Week 8 prompt: interpretation/poetics
16May 20, 2014 by jfenn@uoregon.edu
Needless Alley (Photo credit: William Hook)
The theme/issue this week is: interpretation/poetics. There is really only one new reading for this week, as the second one listed is something we already read. A mistake? Who knows…could be intentional. The sub-question listed on the syllabus makes sense still: what (analysis) do we do with digital ethnography materials? Over the past several weeks we’ve encountered visualization and other ways to understand data, and the “understanding” of data smoothly runs into the “presentation” of data—which is ostensibly the topic for next week! Needless to say, since I won’t be here then, you all will be doing workshops, and we’ve already learned that such issues are never that distinct from each other. So, push through resources already in the Diigo group with both “analysis” and “presentation” in mind, while adding other resources that appeal to your own directions and interests.
RECALL that those of you scheduled to do workshops for Week 8 are actually doing them on Week 9. I will make sure the room is open and that someone knows how to run the A/V gear (which was updated yesterday, such that it accepts HDMI video inputs and the Crestron actually controls the projector!).
Category discussion prompt, Spr2014 | Tags: discussion, presentation, reading
Woo! First post!
I was curious what others thought of this statement: “interacting online is still a choice to be made: “none is actually born online; death in cyberspace is simply going offline”” (pg. 12). I wonder if this is a point of conflict and confusion for people when we talk about private, public, and ethical considerations, and maybe why it’s challenging to methodologically and epistemologically grapple with digital ethnography. If one can simple “opt-out” of a digital presence, do we owe them the same ethical considerations of IRL individuals? How do we conceptualize agency and choice in these instances?
And, I think more interestingly, can people just “go offline”? Is this even a reality anymore? Just throwing some umbrella, devil’s advocate-type questions out there.
I think it’s possible to go offline, though in doing so you in may, in many ways, relinquish even more control over your online persona. Just because you choose to not have a Facebook account doesn’t preclude you from being included in photos and posts on Facebook, Instagram, Pintrest, or any other of the myriad of user generated web environments. So, while it’s not impossible to go digitally dark, it’s extremely difficult to avoid having an online presence completely. Just going to an event or participating in your community could land you in someone’s image stream. This of course raises all sorts of consent issues for event planners and festival administrators, especially where minors are concerned. It all goes to the question of, once you leave your house are you entitled to privacy, and is logging on a form of leaving your house, even if it isn’t physically? I can’t answering any of these questions or yours, but I am very interested in this idea of photo consent.
Good questions, Terri! It is certainly a choice, but a choice withheld from some and with consequence for others. Scholars have shown that there is a distance wage gap between those who have access to the internet and ICTs and those who do not (see. DiMaggio and Bonkowski 2008 “Making Money Surfing the Web…”). Further those with the longest use and most experience in developing digital literacy benefit more so than those with less. Experience with online tech and resources allows people to do may things that provide them with leverage in the labor market. Jobs posted online only, required technical skills to fill some positions, cultural capital signalizing though displays of digital competencies in both job applications, resumes, and interview all impact how people’s lives are affected by being connected online. All of this to say, those who may argue that there is a clear and autonomous choice as to whether or not to have an online presence are sully the ones who have always been able to do so without experiencing the negative sanctions associated with being technologically disconnected or illiterate.
Regarding the ethnical implications for studying those online and those who are not, I don’t think there can be much of a distinction in as far as how they are treated as research subjects. Online interactions and digital media are so ubiquitous and integrated into the daily activities of many people that it is hard to disentangle one’s on- and offline life. In fact, for today’s connected youth, there is little meaningful difference between online and offline interactions (see Ito et al. 2013 “Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out…”). I do think this reality changes should be studied. Importantly, I also think this reality changes how we study and what can be known from those efforts. It’s all fascinating to me.
Thanks for you post!
I think you make a great point about it being a conflicting perspective when focusing on digital ethnographic analysis, especially about how everything is essentially choice. With or without the lens of an ethnographer, those who choose to investigate the world of digital culture and interaction must keep in mind that everyone who chooses to engage, socialize, communicate, etc. online are making a conscious effort to do so. So as the quote states, no one is inherently born and kept to solely living and interacting in online spaces. Taking this into consideration when performing or structuring ethnographic studies/investigations on these cultures is important because I personally think the ethical implications are much less impactful than interactions or practices taking place offline.
