Week 7 prompt: communities…
4May 14, 2012 by jfenn@uoregon.edu
The periodical service (Photo credit: crises_crs)
This week we’ll focus on another facet of the “who” question(s) related to digital ethnography: who are the subjects? We’ve danced around this topic before, and often directly engaged it in conversation, but now let’s turn our attention to issues of identifying, mapping, sourcing, navigating, documenting, or otherwise conducting digital ethnography with groups of people (or, individuals, for that matter).
Category discussion prompt, Spr2012 | Tags: community, discussion, group, people, reading
Extending from the comments I made last week (which were probably more pertinent to this discussion of communities than last weeks prompt), I want to question whether the non-human elements of online communication can be members of a community when we are thinking about digital actors. Skinner states, “In both settings – face-to-face and computer-mediated – communicative interaction is virtual ad imaginative (in Anderson’s sense of the word) as well as part physical: there is the presence of computers and sentences, and the presence of bodies and speech, all of which are received and interpreted internally.” (Skinner 17) The boundaries of communities online are similar to the boundaries of nations, which Anderson considers are constructed both from within and outside of the constructed community. Therefore these boundaries can be periscopic based on an individual’s position. Drawing from the Langlois article again, she offers a new framework for looking at online communication, “one that decenters human subjects from the production of meaning and that acknowledges the technocultural dimension of meaning as constituted by a range of heterogeneous representational and informational technologies, cultural practices and linguistic values.” (Langlois 1) Langlois is not doing ethnography, but we have to think about how the production and valuation of meaning is happening through non-human pathways online in conjunction with individual user behaviours. The field of folklore has several definitions (or no definition depending who you talk to) of what folklore is, but many are similar to Dan Ben Amos’ “Folklore is artistic communication in small groups.” At least for the field of folklore, how do you expand this definition to online expression, if the whole subject of the field is supposed to be occurring in small groups or at least defined communities. Considering the methods used by Langlois to find meaning in participatory media platforms, I wonder if we should be including the non-human actors in behaviour online in order to understand the boundaries of communities. This might not help the field of folklore, where enthnographers still have to make arguments for valid communities for research online, but it might help push the idea of how the imagined boundaries of communities are defined and maintained.
Trying to define a community is much like grabbing a handful of water. It is a very slippery exercise and not easy to grasp. Members of communities can share many characteristics based on geography, shared interests, or other forms affinity. The problem, however, is that members of a community can come and go, are not always identifiable, and don’t necessarily declare their association. For those who do self-report or consider themselves to be a part of some culture, subculture, scene, club, or what have you, even they have varying degrees of association, participation, or even enthusiasm for their involvement. As a process of ethnography, what is probably most important is to determine what participants think of their own association as opposed to trying to impose some loose boundary around groups we, as researchers, think should apply. Creating arbitrary definitions and trying to enclose people into what ethnographers think is a group is probably the wrong approach. To truly define a community requires members of that community to self-identify themselves as having some form of membership or affiliation. Of course, this may not always be the case. But it seems appropriate to ascertain what type of a community exists mostly from the very people who think of themselves as belonging rather than trying to convince people they form a group when they themselves are not even aware of their own association. In other words, to define a community, I think it makes the most sense to assume that a community is more or less a feeling of belonging that any group of people bring to their association. It is not bounded by activity, membership, or physicality, online or offline, but by this feeling of belonging. The real trick, then, is trying to get members of this group to be able to express this and to be able to feel like they form a community.
After doing the readings for this section and participating in the conversation in class, I continue developing the framework of a “community” as the space, physical or imagined, where participants perform “actions”. These actions and behaviors make the individuals feel part of a community, where they share common interests or ethos with others. The actions are not always the same among the members but they come together to form a larger structure, a community with multiple levels. Perhaps, while doing digital ethnography it is important to start from this concept of community as the “space” where members bring in their own description and values of what it means to belong. Most of our readings for this section described specific communities, and what they described as a common topic was the fact that the individuals, who move in a particular social context, decide how to engage in the online communities as well as their off-line communities been “multi-present and thoroughly engage”. This engagement is the one that provides the construct of meanings within the communities, and therefore these meanings are going to be multiple and malleable. Additionally, one of the conversations in class that sparked more questions for me about conducting digital ethnography work, was the dialogue about how the “non-human” components of the digital communities are actual shaping agents within the community. The infrastructures and platforms in which these digital communities occur create entry points for “aggregation of information” and it might be important to understand how these gateways shape the information that community members share and generate.
Expanding on an earlier comment about non-human members of a community, this is an area often touched on in research on interactive and virtual communities. It’s important to consider how we’ve interwove our technologies and how they come to act as independent agents alongside human agents. For example in online digital games, player-produced modifications (mods) often act as agents in game-play, even team-play, with which we interact. Collective use of mods seem to evoke new members of the team.
Software actors are somewhat ambiguous members, less prone to unpredictable behavior, yet they have an impact on our actions and often feel like human actors. Non-player characters play similar roles. In looking at digital communities, we should consider some of the material, corporeal and technical affordances relevant to digital communities, and suggest how online communities can be considered as sociotechnical – as layered, generative, dynamic, embodied and open-ended networks of human and non-human agency.