Once again, I was unable to capture others’ voices in Second Life while recording. Karlo has recommended an application called soundflower, which I will be testing extensively between now and our next meeting. For now, in place of an audio recording, I’ll sketch for you the minutes of our meeting:
I opened the discussion by stating that the current readings focused on the specific practice of ethnography. They included a theoretical discussion of the practice and an implementation of it. Schweder’s article instructs us to clean the slate of the presumptive universals we even unwittingly take for granted and attune ourselves to the specifities of context, culture and difference. Miner’s study of the Nacirema, which not everyone realized as a semi-parodic ethnography of the American (Nacirema spelled backwards) demonstrated the potency of the modus operandi: make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Again, in this reading, it is attuning one’s attention to the otherwise taken for granted practices and sensibilities that are culture.
Next, Clara presented the readings in greater detail. She included in her presentation references to the earlier reading on autoethnography. Clara made the point that accounting for one’s own subjectivity is the underlying modality for the kind of ethnography Schweder is proposing and autoethnographic methods. While the former addresses subjectivity in order to shed presumptive universals, the latter takes subjective experience as an inescapable yet valuable resource of productive inquiry. The question of subjectivity became a focal point in a related discussion of quantitative and qualitative methods in people-centered research, including media design research. Justin characterized quantitative methods as a generalizing form of calculus. I suggested that a broadly sketched distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods is that the former tends to convert or reduce qualia to universal equivalents (such as numbers) in order to identify patterns, while qualitative methods tend to meditate on the particular with the goal of description and interpretation. Some of the students stated that quantitative methods might better achieve objectivity, while Shweta emphasized that bias is often present in the very act of framing quantitative analyses and formulating questions. Schweder’s essay demonstrates that questions, whether they are the tools of qualitative or quantitative analysis, can carry with them presumptions that distort, exclude or invent the phenomenon and context in question.
Karlo offered an important insight when he said that methodologies are best chosen according to the exigencies of the context, as well as the objectives of the research. I offered the idea that some methodologies are more appropriate to some researchers than others, according to one’s subject position and individual skills. In fact, I strongly encourage creativity in the development of research methods.
These considerations emerged in the context of our discussion regarding the appropriateness of qualitative and quantitative methods in media design research. Clara had already offered a response: using both types of methods may provide a balance of broad pattern and descriptive specificity. I suggested that quantitative methods can also serve as a broad orienting device , and that they can also act as crosschecking or corrective device for qualitative, ethnographic research. Overall, the answer depends on the specific objectives of the research. If it is anthropological research, the objective is understanding, as Clara suggested. I offered that it is a conversation for the production of mutual recognition. If it is media design research, the objective is more narrow — and this will depend on the sorts of broad interests in media technologies, services and content that each of you have. Are you interested in social change, such as producing equalities by enabling the disabled? Are you interested in education? Entertainment? Do you want to enhance creativity or productivity? Are you interested in work environments or domestic spaces? The kinds of broad interests and researchable design questions you will ask will in great part determine the kinds of methods you will use to effectively achieve results.
Next, Adam asked what we made of autoethnography — where is its legitimacy as a methodology? I offered that first and foremost it is an exercise you are performing in relation to your experiences with the media technology Second Life in order to attune your attention to multiple dimensions of experience, embodied experience. This is an important skill: to develop a mode of attention that allows you to accumulate and record observations that become, through their accumulation and documentation, rich with insight. This skill will then be applicable to the experience of others, of communities of potential media technology users. Next, what better way to understand the intimate investments in and experiences of technologies that by starting with one’s own embodied experience? Last week’s reading from Brenda Laurel’s Design Research included a passage about design improvisation, which means design development through staged, bodily enactments of user scenarios.
Finally, I said, your autoethnographies of your SL experiences may yield general questions that are relevant across many areas of media design. This will be useful for your upcoming assignment to formulate relevant and researchable media design research questions.
After our discussion, Bianca took us to the machinima institute so that we could begin to see some of the productive uses of Second Life in particular, in education and the arts. Students located and activated the in-world streaming media function and together we watched a machinima piece. That’s when Jangula, a student of mine from another course, dropped in. He was taking a break from his ongoing ethnographic research on the consumption and circulation of hentai anime images.
