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Facing our black mirrors

Stimulating individual and collective reflexivity on smartphone use through documentary film
Ariane Papillon
Traduction de Delaina Haslam
Cet article est une traduction de :
Facing our black mirrors [fr]

Résumé

This video essay entitled “A phone trip in Dublin” is the result of the first stage of the Facing our black mirrors research-creation project, which took the form of a residency in Dublin as part of the international NEST program. Interviews in the form of “phone tours”—guided tours of smartphones—were conducted primarily with employees at big tech companies. This essay reflects on a form of paradox stemming from the persistence of certain behaviors despite our understanding of the functioning of algorithms and the harmful consequences of smartphone use. The field research and the recordings of the audiovisual material comprising this documentary essay were carried out in January 2025, at a time when Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony highlighted the ideological and political weight of the big tech companies and their bosses.

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Texte intégral

A phone trip in Dublin

Introduction

Unlocking an iPhone screen. Zebra stripe wallpaper and widgets. 11:54 am. “Welcome to my phone!”

1At 13 minutes into the film À nos amies [Girls Through the Looking Glass], a documentary shot entirely on a mobile phone and produced as part of my research-creation PhD at Paris 8 University, the image no longer comes from the camera of the phone, but directly from its screen, thanks to a simple video capture function: screen record. Eighteen-year-old Rita gives us a tour of her mobile phone. Her voice is recorded simultaneously on the same audio file. She is carrying out one of the film “exercises” that I set the four teenagers who took part in my digital correspondence project, which was conceived as a future feature film. I named this exercise “phone tour as a nod to the “room tour” that they filmed a few weeks earlier: a simple technique involving recording a tour of a bedroom, which is very popular on social media. During the phone tour, Rita chooses what she shows: she does not click on WhatsApp messages—too personal—but presents her two Instagram accounts, “one private and one… a little less private,” perfectly mastering the logic of “social steganography” (boyd, 2011). In the following sequence, Louanne responds with a tour of her own smartphone, whose wallpaper and icons are personalized in pastel colors and carefully selected images. These visits are an opportunity for subjects to comment on their own socio-digital practices by presenting them, comparing them, but also by looking at them afresh from a certain distance. Showing her Insta homepage makes Louanne realize that it is full of photos and videos of young women in bra tops who achieve “very impressive” sports performances and bodies embodying the normative beauty of this third decade of the twenty-first century.

2While the phone tour was only one of the methods used in this research-creation project (with the aim—among other things—of promoting documentation by teenagers themselves of their social and cinematic uses of the mobile phone), I acknowledged its potential as a tool. With this method as a starting point, I have thus extended my research on individual and collective reflexivity on the mobile phone, paying particular attention to the “individual attachments and their social mediations” generated by this hyperobject (Allard et al., 2022). Through audiovisual documentary creation, I aim to contribute to the discussion of the socio-ecological dimensions of digital technology.

1. Tech professionals

  • 1 The corporate tax rate is 12.5% in Ireland compared with 34.3% in France (Mise, 2012).

3In January 2025, as part of a residency funded by the international NEST (Networking Ecologically Smart Territories) program, I spent a month in Dublin to carry out my first research and creation fieldwork. A unique characteristic of the city is that it hosts most of the so-called big tech or GAFAM (for Google Apple Facebook Amazon Microsoft) companies thanks to—or because of its advantageous tax system,1 employing more than 200,000 people in 2022, although this was slightly reduced in 2025 owing to numerous waves of redundancies (Cantillon, 2025). While flat-sharing with a Google employee, I took advantage of this opportunity to focus my research on tech workers, and in particular companies related to the daily use of mobile phones and social networks (in particular Google, TikTok, and Meta). I then focused my investigation on the following question: how does the work of these people and their knowledge of the functioning of these applications and their algorithms potentially influence their use of the smartphone and what they think about it? Knowing that I wouldn’t be able to answer this question entirely satisfactorily within the framework of this one-month, solitary residency, I sought to take the first steps in the investigation using the method of the phone tour.

2. Methodology and feedback

  • 2 In January 2025, at the time of my residency, the Meta Group announced that it would end its conten (...)

