Thaloc, the Aztec rain god, was also the god of water and fertility, and likewise, the good people of ancient Mesopotamia worshipped Hadad, a storm god responsible for rich soil and new growth. It should come as little surprise that the first rainfall of the year after a period of aridness is greeted with joy and kindles hope.

This was not the emotion I felt as I opened my curtains, although I admit that it must be more pleasant to engage with a squall by dancing with joy, rather than gazing at it melancholically through double glazing, shrouded in a heavily caffeinated mist. Phenomenologically, getting caught in the rain is regrettable, as is arriving at your destination with your hair plastered over your face, your outfit akimbo, and accessories dripping; this is hardly the way anyone wishes to look when they meet a potential significant other—with the notable exception of Mr Darcy, for whom it seems to have worked out quite well. Being soaked to the skin may be dangerous in winter, while another problem that has arisen in recent years is the fact that in an age in which we are precariously dependent on the information stored in portable yet fragile electronic devices, being caught short without adequate protection is a recipe for disaster. It is clear that on days like today I should stay indoors.

Manchester is a curious city; it is as grand and fearlessly architectural as any of the great European conurbations, but on a smaller scale. Not in terms of the buildings themselves, I hasten to add—the buildings tower over the streets below with a post-industrial grandeur that only marble columns can muster. No; the scale lies in the street plan, in that the city centre is compact, and it is easy to get around on foot. This may seem somewhat of an anathema to the well-dressed gent—surely the last thing you would want to do is walk any distance in the rain—but I am not so sure.

While looking like a drowned rat lacks appeal, the idea of battling the elements like a latter-day Edmund Hillary is rather dashing, but getting one’s wet-weather outfit right feels good, and it is no small task to do so. There is a shade of schadenfreude to be had when one glides past a fellow commuter who has not got it right. Short bomber jackets, polyester faux-fur trimmed hoodies, and fitted tracksuits abound on the student campuses of Manchester, and while they might fit a current trend, offer little protection from the range of afflictions the sky can throw at us. Furthermore, that ever-present solution of many an academic—throwing an anorak over one’s work outfit—is not for the sartorially faint-hearted because what it makes up for in practicality it lacks in stylishness. None of this changes the fact that rain demands outerwear.

Which gives rise to the question: what do we wear when it rains? The best way I have found to stop the ingress of water while retaining sartorial control is to start on the outside and work in. Boots, coats, hats, and—despite to my on-going reservation about the item—umbrellas all feature heavily in my first sartorial decision of the day. An umbrella fashioned by hand from one of London’s great makers (Brigg or Fox spring to mind) is a wonderful thing, both aesthetic and useful, but so often, the plastic parasols that shield the shuffling city crowd are flimsy, inadequate, and inside out, not to mention frequently coming close to taking my eye out. To a certain extent, our form of dress will always depend on quite how bad the weather is, whether we are facing a drizzle or a typhoon, and if it is merely a cloudburst or we must grit our teeth and weather the storm for an entire whole journey. If we are too fastidious in our clothing, we might end up in the unenviable situation in which our outerwear keeps out the rain, but the body gently steam-cooks so that we arrive at the destination in a distastefully moist state, such that we might as well not have taken any meteorological precautions at all. It is necessary to possess a variety of ready items to throw together for the final edit of your morning look, depending on what is happening on the other side of the window. Unless, of course, you do have a supernatural valet.

The outer layers of a wet weather outfit act as a sartorial suit of armour, shielding the occupant from the rain, wind, and cold of an ill-tempered morning. When well-fitting, this second skin should not hang off the wearer or shroud one’s form, but rather embolden and enhance the wearer’s physicality: their posture, build, and presence. This is not always easy to achieve, and many a well-meaning aspirational dandy is swamped by oversized outerwear or distorted by a piece that does not flatter. I am as guilty of this as the next man, having once lusted after (and acquired) a late-1940s RAF officer’s greatcoat that was sadly made for a man far larger than myself, and effect that was exaggerated by the drape from the beautiful but astonishingly heavy cloth, woven by Crombie.

The trends to which we are subjected by the fickle world of fashion makes it difficult to decide on an appropriate coat, and unless you are fortunate enough to have your clothes made for you, this is something that we must accept. Whether you are an off-the-peg, full-bespoke, or somewhere-in-the-middle kind of man, you should maintain caution; it is easy to get caught up in the theatre of outerwear and to purchase something that is fabulous beyond measure, but the thought of wearing it beyond the threshold of your home is a little daunting.