To that final point as well, I personally think it’s almost impossible for someone to go completely offline. As we all know, even though someone can turn off a device, log out of an account, or even go so far as to go somewhere without even cell phone capabilities, all these factors still do not take your information, your accounts, or your presence completely off the digital grid.
The only way I see it is possible to be completely offline is to be born into a culture without internet capabilities, and/or have no intent on modernizing at the rate most first world countries currently do.
So, concerning this question of going “offline” and thinking about the interpretation and poetics of digital ethnography, I started thinking about this series in Wired – it’s back in 2009, but I think the premise is still spot on. Does anyone else remember the campaign, “Author Evan Ratliff Is on the Lam. Locate Him and Win $5,000″? Wired challenged it’s readers to find wrier Evan Ratliff during a month in which he would seek to create a new identity. Here Ratliff describes the premise of the hunt:
“The idea for the contest started with a series of questions, foremost among them: How hard is it to vanish in the digital age? Long fascinated by stories of faked deaths, sudden disappearances, and cat-and-mouse games between investigators and fugitives, I signed on to write a story for Wired about people who’ve tried to end one life and start another. People fret about privacy, but what are the consequences of giving it all up, I wondered. What can investigators glean from all the digital fingerprints we leave behind? You can be anybody you want online, sure, but can you reinvent yourself in real life?”
His blog series details the traces he leaves – whether through purchases (capital) or geographic (California tracks his license plate when he goes through a toll). What they managed to find out about Ratliff was remarkable – a “staggeringly large community” emerged to track Ratliff’s life, “It topped out at 600 Twitter posts a day. The hunters knew the names of his cat sitter and his mechanic, his favorite authors, his childhood nicknames. They found every article he’d ever written; they found recent videos of him. They discovered and published every address he’d ever had in the US, from Atlanta to Hawaii, together with the full name and age of every member of his family.
They discovered almost every available piece of data about Ratliff, in fact, except his current location.”
Anyways, great series, lots of food for thought, some cheers for “Virtual in the real, and real in the virtual” and a way to think about all of these pieces that came together to paint a picture of Ratliff, without ever actually reaching him. The series also does a great job of presenting the community’s cat + mouse chase.
http://archive.wired.com/vanish/2009/11/ff_vanish2/#more-859
In the article, the authors use their work in understanding the consumption or involvement on the internet by individuals over time. It is, from my understanding, the authors motive in writing the paper is to both argue the importance of internet research, as well as to propose future advancement to the field of internet research.
Stepping away from the reading, I wanted to address the question directly. I believe that the question of how we use or analyze digital ethnography is the same as questioning how we will use or analyze “offline” ethnography. We must approach our data, and ask how we might ethically represent the material we have collected. It’s necessary to also discover what we believe is relevant and interesting in our research materials. The way we analyze our data also depends on relevance and personal choice. I often find myself asking what the function of an interaction is for the individuals involved. Applying this to digital research,I could ask myself why it is important for individuals to anonymously share ghost stories on a blog. Particular to online research, though, we must ask ourselves how well we are representing the online communities. Do we really know our community if we have only been “lurking”? Can we adequately analyze data collected from a site without directly interacting with the individuals on the site?
In thinking about how to reply to the prompt question, I began to consider what it is we need to know before we can conduct research and to then be able to analysis it. If the authors of the article are correct (I believe they are) in stating “[r]esearchers need to have some level of technological expertise in computing and information technology to conduct the fieldwork with the expertise levels rising as web exploration deepens” (12), then how do we keep pace with these rapid changes? How can we analysis something when so much of what we are investigating is fluid and unfolding quicker than we can capture? What tools do we need and how do we learn of them?
Assuming we can obtain the ability or set of tools to understand a culture, online community, etc. then perhaps our way of analyzing should also change. Analyzing or interpreting generally leads us to form a set of conclusions about what we have researched. Therefore, what if we drop the notion of conclusion? What if we present or demonstrate what we’ve learned in evolving and altering ways just as fluid as what we observed? Could we simply identify patterns or hotspots as indicators of change or resistance?