4To collect the testimonies that constitute the raw material of my documentary essay, I proceeded in two ways. First, I frequented streets and cafés located near the big tech firms’ headquarters, stopping people at random to ask them questions first of all via a simple sound recording, and then suggesting a phone tour. This method is similar to a vox-pop interview (Noury, 2023). Second, I organized, via my contacts, targeted meet-ups with Google employees, in particular, as well as with a TikTok employee and a freelance entrepreneur. The Meta employees whom I intended to interview declined or cancelled our appointments owing to a climate of fear and instability induced by the latest statements by CEO Mark Zuckerberg about moderation policies.2

5Methodologically speaking, the relationship between researcher and interviewee and between documentary filmmaker and subject seem to me to be (re)defined by the practice of the phone tour. First because the tour creates the conditions for an interview conducted more by the respondent than by the interviewer since the former is invited to comment on his or her screen and navigations. The tour seems to act as a trigger for speech and to lead the interviewee to places where a simple interview would probably not take them, thanks to the presence on a mobile phone of components associated with intimacy (what can be referred to as “digital intimacy” after Diane Poitras, 2023). The benefits of this type of approach in a sociological survey framework have been demonstrated by several researchers who use the notion of the “guided tour” (visite commentée; Gallant et al., 2020). This approach “not only facilitates the collection of evidence but also its observation in context, while benefiting from the reflexivity of individuals about their own online activity” (p. 196). It could also serve as a “stimulus to foster discourse on digital practices” (p. 196). Video recording promotes “inductive analysis” by enabling retrospective examination of the data (p. 207). The guided visit also has “an advantage in terms of research ethics” as it gives individuals “control over what they agree to show (p. 207). Jørgensen (2016), who uses the term “media go-along,” argues that conducting research with “media at hand” constitutes “a springboard for understanding media use as forms of mobility that take place within a media environment,” and that it makes it possible to move beyond the “online/offline” dichotomy and to turn internet ethnography “inward” (p. 36)

6However, I positioned my investigation with a slight shift away from a purely sociological or ethnographic approach: since I am a researcher in film studies and an artist, I presented myself as a documentary filmmaker undertaking a research-creation residency at a university rather than as a sociologist. This transforms the relationship, since for participants it means a chance to contribute to making an audiovisual creation. It is possible that the artistic dimension put the interviewees at ease, who might have been more inhibited if faced with a sociological or journalistic survey. Moreover, the technical conditions were favorable to the anonymization of testimonies and a means of letting go, since the interviewees’ faces were not filmed. The fact that people chose for themselves which apps to show me and where to click also gave them some control.

7The perspective of contributing to making a documentary essay from the starting point of a personal reflection that I gave concerning my own contradictions and uses of the smartphone—especially with regard to the ethical, political, ecological, and psychological implications—also favored personal testimonies which resonated with my research concerns. This project is thus part of a strand of research-creation understood as experimentation with the margins of social-science inquiry and artistic research, responding to a form of “critique of essentialism” as identified by Louis-Claude Paquin (2020), which uses creation as an alternative to (or a way of moving beyond) a mode of qualitative data analysis that treats research subjects as stable and capable of delivering truths. Paquin thus proposes considering subjectivity not as a limiting bias but rather as a starting point to be explored as a means of reducing methodological anxiety. The methodological framework of this research-creation therefore postulates that the data are “fabricated rather than found” (Ellingston & Sotirin, 2019). The next steps for this project could be to continue these experiments in collaboration with social science researchers, with the aim of using the phone tour as both a method of investigation and a creative tool.

3. Reclaiming our data

8This research-creation intends to use the phone tour as an attempt to regain possession of our data, the data that we more or less knowingly consent to give the companies that manage the applications we use on a daily basis. This is a symbolic reappropriation, since this approach consisting of recording your own phone screen and commenting on what it contains does not, in practice, allow you to avoid the collection of data. The phone tour, conducted in conversation with the artist-researcher as user, creates the conditions for both individual and collective reflexivity. For instance, asking oneself “Why am I seeing this targeted advertisement?” rather than simply scrolling past it (or clicking on it, if the marketing is effective!) makes it possible to reflect on the profile constructed by the website or application based on collected data, and to consider how this profile resembles—or differs from—that of one’s interlocutor. The editing of the material helps to highlight a comparative process, revealing both shared features and points of variation across participants’ Instagram feeds, for example. At times, the voice is out of sync with the image, which sparks viewers’ curiosity and invites interpretation of what we see in light of what is said, or vice versa. An audiovisual documentary essay makes it possible to archive (or “archivalise”, according to Ketelaar, 1999) material that is destined for obsolescence (interfaces change, and content posted on social networks is erasable or even ephemeral) or difficult to access because it is private (such as data from a health application or the navigation history from Google Maps).

