Introduction

Information communication technologies (hereinafter ICTs) have had a far-reaching impact on the everyday life of ordinary citizens in Africa. The impact of ICTs has been particularly profound in volatile societies, where they have been shown to be an important factor in the mobilisation of people and ideas (cf the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings). The mobile phone influenced social life tremendously (Dibakana, 2002; Obadare, 2006; Hahn and Kibora, 2008; de Bruijn et al, 2009; Ekine, 2010), but the mediascape has changed dramatically as a consequence of the introduction of the internet and the smartphone (Cleaver, 1998; Dahlgren, 2000; Kalathil and Boas, 2003; Burrell, 2012; Gleick, 2012). The smartphone has enabled access to the internet on a mobile device, thus making the internet more broadly accessible for more people across Africa. Indeed, over 28 per cent of people on the African continent now have access to the internet (Internetworldstats, 2016). It has become an alternative technology of information exchange in an otherwise often restricted media landscape. This has transformed our fields of research as well as the lives of our informants (cf de Bruijn, 2012).

But new ICTs and the flows of information they generate also have a profound impact on how we, as researchers, can and do conduct our research in the field, and how we relate to our field. Pelckmans (2009) has observed how the appropriation of mobile telephony by both researchers and informants in the late 1990s and early 2000s enabled new forms of interaction, relating and knowing that have a profound impact on the practice of conducting research, as well as on research ethics and epistemology. Since then, the widespread use of smartphones and the internet by both researchers and informants suggests we are never really ‘out of the field’ (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997) because we actually carry (part of) our field in the form of our smartphone in our pockets. This continuous access brings obvious advantages, but also requires us to work with new flows of information. Working in a particularly crisis-ridden part of Africa, we have experienced that this constant flow of information through social media has had a profound impact on our perceptions of insecurity on a personal and emotional level and on our decision-making processes.