section 9 || virtual ethnography
- This week’s readings shifted us to virtuality and how we can conceptualize/theorize virtual “space”. The most interesting argument to me is Hine’s regarding the fragmentization of ethnography as a result of virtuality. It’s sort of interesting to conceptualize virtual ethnographies as only a piece of a larger puzzle — since ‘online’ constitutes a series of worlds and infinite intersections of cultures. The way virtuality in of itself becomes a way of understanding how globalization and postcoloniality has fragmented bodies, identities, and borders is also of special interest to me. “Ethnography in this strategy becomes as much a process of following connections as it is a period of inhabitance.” (Nine, This especially reminded me of the ways in which people practice a lot of anti-imperialist solidarity activism on the internet — virtuality has become a site of transnational activism facilitated by the ways in which fragmentation can allow for a broader picture to be formed by connecting distinct yet similar pieces together.
- And then, "How the World Changed Social Media", the piece about “social media” and what it is constitutes, but more importantly, it is interesting how "social media" transforms and shapes the ways in which we interact "offline", I'm thinking about hookup culture, "swipe" politics, and how that sort of changes how romantic/sexual relationships operate.
- Another interesting aspect of the readings this week was in Gershon’s piece — how tensions in different media ideologies are navigated through. A specific quote set her argument, “understanding people’s media ideologies can give insights into how utterances are received, and why people choose to reply in particular ways.” (Gershon, 21) This stuck out to me because of a recent experience over the Internet that confronted me with the kind of different histories and contexts that underlie interactions. You can never disconnect the person from the political from the virtual, and it becomes almost essential to consider the plethora of ways in which people discount certain “media ideological dissonance” as simply “not understanding professional conduct”. What kind of power underlies the miscommunication or the mistake? Just an interesting thought I’ve been dealing with recently.
Kind of related to your point about anti-imperialist solidarity activism on the internet, Hine + Gershon had me thinking about ‘leftbook’ and how those Facebook groups—all ‘private’ but easy to be accepted into—articulate a series of ideological rules/commitments, both about ‘media’ but also about politics, politeness, etc that are present in other modes of communication and activism (a label I would hesitate to call leftbook…) but aren’t spelled out so explicitly. In groups with the expectation of ‘self crit,’ there can even be a public transcript of transgressions when mods (which are often publicly listed, itself is an unusual visibility of power relations) ban the transgressor before they get a chance to delete a thread where they, for lack of a better word, ‘get their ass handed to them.’ I also think in all forms of communication, speakers/users/etc collaborate in creating the rules specific to their conversation--somewhat of a blind spot in Gershon's discussion of breakups--and group archives can serve as a record of that process.
ReplyDelete