Tuesday + Wednesday, January 5 + 6: Asynchronous Independent Work

via Zak Jensen; used with permission

Read Over the Next Two Days, to Contextualize Exercise #1:

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Your Tasks for Exercise #1: Self-Tracking:

Below, read the background for the exercises and get specific details of tasks and deliverables for the assignment.

Questions? Check in via our Google Doc discussion board with any questions, challenges, insights that arise over the next two days, so we all can benefit from the discussion!

Background/Overview of the exercises

The exercises in this intensive course (2021 version) invite you to practice the fundamentals of digital ethnography by analyzing your own digital media use. This is an established method for experiencing the challenges any ethnographer faces when trying to access the granular levels of everyday interactions and making meaning from these microscopic, meaningful, but often mundane and ignored aspects of everyday life in any cultural/social setting. Taking an autoethnographic approach to fieldwork, you will generate data from ‘participant observation’ in such forms as audio/video recordings, fieldnotes, and trace or tracking data. You’ll also generate some elaborations or snippets through video logs (vlogs). And you’ll also generate more layers of data through short, timed self-reflection ‘brain dumps.’ Later (as the course progresses), you will shift from the self-centered focus on the self to practice methods of eliciting information from others using classic techniques such as interviews – or assessing the subtle features of the context using sociological tools like discourse analysis, historical analysis, visual analysis, or situational mapping.

The goal of these exercises is to dive into the complicated analytical terrain where the ‘digital’ influences (that is, both enables and constrains) what the ethnographer can see, how they move through fields, and how they make sense of lived experience through their own engagement and movements through what noted anthropologist Clifford Geertz referred to as “webs of significance.”

Let’s dive into a bit more detail about the overall set of exercises for these two weeks:

Although you will end up studying far more than your own personal experience, the first stage of the project focuses on you as the primary participant in the study. You will collect data on yourself to reveal in more depth some of the ways your life is intertwined (or not) with digital technology and how you experience this entanglement.

As ethnographers, you will be conducting inductive, emic research. This means that your plan emerges and likely changes over time, as you dig deeper into those “webs of significance.” 

Summary of the approach. This entire two week set of exercises involves a lot of:

  • observation of your everyday activities (fieldwork), 
  • collection of material evidence of your digital interaction (through collection of artifacts, writing/recording fieldnotes of your observations),
  • self-elicitation of your own perceptions and attitudes about your activities and expectations with/in digital media (self-interview or other-interviews, sometimes in the form of “braindumps,” other times in the form of conducting and recording actual interviews) and;
  • analysis of your observations and these materials through various multimedia (written, audio/visual recording) reflections. 

A note about emergent, inductive approaches to ethnography: It all begins when you start paying attention to your “lived experience” of social media and your everyday use of the internet. Many ethnographies begin with a vague (very vague!) plan: In this class, for example, you have been given a general reason for the study (to explore everyday life in the digital age and practice digital ethnography); there’s a vague idea for focus (digital transformations in the 21st Century), and a research location for ‘fieldwork’ (your life). As a rule, ethnographic approaches take your unique experiences seriously, and likewise, embrace the idea that one’s exploration will follow an emergent process rather than be totally predetermined. This means the tools, approaches, concepts, and theories emerge as you go along. They change over time and as you learn more about the environment and phenomenon you’re exploring. In practical terms, this means that the beginning of the project may seem almost too vague, as if there’s no direction, much less an end in sight. This is characteristic of open-ended, interpretive, or emergent methodologies.

You will be asked to observe yourself in two ways: 1) tracking as much of your digital media activity as possible for 48 hours and, in a few days, 2) taking a media fast for 24 hours and reflecting on what happens and how you feel. in both these exercises, the goal is to generate a lot of “raw data” to analyze by being honest and detailed. Try out different strategies to get rich data, so you have good material to work with over the semester. The goal is not to be accurate or precise, but to generate rich details because the overall goal is to just practice (and fail at!) using different techniques and tools.

 Why this exercise and not something else? 

First: Critics as well as digital media scholars have for many years now noted that ubiquitous social media + platforms + processing power + information infrastructures + shrinking and mobile devices = a situation Adam Greenfield said was “nothing less than the colonization of everyday life by information technology” (in the book Everyware, p. 33). 

