Media Ideologies: Clearly Communicated, Clearly Misunderstood?

I'd like to touch on a few things that stuck out to me from one of this week's readings, "Media Ideologies and Idioms of Practice."

Firstly, I was on the same page as Gershon for at least the first section or so, until she began to attempt a sort of ethnographic objectivity so removed from the nature of her subject of study, that I believe she completely ignored one of the mechanisms behind individuals' formation of their "media ideologies."

I understand her point that different individuals will have different understandings of the "second-order communication," they ought to be receiving with different media (which I really wish she had explored in further detail), but I believe that the author's assertion that students' media ideologies are so unpredictable and varied, "based on their own practices and conversations they have with people they know," is really short-sighted. She frames this development of differential ideologies within the context of the "appropriateness" of certain media for ending relationships, basing a good chunk of her argument of the "formality" or "informality" of the medium in question. Frustratingly, Gershon never actually defines "formal" vs "informal," and she seems to conflate formality with appropriateness. This failure to question event such integral concepts to her argument prevents her from seeing other issues with her interpretation of subjects' media ideology development.

For example. Gershon (knowingly and purposefully) neglects to engage with the functions of the media used by interviewees, and she therefore neglects to examine how interviewees' motivations might relate to that function to help them construct a medium ideology. She states that examining the functions of different media would present simply her own biases and interpretations, which is false for a number of reasons to extensive to detail here.

However, in support of her "objective" observation of how one subject uses a specific medium, Gershon gives the example of the young woman who has many casual relationships and who primarily uses instant messaging as a means of ending these relationships. The young woman states in her own words that this is because it is finite, limited, and impersonal. She (the interviewee) says that she recognizes that is it harsh, but that she knows that it would be harder to break up with someone in person because you can see their face and their emotions, and instant messaging, its less serious nature, (I would argue its less effortful and less involved nature) best serves her motivations in ending relationships.

This, and many of the other vignettes Gershon provides, illustrate to me a much larger factor driving choice in media and understanding of appropriate media use, which is the emotive second-order communication that these media may or may not facilitate, and the levels of respect and compassion that engagement in emotive communication demonstrates for those involved in a conversation.

By "emotive second-order communication" I mean facial expression, tone, inflection, body language, and numerous other non-verbal methods of communicating feelings and information that is patently absent from the written word. The media of communication that Gershon examines differe in just how much or how well those modes can compensate for this lack of visual and aural cues, and medium choice is actually based on what advantages or disadvantages that has for the communicating individuals.

Instant messaging, with its concise, immediate nature and notifications of "message sent,"  "message received," "message read," "so-and-so" is typing, and so on allow the young woman in the above example to be sure that the information she wants to convey is delivered, but the lack of emotional information she is subject to as a result of her words also allows her to shield herself from information that she would otherwise be vulnerable to.

In the example of "Louise," whose seven-year relationship was ended by email, Gershon notes that Louise called her former significant other a "coward," which accurately reflects the emotional shield that the written word provides in the face of a difficult social situation. It's also important to note that the longer form of communication, email, was chosen over other, less involved, less effortful choices such as text or IM, which is concomitant with the idea of some level of respect or compassion commensurate with the seriousness or duration of the relationship.

Gershon's understanding of how these "media ideologies" are formed is just one of the concepts that I take issue with in her analysis; there are several others. While I do believe that the implications of media choice for communicating certain kinds of information is a worthy topic of study, I don't feel that Gershon was successful in developing a convincing argument here, and I think she demonstrates one of the pitfalls of attempting too much "objectivity" in ethnography: it obscures the subjective experiences that may be the key to understanding the phenomena under investigation.