To me, outerwear should be theatrical and heroic; after all, you can get away with flaunting a large amount of fabric that swishes around your knees, emboldening the physique. Why not bask in the sumptuousness of asserting your individuality, becoming one of those characters from history who pass others by in the mist—hero or villain, it’s up to you. You can hang up your outerwear when you get to the office, dial down the theatre and look forward to the end of the day, when you slide your arms back into the heavy fabric and raise your collar against the wind… it’s hard to look heroic in a cagoule. While outerwear is at its best when it follows classical lines, it can be lifted into the realm of effortless chic with nothing more than a small modern twist. Fortunately, history is on our side. The classic pieces of outerwear available to the modern man possess a heritage and legacy in every panel. Whether we choose to don a Macintosh, greatcoat, overcoat, topcoat, bomber jacket, flight jacket, safari jacket, or even the demob raincoats issued to soldiers after the end of World War II, a considerable amount of outerwear has a distinctly militaristic feel that can manifest through cut, fabric, or detailing. This should not be surprising, given that a great deal of contemporary menswear is the end point of a garment that can withstand farmwork and military life, and has been reworked over time into civilian mufti. The tailored lounge suit, for instance, can be traced back to a military uniform, while formal morning dress has evolved from attire designed for the cavalry. It is, perhaps, this history that allows such garments to continue to embody a specific set of masculine values, even as they are reworked, re-coloured, modernised, and reframed for civilian life. The same can be said for footwear; boots take their cues from the rugged rubber sole, high ankle, and sturdy construction of combat boots, and the leather material means that they can be shined to perfection across the vamp and toe.

Given the lack of such sensible items in my Scottish wardrobe, upon arrival in Manchester, I equipped myself with a set of new items to guard against the onset of autumn. Fortunately, being someone who has a great penchant for the biscuit aisle, I find shoes and coats to be among the friendliest and most forgiving of wardrobe staples, so it has been no hardship. It is one of life’s great pleasures to slide one’s arms into the comforting embrace of a well-endowed overcoat; with summer long gone and autumn ebbing, it feels like embracing an old friend.

When shopping for a new coat, it is essential to have a list of particulars that you are looking for, beyond the usual thoughts of colour and cut. Substantial cloth, chunky buttons (two holes or four?), generously proportioned collars (perhaps Edward Sexton without the full Tommy Nutter), belted backs, extra length, vents which can be buttoned, and small extra details such as the inclusion of a throat latch are all aesthetic possibilities with a practical purpose, all intended to protect the wearer against a windswept moor or a long night on guard duty. Seeking out garments with such features, or commissioning them yourself, is an excellent way of drawing on the cumulative wisdom of tradition, at the same time as adding details that are sadly disappearing from much of the mass-produced outerwear available on the high street. Whether on the front line or the touch line, the next time you pull on that favourite winter coat, think of all the coats that came before it to make it what it is.

Just as in the military, duty calls; my first commitment of the day jolts me out of these circuitous musings. Giving a lecture at 10 a.m. on the anthropology of material culture entitled—with an irony which is not lost on me—‘Being at home: difference, identity and the domestic’. Time to get ready, 300 students beckon… what to wear?

I decide to put on a pair of Italian-made chestnut leather dispatch-rider boots, with burnished almond-shaped toes that hide a sensible vibram sole. These are purposeful yet elegant shoes that also manage not to look too much like combat boots. When they are laced up and secured with a buckled flap, a sense of insulation against the day begins. Then there is the coat; it’s not too cold today so no need for heavy wool, but it is still raining. I take a long Macintosh from my coat stand and ease on the slightly stiff material. Ostensibly minimalist but with a subtle playfulness to the cut and colour, this coat is a recent acquisition but one that has already served me well, shrugging off the worst of Manchester’s weather. The gabardine fabric is a deep blue-green, flecked with threads of squid ink and teal so that in a certain light, it could be mistaken for a good Japanese selvedge denim. The weight and slight stiffness of the fabric gives it a life of its own, as it dances in the wind and whips around corners, expertly following the movement of the occupant. One of the strong suits of gabardine is its history; patented by Burberry and favoured for expeditions by the likes of Ernest Shackleton and George Mallory, this cloth perfectly balances practicality and formality.

My coat is about as simple as they get; single-breasted, with two deep slash pockets incorporated into the side seams, and no epaulets or belts, as can often be found on this type of coat. The coat’s length—it extends four or five inches below the knee—and the subtle flare to the hem evoke the rubberised coats of World War II dispatch riders, and add to the drama without the addition of fussy belts and pockets. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but this simple, modernised militaristic cut, coupled with the cloth’s unusual hue, make for a garment that walks a line between classic and modern with effortless aplomb.