I think these are all good and thought provoking points, Michael. One of the things you wrote that caught my attention was you point on how we can keep up with such rapids changes in the “digital landscape.” I think we have to begin by framing the changing nature of new media and digital technologies a little differently. Many people argue that because things change so quickly that any findings, and even applicable methodologies, are almost immediately out of date. I argue from a different perspective. Like many things, digital media, the internet, and its related technologies do not change rapidly as much as they expand and build on previous iterations at a quicker pace. In that sense, we build proficiencies as technologies shift, and instead of having to begin anew with each cycle, we draw inferences and make assertions on the foundational elements of those technologies that remain. Facebook, for example, is notorious for changing something on its user interface every 6-12 months. The learning curve for each new change is pretty easy to navigate because we are already proficient in its use as a social networking site that allows statuses, photos, links, and other media to be shared. that underlying functionality never really changes. Rather, it just makes adjustments. Now, that is not to say that game-changers do not come along. Myspace changed the game in the same way that the iPhone did. But both of those events happened about a decade ago and the basic format has been around since, with many improvements and tweaks to increase both depth of use and reach.
All in all, I think that if rationales can be generated to study the varying complexity of human behavior in a rigorous scientific manner, that those who argue that digital technologies are just to tough to get a hold on need a little more ambition. Thanks for your post. It got me thinking!
I really appreciate the questions you have proposed, Micheal. Clearly the online user base, virtual connections, and networks are growing stronger and more significant/influential. I believe the authors speak to this fluidity you describe when they discuss the evolutionary phases of the internet and the emerging terminology used to define digital ethnography as a field of its own. The quote from page 10, “these ongoing shifts confound traditional ethnographic methods of capturing and examining the cultural context in which consumption occurs” suggests the ways in which we deliver, gather and consume information have changed and therefore so must the ways in which we attempt to analyze them. Your concept of using “patterns or hotspots as indicators of change or resistance” is intriguing as it embodies a shift in approach and maintains a level of relevance consistent with the influx of new media and opportunity.
I found the statement, “The concept of ‘webservation’ (varisco 2002) is fundamentally different from conventional observation in that ‘to be blunt, there is no behavior to ‘observe’ online and the cyberethnographer enters the field without leaving the comforts of home.’” (13). I found this interpretation to be very interesting. This is because by doing the online research, the researcher is often pulled into another world (even if he or she is sitting on their own couch). There is an open door to a whole new area to explore and it is the methods used that draw that researcher from just someone sitting at a computer screen to someone who is doing much deeper work.
As far as analysis it self goes, we do the same types of analysis in a digital space as we do in person, just the parameters might be slightly different. How we adapt these methods might also differ, but the end goal is still the same: To do ethnography and help to better understand another culture or group however that might be defined. The digital ethnography field is new enough that there doesn’t need to be any specific guidelines for the digital but just suggestions based on what other people have tried.
When it comes to the question, what (analysis) do we do with digital ethnography materials, I find myself thinking about how much the digital world as sped up the world.
In the reading the authors list Hair and Clark’s five guidelines for conducting virtual ethnography, which consist of: identifying a community and negotiating access, interaction with participants, conducting interviews, data interpretation and then returning that interpretation back to the group. However, the internet is constantly evolving—communities that are there one day may be gone the next only to be replaced by another community that is similar but slightly different. Furthermore, the people who are actively participating in these groups change daily. This leads me to the conclusion that what we do with digital ethnography materials has to be done at the same speed. So by the time, you negotiate through all of—to the use the Hair and Clark framework again—previous how-to steps, a researcher must turn out their interpretation just as quickly so that it can be presented to the “same” community for analysis. If a researcher lingers too long on their interpretation they risk not returning it to the same group.
Zhang’s piece is a very good review of the development of the understanding of digital ethnography and how this methodological development in fact intertwined with the development of internet format from web 1.0 to web 3.0. I would even suggest that this reading should be put under week one or two’s reading in the future as it is such a great introduction material for this course. Zhang’s summarize of these four approaches’ feature and difference are very clear and convincing. However, I am a little concerned about Zhang’s statement of using digital ethnography as the umbrella terminology to dominate this field. For me, the differentiation between four approaches – especially between virtual ethnography and digital ethnography – remains important and worth to reserve. When people struggle over whether they should use the term “digital ethnography” or “virtual ethnography” to summarize their methodological approach, they in fact are wresting around the idea whether they think their online investigation as only partial nor as complete, whether there is a independent online community, and whether they can conduct a thick description replying completely on the online space without bridging to the offline behaviors. And all these differentiation have direct impact on where and how do we collect and analyze digital ethnography materials. More important, I think these choices scholars make on terminology can reflect important epistemological and methodological reflections, and thus should not be obscured due to the development of web space from web. 1.0 to 3.0. Instead, if we believe that language itself is culture and naming is power (mentioned in previous weeks’ discussion), we should take advantage of scholars’ struggling over which term to be used, and treat this struggling as opportunities to reflect and rebuild our understanding of this field based on existing debates.