4. Contributing to collective reflexivity in order to understand algorithms and move away from individual responsibility for the consequences of our usage

9The Facing our black mirrors research-creation project puts forward for consideration the idea that that the central issue at present is no longer so much one of raising awareness, through the dissemination of information—since the majority of people are already aware of the detrimental effects of smartphone use on mental health and the environment—, but rather of finding ways to escape the mechanisms of dependence that it generates and the feeling of powerlessness and isolation, and instead to think up, collectively, other uses and above all other means of handling digital technology. Although the interviewees’ political leanings differ from mine, they show that they are aware of the impact of their smartphone use. They have access to the same information as me, or even more as a result of their jobs: for example, marketing managers are very familiar with strategies designed to encourage the consumption of polluting and poor-quality goods. How can we move away from individual accountability and user guilt? How can we create the conditions and spaces for collective reflection to consider the possibility of fighting technofascism, of creating alternatives, and of thinking about the sustainability of our materials and the ethics of our practices without necessarily renouncing digital technology entirely? Facing our black mirrors intends to play a role in this project. Involving tech workers in the making of the video essay “A phone trip in Dublin” allows me to make a brief foray into their world, as well as to draw attention to work that goes unnoticed and is little understood by the general public, and to try to engage those who enable the highly ideological and anti-ecological actions of the tech giants in a process of reflexivity. Unlike the precarious digital laborers (clickworkers) studied by Antonio Casili (2019) and documented in a film by Nicolas Gourault in Their Eyes (2025), the tech workers I interviewed are privileged: they are properly (or generously) paid and have international mobility made possible by their nationality or by their residence permit. One question remains to be explored: can they be allies in a movement of mass criticism of the companies they serve, initially, and then use their knowledge and skills to promote digital technology that is both responsible and aimed at degrowth?

10In the interviews collected, critical perspectives remain tentative or euphemistic. For example, a Google employee on the subject of data collection cautiously argues that “it could end badly” and says that she left Twitter/X after its acquisition by Elon Musk, although she emphasizes that this was a “personal choice.” An entrepreneur in the marketing field, whose main clients are Google and Meta, says he is convinced that, regarding the environmental impact of these companies, nothing can be done.

  • 3 A phenomenon called the “Big Quit” took place after the COVID-19 pandemic. In January 2025, some ex (...)
  • 4 In 2021, a former Facebook engineer, Frances Haugen, unveiled thousands of internal documents via t (...)

11Also, while the video essay ends with an invitation to deprivatize the Internet with Ben Tarnoff’s book Internet for the People. The Fight for our Digital Future (2022), a rather pessimistic answer to the question posed above seems to be emerging. Although some tech workers resign3 and others speak out publicly,4 many prefer the comfort their status brings, not to mention those who embrace the ideology of their companies and leaders. Nevertheless, the radicalization of business leaders (Romarchi, 2025) and the fading of the image of a “progressive” sector (Tréguer, 2019; Laurent, 2025) could perhaps change the situation. The dependence of users—including myself—on social media and the digital tools of the tech giants does not seem to me to be irrevocable: to move beyond feelings of helplessness and defeat, it is important to continue this work of reflexivity and criticism, and to get contributors to face their black mirrors. One avenue to pursue could be to interview tech workers after showing them this video essay, and to ask them more head-on, contentious questions.

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Bibliographie

AFP. (2025, 7 janvier). “Meta met fin à son programme de lutte contre la désinformation aux États-Unis,” Agence France Presse.

Allard, L., Monnin, A., Nova, N. (2022). Écologies du smartphone. Le bord de l’eau.

boyd, d. (2011, 28 mai). Social steganography. Privacy in networked publics. ICA. https://www.danah.org/papers/2011/Steganography-ICAVersion.pdf

Cantillon. (2025, 14 juin). “Are Ireland’s tech layoffs down to an AI rout?,” The Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/06/14/are-irelands-tech-layoffs-down-to-an-ai-rout/

Casilli, A. (2019). En attendant les robots. Enquête sur le travail du clic. Seuil.