I shoulder my bag (waxed cotton is suitable for a day like today), throw a thin cotton scarf around my neck to keep out the wind, and pick up my umbrella. It’s time to go. I leave the building, pull up my collar, and sink my head into the luxurious oversized points and comfortable structure that allows my ears to nestle into the shelter afforded by the gabardine, without having to be constantly readjusted. As I pass the statue of Alan Turing, in Sackville Gardens I touch a metaphorical forelock and resist the urge to wonder out loud why the bronze wasn’t cast with an umbrella to keep off the incessant precipitation. If this was a film, the refrain from Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’, would be playing: ‘Rain down on me’; but this is Manchester, and all around me I see the result of the human struggle to come to terms with the rain, constantly crafting and re-crafting clothing to come to terms the environment. The next time you buy a coat, wiggle on your favourite boots, or dodge a carelessly brandished umbrella, remember that clothing sits in a historical lineage, mediates the relationships we have with each other, and fundamentally alter how we interact with the world around us.

Epilogue

And once again, @anthrodandy falls silent. This piece of creative ethnography has given voice to my digital self, but why have I allowed this to happen? When I began to conduct anthropological fieldwork with Instagram, it was a silent platform made up solely of images. Interlocutors whom I had never met in person had voices, walks and affectations in my head – think about your favourite characters from a book that has not yet be made into a film. It was during this time that I began to question how these digital creations - from tailors and other well-dressed Instagrammers – would sound. As the features of Instagram evolved and videos, live streaming and reels became commonplace Instagram became a noisy platform full of overlaid music and the voices of those I followed. At times the reality of the voices jarred with my expectations, a context collapse of sorts, yet as I continued my work the overlaid sounds and voices of those I followed appeared to become more performative as confidence in these new features grew and the capacity to add auditory flesh to the digital self became possible.

I resisted the urge to make @anthrodandy speak on Instagram. For some squeamish reason that I could not quite identify it seemed that this would be a meeting point for my terrestrial voice and digital self that I was not comfortable to navigate. Yet this has led to my digital self remaining silent until I revisited this above text and found that he had not been quite as silent as I had thought. Using this passage of creative ethnographic writing as a way to expand my critical engagement with the field and my own anthropological practice demonstrates the value of this form of storytelling and the power that alternative forms of ethnographic writing can have on researcher themselves as a site of knowledge production.

As I revised this work for publication I have repeatedly returned to a difficult philosophical question. In the forward to their excellent book, Unfinished, Biehl and Locke (2017) employ the example of an incomplete oil painting to act as a mirror to the theme of the anthropology of becoming and the multiplicity of lifeworld’s inherent to the inevitably unfinished matter of anthropological scholarship. Yet if we consider the digital self that has spoken in the above tale from the field I cannot help but question whether this digital self can ever be complete. There is an irony to this, as one might argue that the creation of such digital selves may make one’s life more complete, or conversely may diminish one’s completeness, siphoning off some essence of self to be contained in the online ether. Luvaas’ (2019, 259-260) evocatively captures this tension, framing taking a step away from his social media (and the research self that used it) as unbecoming, whilst also suggesting that opening a new account heralds the start of a new becoming.

Yet a question still remains – what happens to the digital self if the content that constitutes that self remains visible on a social media platform, even when the terrestrial self has stepped away from continuing to add to it. This is complicated by the assertion I have made elsewhere (see Bluteau 2021, 2023, 6; 2025a, 9) that digital selves with large amounts of content are capable of acquiring agency in their own right and exerting this over the terrestrial self. This can be manifested in the pressure to purchase new outfits to costume the digital self (see Bluteau, forthcoming) and expectations laden on the terrestrial self by those who have viewed the digital self’s content (see Luvaas 2019, 256), but how long does this agency last. The narrative of these unfinished digital selves, who’s wayfaring (following Ingold 2011) has slowed to a crawl is something that ethnographers will have to confront as such abandoned or neglected second selves become an increasing part of the life history of our terrestrial selves. This raises further questions about the death of the terrestrial self, the ownership of this digital footprint and how we conceptualise the becoming and unbecoming of individuals that may have an incredibly complex set of overlapping and overlaid selves that constitute their social legacy. In the age of social media such conversations are important to anthropologists and social scientists across the world, and perhaps by engaging fulsomely with experiments in ethnography it might help us to understand this difficult folded landscape a little more clearly.