The lifestream this week has been almost entirely made up of comments and readings for my ethnography and those of my colleagues.
The ethnographies were all fabulous and led me to really think about communities in a new way. They were necessarily short because of the time constraints but this was not too restirctive because as Hine states (2000)
“ethnographic stories are necessarily selective”
One thing that quite surprised me is how that many of the communities studied fell quite neatly into the Utopian and dystopian views of the Internet that we were considering a few short months ago – even those that seemed harmless on the surface. For example, the disturbing sexual connotations arising from Silvana’s research into Davesfarm to the social disassociation of Sibylle’s sleeping cats which bubbled beneath what appears to be two outwardly friendly communities. I wonder if this negative aspect would have come to light if the ethnographer had been more involved with the community? Members of a group have their own ideas about what makes that community ‘tick’ because they themselves have a vested interest in that group.
Hine paraphrases Van Maanen when she says that there is an issue with
“ethnographers taking their own analytic frameworks with them, and therefore failing to address the field site they visit on its own terms”
The Utopian communities appeared to be ones that maintained a skills that would possibly die out otherwise, like the Irish music in John’s The Session, actually connected people virtually and in reality like the swapping in my quilting community, and to empower expression with Nicola’s Torchwood group.
Apart from that I have added an RSS feed to Digital Revolution – a blog from the BBC which is producing some interesting content. What I like is that many of the posts are available as video interviews, with the transcript below for those occassions when my internet connectivity is not good enough for viewing film.
All in all another constructive week.