Descroix, C. (2022, 3 octobre). “La Grande Démission, un phénomène qui touche aussi les 18-35 ans,” Le Mouv. https://www.radiofrance.fr/mouv/la-grande-demission-un-phenomene-qui-touche-aussi-les-18-35-ans-9549331

Gallant, N., Labrecque, K., Latzko-Toth, G., Pastinelli, M. (2020). “La visite commentée: documenter les pratiques numériques par l’entretien sur traces,” Méthodes de recherche en contexte numérique. Presses de l’université de Montréal.

Godin, R. (2025, 19 janvier). “Les Big Tech basculent à l’extrême droite: c’est l’économie, idiot!,” Mediapart. https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/economie-et-social/190125/les-big-tech-basculent-l-extreme-droite-c-est-l-economie-idiot

Hagey, K., Horwitz, J., Glazer, E., Seetharaman, D., Wells, G. (2021, 1er octobre). “The Facebook Files,” The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039

Jammot, J. (2025, 10 janvier). “Meta met fin à ses programmes de recrutement pour la diversité,” Le Devoir. https://www.ledevoir.com/monde/etats-unis/831721/meta-met-fin-ces-programmes-recrutement-diversite

Jørgensen, K.M. (2016). “The media go-along: Researching mobilities with media at hand,” MedieKultur. Journal of Media and Communication Research32(60). https://doi.org/10.7146/mediekultur.v32i60.22429

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Laurent, S. (2025). La contre-révolution californienne. Seuil.

Mise, J. (2012, 31 octobre; mis à jour 18 février 2025). “Quand les géants du Web préfèrent l’Irlande,” Europe 1. https://www.europe1.fr/technologies/Quand-les-geants-du-Web-preferent-l-Irlande-387274

Noury, C. (2023). “Bonjour monsieur/madame/+tout-le-monde, avez-vous une minute pour un vox pop?” Recherche(-création) médiatique par l’écriture sur et par la pratique du vox pop [thèse de doctorat en communication, sous la direction de Louis-Claude Paquin]. Université du Québec à Montréal.

Paquin, L.-C. (2020). La pratique de la recherche-création. https://lcpaquin.com/Ecriture/Ecriture_pratique_RC.pdf

Poitras, Diane (2023). Intimités numériques. Projet de recherche-création financé par le Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC), le Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada (CRSH) et l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). http://intimite.bigdata.grisq.org/

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Notes

1 The corporate tax rate is 12.5% in Ireland compared with 34.3% in France (Mise, 2012).

2 In January 2025, at the time of my residency, the Meta Group announced that it would end its content moderation policies. See “Meta announces end to its fact-checking program in the US” on lemonde.fr with reporting by AP and AFP, January 7, 2025: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/01/07/meta-announces-end-to-its-fact-checking-program-in-the-us_6736794_4.html

3 A phenomenon called the “Big Quit” took place after the COVID-19 pandemic. In January 2025, some ex-employees claimed to have left their company for political reasons, such as Roy Austin, former vice president of civil rights at Meta (DesCroix, 2022; Jammot, 2025).

4 In 2021, a former Facebook engineer, Frances Haugen, unveiled thousands of internal documents via the Wall Street Journal and accused the company of lying about its use of user data and knowingly pursuing strategies which are harmful to the mental health of internet users as well as in terms of ethics and fairness (Hagey et al., 2021).

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Titre Video
Légende Author: Ariane Papillon. Link : https://vimeo.com/​1084728184/​9060b41f0b
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Ariane Papillon, « Facing our black mirrors »Hybrid [En ligne], 15 | 2026, mis en ligne le 15 avril 2026, consulté le 16 mai 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/7064 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/162zi

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Auteur

Ariane Papillon

Ariane Papillon is a film director and researcher/lecturer. After completing a doctoral contract and two years as a temporary teaching and research fellow (ATER) at the Aesthetics, Sciences and Technologies of Film and Audiovisual Media (ESTCA) Laboratory (Paris 8 University), she defended her PhD dissertation entitled “Partages de la mise en scène: enjeux de la délégation de la caméra aux personnages dans le cinéma documentaire contemporain, entre représentation et autoreprésentation” (Sharing the mise-en-scène: what is at stake in delegating the camera to documentary subjects in contemporary cinema, between representation and self-representation) under the supervision of Dork Zabunyan. She is currently an ATER in Film Studies at the École normale supérieure de Lyon.

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