Is this a good thing? A bad thing?  A neutral state for possible futures?  Attitudes about the impact of communication technologies on our individual and social lives range from enthusiastic to suspicious. Over the course of the 19th and 20th century, it was a persistent topic of discussion– about the telegraph, the telephone, radio, moving pictures, television, reality TV, the 24 hour news cycle, and the Internet. In the 21st Century, the buzzwords are different: digitalization, datafication, machine learning or artificial intelligence, and algorithms.  On the one hand, we benefit greatly from our connection to technologies. People can experiment with new personae, new social communities, and find meaning in global rather than just local communication situations. We have access to more information than ever before, which allows us to access more depth around any topic, if we seek it out.  On the other hand, the “always on” state of the mobile internet (smartphones, e.g.) plus the dominance of social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, TikTok e.g.) has prompted many critiques. What’s the impact of living in filter bubbles or echo chambers? How can we distinguish what’s really important in the constant deluge of information from multiple streams? Are we addicted to our devices? What’s happening to our attention span in rapidly shifting interactions and information flows? Or, let’s consider the rise of data collection, big data analytics, and surveillance. The use of self-tracking in fitness, for example, gives people detailed information, and can motivate people to stay healthy. But in what ways does this quantification influence how we see our own bodies through this data lens? How does this data get used by insurance companies or our employers to monitor our health, for both good and ill? Big data analytics can be used to help identify patterns in global warming, which is adding critical nuance to our understanding of human influence on the planet’s health. But it is also used for racial profiling, discrimination, and predictive policing.

We believe that examining your own everyday mundane behaviors with digital media, through an autoethnographic lens, can help you gain greater critical consciousness about what lies beneath the surface of everyday digital technologies.

Second: Ethnography is a practiced skill. It requires acceptance into a cultural environment as well as intensive immersion to observe, ‘live with,’ analyze, and, over time, understand those aspects of cultural experience that are understood by the cultural members themselves. Often oversimplified in written ethnographic reports or textbooks, ethnography is not a simple matter of observing, looking at cultural artifacts, and talking with people in formal interviews or casual conversations. Most of what is happening in any cultural context is tacit and therefore invisible. Where do we get knowledge about what we should do or not do, how we should interpret symbols and signs around us? How do we know what a certain situation or interaction ‘tells us’ about what’s going on or means? Most cultural knowledge is buried in the infrastructures of language, rituals, norms, and material aspects of the lived environment. These are difficult for ethnographers to access. 

Ethnography is a longstanding mindset (epistemology) and approach (methodology) developed by anthropologists to explore, interpret, and write about ‘foreign’ cultural contexts. It has been important to rethink and reformulate many tools of classical anthropologists, adapting techniques from their colonialist tradition of studying the so-called ‘natives’ to fit better with the digital-saturated contexts of today. Researchers have been shifting these practices since the advent of the public internet in the early 1990s.

Internet researchers Annette Markham and Meghan Dougherty developed exercises in 2012 to practice the tools and techniques of digital ethnography by having participants focus on their own lived experience through autoethnography and autophenomenology. Practiced and tested over the past eight years, these methods are useful to unveil what’s involved in fieldwork in social and digital media. These exercises involve tools to gather information at granular levels, using multiple methods to generate a lot of material to analyze at later stages of the research process — material about behaviors, decisions, interactions, perceptions, attitudes, information flows, and experiences.

Digital ethnography is a process of trial and error, repeated failure and repetition, to get it “right.” Prior to practicing on others in an actual lived ethnographic context, this course gives students the opportunity and tools to practice digital ethnography techniques on themselves, and then later apply these tools to study others.

Specific processes, tasks and deliverables for Exercise #1

48 Hours of Intensive (Self) Tracking

During this exercise, you collect material about your own activities, decisions, interactions, and uses of digital media. In addition to yielding useful information for you through logging, tracking, and fieldnotes, the exercise is designed to help you recognize the difficulty of collecting data, and may help challenge your assumptions – what you think you know about your own digital media use. It can help reveal feelings and meanings about your relationship to or use of digital technologies that you would otherwise not notice.  You’ll reflect on data you collect in several parts.

Specifically: This exercise is an intensive tracking and observation of your own activities with digital media. This involves focusing on as much as possible, including your motions, habits, and physical uses of devices, times spent in interactions, numbers of sites/posts visited per hour, types of typical uses, habits of distraction, multi-tasking. Also, you are trying to notice how you are feeling as you use digital media. The point is to generate a lot of different data that can be analyzed later. You’ll generate this material in logs, and by taking screenshots, screen recordings, auto-logging. You’ll also observe through ethnographic fieldwork, producing extensive fieldnotes (written). Afterwards, you’ll engage in some immediate reflections (a set of layered maps, a vlog, and two braindumps).  Essentially, you will track your media use at a very detailed level. You will create written and video reflections, and produce various small “building block” assignments. There’s more detail below to explain each step:

Before you begin: Plan your media tracking – Write out a specific plan for how you will track your media use for 48 hours. Don’t skip this part, since it serves an important role in helping you focus and will be submitted later in the semester, as part of your overall dossier. 

Consider what you think is relevant and plan how you will gather information about your activities, perhaps by thinking about what sort of data might be produced. Remember, this is ethnography, so you are trying to generate material for qualitative (versus quantitative) analysis, and you’re trying to capture material that anthropologists might collect in fieldwork. 

