About the Project

 

Who walks together?

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This website is a research project that looks at how members of a walking group in London experience their environment. The walking group is organised by a woman named Bethany* through the platform Meetup.com. Walks take place every weekend and occasionally mid-week during the evenings, with Bethany planning the route and leading the walk for a fee of £4. The walks had anywhere between ten to forty attendees made up of a mixture of regulars and newcomers. The demographic of the group was very varied, with a mix of ages, ethnicities, genders, and occupations.

 

As I spoke to more and more walkers, I observed that many were actively seeking to establish a social network that they did not already possess in London – they were new to London, or recently divorced, or with grown children – or they simply did not have any friends who were interested in walking. Over the span of three months, I attended four walks and conducted two one-to-one walking interviews with members of the walking group I had built rapport with. The walks were usually around ten miles long through one or more London parks, sometimes with a stop at the pub in the middle. Most people came alone, some in pairs, but most people mingled and chatted during the walks. Some simply walked in silence, either content to be a part of the pack or not yet confident enough to strike up conversation. I enjoyed walking with the group – the nature in the parks always provided something interesting to talk about, and it wasn’t considered strange or abnormal to occasionally walk in silence, which was useful when I wanted to gather my thoughts or reflect on what someone had said.

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I planned to attend one more walk to gather more focused data and footage, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all walks were cancelled. Thus, the images and videos on this site are stock images unless otherwise stated. I was interested to see if the walks would continue via video conferencing platforms or online, but the walking group became inactive.

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Why do they walk together?

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I came across the walking group on Meetup.com and was first interested in the way Bethany had described the walks as ‘stress-relieving’. I wanted to learn what kind of social space the walks were and how they were thought of in relation to the stress of everyday living in a big city such as London. As I became familiar with the walks, with Bethany, and with the regular core of walkers, I grew interested in how and why walking in groups within nature and green space in London provided the possibility for a form of safe co-presence that walkers struggled to find elsewhere. Experiences of London were mixed – I heard it described as busy and overwhelming, but also and ‘buzzy’ and productive in an inspiring way.

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Regardless of how London as a city space and workspace was experienced, most walkers that I spoke to agreed that they used Meetup.com as way of finding their social ‘niche’. This niche occurs at the intersection of online relations and in-person interactions. As one of my interviewees, Daniel*, explained,

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“I can live online, on Facebook and Twitter, and have interactions to an extent, but Meetup bridges that gap, and brings the online world into reality, where you’re actually meeting people physically in person. It’s a directory, making things accessible – the Internet has made micro-niches.”

(Interview, 09/03/2020)

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When Daniel described Meetup as ‘making things accessible’, I understood this to mean that Meetup gave him a tool to locate and acquire a social space, the value of which came partly from its physicality. Meetup makes other people in London physically and socially accessible and legitimizes these interactions. Particularly set within the broader context of London, where words such as ‘transient’ and ‘isolating’ were common descriptors by members of the walking group, he characterises Meetup.com as a directory for creating and maintaining social ties that take place both through the website and away from the ‘online’ in the physical world.

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Walks always began near a tube or train station. Bethany usually arrived ten minutes before the set leaving time to take payment and attendance. On one occasion, I arrived to Richmond Station a lot earlier than Bethany – and I noticed a few people also waiting. As it was one of my first walks, I didn’t recognise any of the regulars, but I suspected that we were all waiting for the walk. Yet no one made the first move to initiate conversation. It was not until Bethany arrived that we all drifted over and began our introductions. As noted by walker Colin in an interview, “You don’t take tube journeys in the hopes of meeting someone and striking up conversation,” (Interview, 02/03/2020). I suggest that taking part in the Meetup walking group is a way that participants make the anonymizing ‘buzz’ of London intelligible.  The London buzz is experienced as intensely social and human, but at the same time difficult or impossible to penetrate, particularly for people who do not already possess a social network in London.

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Walking is about being with others in a group, not necessarily to make long-lasting connections or even speak to anyone during the walk, but about experiencing a social co-presence in London’s nature, facilitated and legitimized by Meetup.com.

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A note about digital anthropology

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My field site occurred at the intersection between the digital and the physical – if such a distinction can truly be made (Boellstorff 2016). Without Meetup.com, members of the walking group may not have found each other. Yet the social space facilitated by Meetup.com necessarily takes place in a ‘physical’ space; the value provided by Meetup.com for its members is its ability to function as an online directory for face to face interactions and to legitimize in person interactions with strangers. As I noted earlier, due to COVID-19 social distancing, the group paused their walks completely, rather than continue in a virtual sense, such as by using a video conferencing app to take walks together. The lack of virtual alternatives could suggest that most walkers are content with their online social networks and instead use Meetup for in-person interactions.

 

Digital anthropology is thus essential in this case for taking into consideration the ways social relations are constituted by and through a website; but an analysis taking place purely at the level of the website would be inadequate in answering my question of what kind of social spaces the walks are.

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The website

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By presenting my findings digitally I hope to create an immersive experience for the viewer. Using a mixture of primary ethnographic material, such as quotes, footage, and screenshots, interspersed with stock imagery and video to replace content I was unable to obtain due to pandemic restrictions, I designed the website to place the viewer in the shoes of the walker. My website takes the viewer on a journey from one version of London to another – the London characterized as transient, anonymous, and overcrowded, to the London accessible through Meetup.com; a social space, set against the green backdrop of the parks.

 

By utilizing apps on the Wix platform, I aim to represent how Meetup provides an access point or ‘directory’ that my participants used to experience in person social interactions and co-presence in London’s natural environment. Additionally, I hoped to make the website interactive, allowing the user to contribute to the discussion of the walking group by leaving comments. Ultimately, my central objective in presenting my research in this way was to recreate the journey taken by participants in the walking group, a journey that takes place across multiple versions of London that exist both online and in person. Additionally, I hope to showcase more participatory and immersive digital methods for the presentation of data.

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*Names changed for anonymity.

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Boellstorff, Tom. 2016 "For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real," Current Anthropology 57, no. 4: 387-407.