“The human being just can act on what they say or hear via web, but what ultimately matters is when human beings do so in the real social world where they are situated in the different social categories,” (Ethnographic Alternatives for Dialogic Marketspaces,12).
This quote from the Zhang, Dholakia, and Kompella caught my eye because I think that the relative importance of what happens online is beginning to equal and interact with the importance of actions in the physical world. The way the revolution in Egypt was coordinated via Facebook comes to mind as well as various flash mobs and ad campaigns. This is, I think, where putting more weight on the importance of online space to the people being studied comes in. As we know, their perspective informs and is central to how we interpret the data that we receive and unless inhabiting online spaces is absolutely unimportant, I think that actions online matter just as much as actions in the world and should be treated accordingly.
I would also like to say that all of the questions posed by my classmates above are all intriguing and merit further thought. Maybe some of them can make it into discussion today. You guys are all awesome!
The readings, our comments, and our past discussions definitely suggest a dissensus concerning the relationship between “online identities” and “authentic/real-world identities.”
Above, Mr. Martin reinforces the notions that the two are interrelated and inextricably so. He asserts “… for today’s connected youth, there is little meaningful difference between online and offline interactions (see Ito et al. 2013 “Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out…”).”
Varisco (cited by Zhang, et al.), on the other hand, contend that “except for the demonstrable ways in which interaction on the Internet or in virtual reality games affects human social behavior, cyberculture only exists as a simulation. Online personalities are merely constructed and inevitably ephemeral.” Zhang, Dholakia and Kompella distill this point into the claim that “The human being just can act on what they say or hear via web, but what ultimately matters is when human beings do so in the real social world where they are situated in the different social categories” (12).
Although this debate doesn’t seem one that can be neatly resolved, Zhang, Dholakia and Kompella note others that support Mr. Martin’s point. Miller and Slater, for instance, note that “we need to treat Internet media as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces” (12). It should be noted that some might be situated as outsiders in the other social spaces they occupy, which suggests that mediated social spaces provide outlets or avenues of expression for underserved, underrepresented, or marginalized folks, whose identities may be masked in what Varisco and those in his camp would identify as “the real social world.”
I thought about “analysis” and what we do with digital ethnography materials in terms of methods and methodology. During my tenure as a doctoral student, I have attended several lectures/discussions in which a researcher relayed his/her findings from a study, while asking myself, “In what ways would the results of this study differ if the researcher applied X or Y digital method?” In turn, does the implementation of more than one method necessitate more promising (e.g., deeper/richer) results? It seems as though the decisions researchers make when conceptualizing a project plays a decisive role in the outcomes of said project. As (digital) ethnographers, we make decisions based on what (media) materials are available to us, and, during the process of choosing and selecting the ways in which we investigate documents/interviews/reports or “data,” we immediately begin changing the nature of a study. In the digital age, is it still possible to anticipate all of our methodological choices in research design? Whether content analyzing field interviews or scraping wikis or editing through thousands of found still images, can the appropriation of multiple digital methodological tools and technologies enrich the amount of information processed, and if so, does doing so automatically lead to more “valid” reseach?
Zhang article was quite helpful for me understand the differences underlie different terms (Virtual Dasein, Netnography, Virtual Ethnography, and Digital Ethnography), which all indicate the ethnography related to online interactions. However, I see the author’s typology of online(?) ethnography as more relevant to the research questions that are asked, thereby as relevant to research objects, rather than evolving terms of online ethnography. There are certain media platforms that do (and maybe would) not necessarily converge with ‘mobile’ technologies. Or, more generally speaking, there are online based interactions that do not need to be contextualized in the ‘real life’ of media users in order for a research to draw the meanings of such online practices. Blurring the line between virtual and real sounds tempting and up-dated, but may be problematic in certain circumstances.