Consider technical details. You will need to “observe” while you “participate” in everyday activities. How will you do this?

General Observations of the field, from the perspective of a foreigner or “alien”: You’ll take intensive field notes (how? Are these in a field diary, are the notes handwritten? What do you think will be in these notes? Consider what you’re focusing on: At one level, digital ethnographers look at behavior, actions, inaction, relations, movement around the web, around the device, through different platforms, among different groups?). How will you “notice” and log your physical movements or hand gestures, or habits of checking devices?

Could you automate some observations by installing some tracking apps on your phone? What sort of data will this yield? 

Visual Documentation: You’ll take video footage of your usage (for example film yourself using social media on any of your devices; there are many ways to do this). 

Documentation of your ongoing feelings and attitude: At another level, ethnographers record instances of emotion, try to write down how people are responding, relating, being social, building, sustaining, or resisting cultural norms, and so forth. How will you ‘track’ this sort of material? This might include writing journal entries about how you felt, writing detailed descriptions about how other people acted in response to your use in both the mediated or material world, what you notice about other people using media, patterns in your use, intentions for use, unintended consequences of use, social activity, who you communicate with, channel switching, motivations for use, social expectations, etc. 

Consider how this activity of 48 hours will cut into your other activities and plan accordingly. Consider when the optimal time for tracking will be, knowing that you want to generate a lot of data to explore later (so don’t track on dates when you’re not online, for example). Plan to switch strategies if you’re not getting good data.  Minimally, you need to log your usage in a way that can be used later for analysis, and has some consistency in your approach. 

  1. Track your social media use for 48 hours according to your plan –  You’re seeking to generate rich and detailed data in this exercise. It doesn’t matter what it means (the ethnographer doesn’t know what it means yet!). While this is somewhat experimental, it is not a haphazard or sloppy exercise. Consistency and careful attention are important. If you cannot be consistent in your approach, you should at least reflect in your field notes on why you are inconsistent, so you can reflect on it, discuss it as a potential limitation of your research design, or even consider it as a finding in later stages. 
  2. Generate “raw data”: During this time, you should generate at a minimum: some video recordings of your screen activities, screenshots of various moments/interactions, fieldnotes of your observations and descriptions, and at least three 15-minute timed ‘brain dumps.’ (see Tips and Tricks post). All of this material is roughly equivalent to what hard scientists would call “raw data.” You’ll be submitting a sample of this material as part of a “dossier” later in the semester.
  3. Make video logs (vlogs) to build descriptive and interpretive fieldnotes: Create three short vlogs (one must be completed before class on Thursday, Jan 7. Vlogs #2 and #3 will be completed during class on Jan 7). These are extensions of your fieldnotes in which you reflect on your usage, your feelings, and any analytical thoughts you have at this early stage about your usage. (U of T students can upload their vlogs to the class quercus; New School students can upload to their dedicated google drive folder.)
  • DUE BEFORE CLASS ON THURSDAY, JANUARY 7:
    • Vlog 1 – Create a short vlog (video log) (2 minutes minimum, 5 minutes maximum) where you ‘walk through’ your social media use. Add a voiceover for your video footage, focusing on the simple question: “What am I doing here?” or the more complex question: “What is going on here?”
      • New School submission instructions: please label your file LastNameFirstName_Exercise1, and upload it to this private dropbox. Your classmates won’t be able to see your assignments. These submissions primarily serve as an accountability mechanism: Professor Mattern won’t be commenting on your work at this time – you’ll receive feedback when you submit your workshop dossiers in a few weeks – but we do want to make sure you’re engaging with the exercises, since each stage builds on the one prior, and because these exercises are designed to prepare you to engage responsibly in independent research.
      • U of T submission instructions: you can upload your files to the Quercus assignment and/or discussion board dedicated to these exercises.
  • TO BE COMPLETED DURING CLASS ON THURSDAY, JANUARY 7:
    • Vlog 2 – Using the exact same video footage as for Vlog 1, create a new narrative voiceover, reflecting on the question: “Why did I do X versus Y?”–here, you might explore your motivations for making (or avoiding) certain actions, clicking (not clicking) on certain items, moving your hands in certain ways, and other very microscopic details of your interaction, engagement, and even inaction or gaps with digital media technology [Edit: Jan 7 @ 5:15pm]: How does multiplicity — multiple tasks, multiple feeds, multiple senses of time, multiple devices, multiple personalities or senses of “self” — play out online?
      • If your existing video footage doesn’t lend itself to remixing with new audio, you can simply create a new video. We’ve invited you to repurpose the same footage primarily to demonstrate the whole process of iteratively abstracting from the same data, which is what we do to find meaning in the data we collect through fieldwork.
    • Vlog 3 – Using again the same footage, you will create a third video with a new voiceover, responding to the questions given in class: What is not happening? Why didn’t I do X or Y?